Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

The Rep Report (October 24 - November 1)

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

SEATTLE: As part of the annual Earshot Jazz Festival, the Northwest Film Forum is hosting a trio of documentaries that offer chilled sights and sounds for music and movie lovers, from October 23 to November 1. The mini-fest opens with the new Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer and Ron Mann's 1981 Imagine the Sound, featuring Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Archie Shepp, and Bill Dixon. Then, starting on the 26th, comes Bruce Weber's newly restored Chet Baker profile Let's Get Lost, a movie that we are always happy to tout.

NEW YORK: New French Films (October 24 - 28) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music provides audiences with the chance to buck the increasingly spotty international distribution system and see the New York premieres of some recent work from France. One film, Je t’aime...moi non plus: Critics and artists is a documentary, on the role of the film critic, directed by the actress Maria De Medeiros, that will be followed by a panel discussion including such critics as Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, and Dennis Lim.

Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema (October 26 - November 14) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center is designed to provide an entry point for audiences unfamiliar with Yugoslavia's cult reputation as a hotbed of experimental and provocative film making. The schedule crams in thirteen classics from the "golden age" of Yugoslav filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, eleven more recent works, and a selection of eleven shorts, curated by Croatian film scholar Mato Kukuljica, showcasing the achievements of "the Zagreb school of animation." Krsto Papic, Dejan Sorak, and Ognjen Svilicic, three directors whose combined careers span some fifty years of moviemaking, will be in attendance.

LOS ANGELES: It's that time of year again, and the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theater just wants to say, from the bottom of its heart: Boo! Starting Wednesday, October 25 (with the classic ghost stories The Haunting and The Uninvited) and continuing on Thursday (with the funkier '70s sci-fi of Demon Seed and the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it throws on a couple of double features as a simmering build-up to its Dusk-to-Dawn Halloween Horror-Thon on Friday the 27th. With two films by Italian gorehound Lucio Fulci and movies by Tod Browning (Freaks), Stuart Gordon (From Beyond), and Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) that probably aren't the first thing even those guys would tell their mother's friends about, this is not the horror marathon of guys who believe in doing things half-way.

— Phil Nugent

The Screengrab : lucio fulci

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

The Rep Report (October 24 - November 1)