10 Off My Head - Post-Pazuzu Scares

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One week ago yesterday we The Team Film Experience voted on our ten favorite horror movies from before The Exorcist, which came out in 1974. That same day I shared my own personal list, right here. Well now it's time for the movies that came after The Exorcist, you can see the Team's Top Ten right at this link. I have to say, the communal list surprised me as I read through this it this morning - even though there's a lot of overlap (six out of the ten) it somehow feels more contemporary than I was anticipating. But then I suppose my own personal list, which I'm about to share, does skew pretty old-school - seven of my ten fall from between the years of 1974 and 1980. What can I say - that is The Age of Horror as I see it, and I couldn't deny them. Anyway I could make a top 20 list from movies that didn't make the communal list or my own list, and that would be 20 great films too. But here's what I picked.
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10. Black Christmas - The eyeball behind the door, you guys. The eyeball behind the door! The body in the attic. The phone calls. The fact that the bad guy (spoiler alert) never gets caught! Oh and Margot Kidder's monologue about turtles, natch. Halloween gets all the credit (and yes, places higher on this list) but Bob Clark did it all first (Psycho is its own thing). And even beyond claims of "First!" what he did first is still wholly unnerving today.

9. Wolf Creek - Depending on how broad your definition of "slasher" is I'm just realizing that my own list is pretty slasher heavy, which doesn't really surprise me - I came of age in the 1980s, y'all. The lone killer stalking and killing his victims one by one just speaks to me. Greg McLean's 2005 film, the second most recent one on my list, gives us that lone killer with oodles of personality (John Jarett's performance is never not entirely both charming and terrifying all at once), but beyond that it's the film's sense of atmosphere that never stops astonishing me - this is a beautiful film, capturing the cold and barren beauty of the middle of nowhere, and plunking us down in a place where we can't help but know, feel it in our bones, that we are nothing.

8. Suspiria - From the very start - the red lit airport terminal, the violent swishing sound of those sliding glass doors slicing open, Dario Argento's fairy tale sense of gaudy menace never ceases to sweep me up and away in its horrible strange miasma. Goblin's score, chanting and pounding and plinking away, while the kaleidoscopic awfulness swirls around.

7. The Blair Witch Project - I feel like I'm always having to be defensive about Blair Witch, the blow-back against it was so strong, when all I wanna talk about it how it curled up inside my brain and died, and rot, and took with it my ability to ever go camping ever again. I love Daniel's write-up over at TFE (it came in at #8 on the communal list) because I too have such vivid memories of the night after I saw the film, and the way the darkness took on a horrible life of its own.

6. Martyrs - This movie is only five years old but I have had no qualms, pretty much since I first saw it in 2008, at placing it amongst the best the genre has ever offered, will ever offer. It sucked me in and disturbed me on par with anything horror has ever done. The frenetic unsettling pace of the first three quarters is one thing, where the director Pascal Laguier makes you realize you're in the hands of a madman who's got no problem with telling ten more stories in one sitting than you were ever expecting, but it's the brutal last section, when he slows it all down just to break your brain, where Martyrs steps straight into the light and towards the profound.

5. The Shining - I was just saying this recently, when Stephen King once again felt the need to malign the film and more specifically Shelley Duvall's performance (or how Kubrick framed her performance, or whatever), but The Shining really is entirely about Wendy for me every time I watch it, and it is through Duvall that I have felt some of the most real, palpable fear that I have ever experienced from a movie. Close your eyes and tell me you can't immediately summon up the trembling limp-wristed way that she holds that butcher knife clutched to her chest in the bathroom.

4. Alien - I don't know that anyone will ever design a greater movie monster than we got out of HR Giger & Co. in Ridley Scott's classic 1979 haunted space-ship film. And I always think of it as being so strange and different from us, the monster, but then the thing that always unsettles me the most when I rewatch the film is just how very nearly human it is in far too many ways for me to ever be comfortable with. It's just us, turned inside out, dipped in acid and slime and chrome, and shot full of every single nightmare that you've ever had.

3. Halloween - Michael Myers remains the only horror movie villain that I have ever had a nightmare about where I woke up in tears and could not go back to sleep for the entire night, and had trouble sleeping for days after. And I hadn't even watched a Halloween movie any time recently! That mask, that horrible blankness, it just seeps right into you.

2. Carrie - I wrote the write-up for this movie over at TFE's group list, where it came in at #4, but I'll just add this over here: I can see your dirty pillows. Seriously though, as much gloriously over-the-top fun as I find DepPalma's film to be, the real lingering sensation is this deep, deep well of sadness. I can hear the break in Sissy Spacek's voice as she says, "Mama..." and I just want to sob.

1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The scariest movie ever made, before or after The Exorcist - ever, says me. When that metal door slams open and Leatherface comes stepping out, everything starts spinning, Tobe Hooper turned the world on its axis. Nothing has ever felt so wrong. (And yes, therefore, so right.) The madness, dear god, the madness. This film captures madness.

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