Ten Off My Head - Pre Pazuzu Scares

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Hey you guys know that it's almost Halloween, right? Otherwise known as the greatest time of the year! Now that I've put the Film Festival and Comi-Con behind me I feel as if I can finally start to focus in on what matters - spooky oogy boogy stuff! Hooray! I am really feeling the mood this year. We've got something exciting coming later this week (fingers crossed, anyway) but til then this here is a wonderful way to start off the Frank. N. Festivities.

This month's Team Experience Poll over at The Film Experience was split into two parts - we were asked to choose our ten favorite horror movies that cam out before The Exorcist, and our ten favorite horror movies that came out after The Exorcist. (Why The Exorcist? Head over to TFE to have that explained.) 

A sidenote though: The Exorcist is having it's 40th anniversary on December 26th and here's a fun fact: my parents went to see that movie on their first date! Without Linda Blair stuffing a crucifix up her hoo-ha, I never would've been born. Thanks, Linda Blair's hoo-ha! Thanks, Satan!

Alright so you can see the communal list over at The Film Experience, and you should it's wonderful. And the comments are wonderful too - everything everybody's naming was on my long list, but man, my long list had like 75 titles on it, ya know? Narrowing this down to a top ten, well you have to make concessions. But that's the fun of it - the conversation it starts. So here's my own personal top ten. As I always say with these things, ask me this in another five minutes and my list will be different. Well some of it. My top six is my top six, although five and six might swap back and forth. Anyway, boo! Let's do this!

10. I Walked With a Zombie - Jacques Tourneur's Cat People made the communal list at #7, and that film's great but I prefer Zombie's sleepwalking sense of foreign menace. Those shots of of the zombie-slave Carrefour wandering through the sugar cane still haunt my nightmares.

9. The Wicker Man - I don't care how many times I see it, I get chills every time Sergeant Howie crests that hill and see that giant stick figure and they dance, they dance and dance and dance, nightmares licking at our feet.

8. Bride of Frankenstein - A lot of people discredit this as a straight horror film because it's so comic at times, and the film is very very funny, it's true, but it's also just insane and sad and weird and unbelievably astonishingly beautiful to look at. And it's scary! The bride is a scary thing - the way Elsa makes her move, the sounds she makes - she is all kinds of wrong.

7. Peeping Tom - Poor Tom always stands in the shadow of Norman Bates (here on this list, too) but Michael Powell's film deserves its own day in the sun, if by sun I mean the harsh light of the studio lamps as they blind some poor unsuspecting girl to the camera turned murder weapon coming towards her. This movie is maybe more Hitchcock than Hitchcock could have ever been. It's the movie Hitchcock's therapist might make from his most personal notes. Dark, darker...

6. Psycho - Darkest. A knife slashing through cinema - before we're soapy skin and bright blonde hair, and after we're muck, sunken, cackling bones.

5. The Haunting - Such a profoundly sad film, the loneliness of Nell echoing down the disturbed corridors - her pent-up fury banging on the doors and pressing against the walls, and her darkness - inescapable, all-encompassing - swallowing her up.

4. Night of the Living Dead - Romero's film is a perfect metaphorical snapshot of a moment that is actually more like a mirror that we stepped right through, all of us - we're on the other side of his looking glass, in the world he envisioned, now.

3. Nosferatu - I still consider Count Orlok to be the scariest movie monster ever put on screen. Everything about him terrifies me. Murnau bleeds images out of our subconscious that we've never wanted realized above board, and yet there they are, and they are looking right into us.

2. Freaks - There is something so primal and so terrifying about the ending of this film, down in the mud, the rain, the knives in their teeth coming at you... it will never ever leave you.

1. Rosemary's Baby - I think I've made it clear time and again that Rosemary's Baby is my favorite movie of all time. Every single frame of this film is a part of me. We are one, from Minnie's garish pastel dresses on downward. Anyway I did the proper write-up for it over in the list at The Film Experience where it came in at second place, so go read that over there!

 

Next week comes our Top Ten Post-Exorcist Horror Films!

So tell me: what does your own list look like?

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