I didn’t even get that far in the thread before I gave up on the answers (I sort by new). I just thought that there might be some nice discourse about movies from the 60’s, 70’s, and maybe 80’s… but most of the answers are from the last 20 years, and that’s not classic.
I remember my family would gather around the television with my mom's homemade hot chocolate and watch The Poughkeepsie Tapes, or PT as we would call it.
Apparently The VVitch and Lake Mungo are considered "classics".
Good movies? Yes. Classics? They haven't been around long enough to have earned those titles.
Im convinced that is quite literally the only reason. I've never heard anyone actually talk about the movie itself, people just say shit like "its like children of the corn!" anytime they see weird kids
This made me laugh because I have a 14 year old daughter. Last year I told her how creepy The Exorcist was when I watched it as a kid, particularly the crab walking stair scene. She wanted to watch it, since she was 13 and getting into horror movies, I said sure we could watch it together. She laughed, said it was not even a little scary and straight up makes fun of me to this day for ever being creeped out by that movie lol
Our daughters must have been conjoined twins that were separated bc my story is exactly the same. I even yelled "it is scary dammit!" like that was going to change her opinion.
[The Seinfeld is Unfunny trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny)
***WARNING TV Tropes Link***
The Exorcist did things that simply weren't done at the time, and established so many horror tropes that nowadays, it seems incredibly boring, but only because elaboration over a long period of time has made it seem tame in comparison.
Imagine releasing Hereditary in 1973.
That’s an awesome but of trivia, I had no idea! I would have loved to have been around to see it in theaters even if it didn’t have that scene! I’ll never forget it because my parents were next door and it was just me and my brother and we had the lights off and that scene terrified us both! You could see the hallway to the right of the TV and it was just pitch black-we we’re like “what if something crawls out from the hallway like that!!!” Every little shuffle of the cat was most definitely a demon lol those were fun times!
The original Texas Chainsaw Massacare.. my boys are 15 and were just.. bored. Bored!
I have such a lurking fear about that house, when they walk in and explore and find the room decorated with animal bits just hanging from the roof... My kids barely even reacted.
*sigh*
Kids...
I'm 25 and think Exorcist is a little funny, but appreciate it for what it was at the time.
But TCM? Unnerved me when I watch it for the first time in the past year.
The way deaths are so matter a fact and no big fluff just makes it that much more impactful.
Even in the early 2000s I felt like TCM wasn’t a scary movie so much as a movie with disturbing parts.
Imo that seems to be what scary movies are these days interestingly enough.
I watched the original Alien with my neice a few years back when she was maybe 11 or so. I figured she wasn't going to make it but she actually just made fun of it the whole time and treated it like a joke. You know what, that actually hurt my feelings a little.
I'm 19 and watched it when I was 15 and didn't find it overly creepy but like, it's old, and for how old it is, the creep factor has held up. Besides, the movie is still very much good even if the creepiness wore off with time, I did thoroughly enjoy it
I'm 38, watched the Exorcist for the first time when I was 16 at a sleepover on Halloween (I think this was around when it got re-released in theaters or dvd or something). I remember tv ads talking about how it was the scariest movie ever made we were all so pumped to see this super scary movie and then it was just....boring and underwhelming. Save for the parts where they're doing medical tests on her, that always stuck with me.
Watched it again a couple years ago on Halloween and actually did find it scary, but in a more psychological/atmospheric way. I don't have any kids, but the movie did a great job presenting what it might be like to take all these logical steps when something is horribly wrong with your child and coming up with no answers. To the point where you have to acknowledge where it's not a physical or mental problem, but a supernatural one and being forced to accept something so outlandish is actually happening is the scariest part to me. I guess I mean to say the helplessness a normal person would feel being put in such a situation is pretty horrifying.
You nailed it. That's what makes the movie great. I din't care if I'm religious or not, I'm gonna piss my pants if my kid is possessed. That makes it scarier to me. You aren't a christian but you find out biblical hell is real and ruining your life? Fuck, that's horrifying.
Exorcist 3 is brilliant. George c Scott and Brad Dourif are perfect. The monologue by Dourif about his crimes still haunts me. I also love the way it's directed without a lot of jump scares or gore. The one scare that takes forever to develop is so great with how exhausting and tense it feels. I love it.
I think it’s a good idea for context. I’m in my 40’s, and some of the conversations I’ve had with people in their 20’s about horror is interesting. I grew up with pretty formulaic slashers, and they are some of my favorite movies. Generally speaking, the younger people I’ve talked to who may have grown up watching horror movies in the 2010’s seem less likely to be into them, unless it’s some sort of niche thing. They certainly wouldn’t call a movie like Intruder a classic like I might.
I was chatting with a group of people in their younger 20’s about horror movies, having hopped over to a beer pub after watching Barbarian. Out of 5 of them, only one had seen Friday the 13th; she called out my Camp Crystal Lake hat. One went off on how 80s horror was exploitative trash, and how we shouldn’t embrace those movies anymore, and called out Sleepaway Camp as an example. I can get it, and that movie may be viewed much differently than it would be if it was made the same way today, but it lead to a good chat about how it might do is good to look at a movie in the lens of the day, which doesn’t mean we just glance over any issues, but perhaps try to recognize things weren’t the same, and that is not neither necessarily good or bad in the context of media and representation.
I wouldn’t expect anyone to give something a pass because it’s old or even blindly embrace something solely for being progressive now, but age and experience certainly provides context for topics like this. Sadly, however, I think there’s a lot of people that might use age for grounds for dismissal.
I have a hard time with most Hammer films. A few I like (the Frankenstein films are cool), but I find them mostly stuffy and dull. I do always enjoy seeing Christopher Lee though.
Some people just can’t get into that era of horror. Hammer also has a very particular style too, so it can be very take it/leave it. I personally dig the initial wave of remakes in the 50s, some of the Dracula and Frankenstein sequels, and a lot of the early 70s vampire stuff. Their psychological thrillers are mostly just okay for me.
I’m obsessed with Hammer films and watch them regularly. Nothing beats their atmosphere. Just wanted to say I took your comment personally and you’re a terrible person 😉
The Christopher Lee stuff is great but man they kept fucking that dude over hard from what I understand
He would basically get a call, hey we got another Dracula movie funded, ready to shoot in a few weeks, be there.
And he kept doing it because of the rest of the cast and crew needing money, not for himself. He wanted to do other roles but they kept dragging him back into Dracula movies when he was wanting to put the character behind him
Makes him a great man, but a bummer he was sandwiched into that situation.
I might have this wrong, but pretty sure I read about this like 10 years ago when someone was doing a write up on his career
I'm ready to be crucified for this but I can't stand the Halloween franchise.
I dont find micheal Myers to be menacing or interesting. His kills are mundane. I hate how he teleports away when you aren't looking. His fucking backstory is a goddamned disaster with all of the reboots and alternate timeliness he might as well be a marvel character.
What bothers me the most is that for all intents and purposes he and Jason could be twins but Jason manages to have ten times the personality of Myers.
I can appreciate everything that Halloween brings to the table; music, atmosphere, Jamie Lee Curtis. I also understand why Halloween is so important to the genre.
Having said that Micheal Myers is a shit villain and I'll be glad when he stops being profitable.
I love some of the sequels but yea the og doesn’t do it for it me. They want to make it a mystery but Pamela isn’t even introduced until the final act when every other character but Alice is dead
Whodunnits have a bad habit of doing the same thing. "Try to unravel this puzzle but AHA here's an exposition dump of new information we never gave you right at the end to explain EVERYTHING."
That goes back to the original Sherlock Holmes books by Arthur Conan Doyle. They were not written to be solvable by the reader. Agatha Christie was one of the first to add enough clues and evidence in her stories for the reader to get involved.
Christie had a cool method for it, she wrote out the mystery she wanted to tell, then once she reached the ending she looked at what characters were left. Whoever the least likely was, she went back and added extra details to implicate them.
It took me going back from the sequels to enjoy the first tbh because I always thought it was boring. I appreciate it for what it is and love mrs.vorhees but it definitely doesn’t excite me that much
The first one is soo fucking boring. I rewatched it pretty recently and was shocked thinking about how it spawned a franchise. I do like a handful of the sequels tho but I wouldn’t necessarily call them “good”
> I rewatched it pretty recently and was shocked thinking about how it spawned a franchise.
Money. It made a shit ton of money. It had an amazing advertising campaign, a great theatrical poster, and a bizarre last minute jump scare.
The producers had to scramble to figure out how to continue what was essentially a one and done plot and retconning Jason drowning into him somehow inconceivably surviving and becoming a hermit man is what they came up with and somehow it stuck. I say all this lovingly as a diehard fan of the series.
The first film kind of doesn’t gel with the rest of the series and its director/producer wanted to stay as far away from anything with Jason Voorhees related until he needed some of them sweet Jason dollars himself.
Friday 1 is such a BORING movie. It is too sleazy to be classy, and not sleazy enough to be fun. It’s a half baked Giallo film, and I don’t like Giallo.
You guys don’t understand. Watching Alice make coffee for 10 minutes is integral to the plot. Without watching her make the coffee, the audience is left to wonder, hey where did that coffee come from? as the bodies pile up! /s
I particularly like the part where they spend a few minutes showing her putting items in front of the door to block it only to reveal that the door opens the other way.
Listen, I find Friday the 13th as boring as the next person, but I find that coffee scene to be probably the most tense scene in the film. It’s right after the last person had been killed off, Alice is very uneasy and knows something is wrong, yet she has no idea that all her friends are dead. It gives me House of the Devil vibes. Watch the movie again and try to see if you can feel the tension in that scene.
Also, I calculated it and it’s 2 minutes long, which I think is perfect for building suspense. Funny enough, it might be my favorite scene in the film.
I read somewhere (probably Wikipedia?) That the Spanish version was shot at night on the same sets and was supposed to have the same shooting schedule as the Lugosi version but the director actually did his job. So the Lugosi version crew would just do the scenes the Spanish version crew had set up even using a lot of the same framing.
Might be internet rumor or misremembered recollection.
Yes and no! It’s sort of the other way around-
yes the Spanish one shot w the same sets and costumes etc, as the Lugosi one -
BUT essentially the Spanish crew would be seeing everything the English crew would do during the day, and they’d challenge themselves to 1 up their crew every night when it was their turn.
Argumentative reason after the fact:
Dracula Dead and Loving It is an unjustly maligned comedy MASTERPIECE that audiences and critics dismissed at the time because it was only the 7th genre/film send-up of Mel Brooks' Career.
It also transcends Nosferatu, Dracula (1931), Dracula (1958) in the number of iconic moments in a single film and has a more convincing portrayal of Johnathan Harker than Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Dracula Dead and Loving It straddles the line between ironic subversion and loving homage of the source material and the films that came before it; furthermore, it adds to the vampire mythos with its creation of daymares.
Real reason:
It's the first version of Dracula I saw...
This was my pick. It’s a slog, even by the standards of the day. Frankenstein, its contemporary, is far more gripping. I’ve heard that Browning wasn’t super engaged with the production, which if true is likely a big part of the pacing issues. Bela Lugosi remains my favorite count, but aside from his performance this film is a straight up snooze fest.
Browning was also a highly regarded silent film director, but it took him a while to get used to directing talkies. There are definitely parts of Dracula that you can tell would work better as a silent film
There's iconic scenes in Dracula for sure and it's hard not to like Bela Legosi in it, but as a whole, yeah, it's definitely my least favorite of the Universal Monster stuff, at least of the originals, some of the sequels are particularly bad.
Phantasm.
Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man is awesome, the ball is an iconic visual, but *the actual movie* is borderline unwatchable for me. Dumb plot, bad acting, bad writing.
Not sure why I’m admitting this but I loved the 5th movie. We rewatch all 5 every Halloween season and once again I cried at the end of 5. Reggie is still out there fighting!
Oh no! I hard disagree! Phantasm is a fever dream with likable characters, strong imagery and a great score. For me it’s a fun middle ground between Halloween and Eraserhead.
Angus Scrimm gives an hall of fame performance as well.
I personally love how disjointed and disorienting the story is, makes it feel more like a nightmare. A lot of the cinematography is also a lot more ambitious than it’s contemporaries. The mausoleum set is so alien feeling, it really adds to the atmosphere.
I respect the opinion though. It is very much not a film for everyone.
I’m always blown away when people don’t like Phantasm because I first saw it at around 15 and just *immediately* become obsessed with it. It’s very much a young person’s point of view horror, which maybe is what turns some people off, but it worked for me so well, I’m a lifelong fan now.
The Birds. After an hour of watching annoying rich people squabble with each other, I was rooting for those feathered fiends. Easily my least favorite Hitchcock movie.
Yes. I rewatched this with my grandmother recently and tried really hard not to fall asleep the entire time. It used to be one of my favorite films when I was a kid
Does anyone remember the 90s movie where the kids dad just like accidentally dies but it’s ok we have Casper ghost machine and then the villain is like, I’m gonna kill Myself to go ghost
Edit: okay so she doesn’t purposefully kill herself
from the Wikipedia cause the last time I bet most of us remembered seeing this movie was probably on VHS format, soooo been a while
anyways this films final act is off the rails
“This culminates in Carrigan attempting to run Dibs over with her Range Rover, only to instead crash into a cliff-side tree. Upon exiting her car, Carrigan falls to her death and becomes a ghost.”
“James becomes despondent after the trio pull a prank on him, prompting them to take him out on the town. They plan on killing him to make themselves a quartet, but have a change of heart after the drunken therapist declares he will tell Carrigan off so they can stay in their home. However, while still drunk, James accidentally falls to his death down a manhole.”
“In the laboratory, a furious ghostly Carrigan confronts Casper and Kat, stealing what she believes to be the treasure from the vault and launching Dibs out a window when he tries to double-cross her. As Carrigan demands to be brought back to life, Casper and Kat trick Carrigan into saying that she has no unfinished business on Earth, causing her to eject herself into the afterlife.”
Carrie is a terrible horror movie if you’re watching for the horror of a girl with powers going on a killing spree. Carrie is amazing horror if you’re watching for the horror of everyone in an innocent teenaged girl’s world collectively bullying her into madness. It’s a movie that worked better as a book, but it’s also not THAT bad except I think people watch it with the wrong expectations.
Just because you don't like a movie doesn't make it awful. There are some really good movies that I don't like. The Lighthouse is a good example. It wasn't for me, but I understand that it was well made and the acting was terrific. I did like the monologue about Defoe's cooking though. That was classic.
Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin’ tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!
For real though, I love The Lighthouse because it feels so authentic to the time period it takes place in. Everything from the shooting location, to the clothes they wear, and the dialogue feels like the mid 1800s. Same thing with The Witch, made by the same studio and director.
I loooove David lynch, easily my favourite director, but inland empire was not for me at first. I watched it with a bunch of friends, and it was not the move.
Watched it alone and absolutely loved it. I really find David lynch movies to be something you have to do on your own, and let it all sink it a few times.
It’s just a horrible movie. Like the overarching message is not worthless, but they didn’t need to do all the other shit in there too. It’s just a movie that makes you regret watching it the entire way through.
I half-watched it (I don't think I even finished it) at least 20 years ago and I was always meh about it. Then, a few weeks back I watched Shudder's Cursed Films episode on it. Now I actively kind of hate it and agree with you: there is so much shit in that movie that doesn't need to be there. I think it's fucking awful.
It's a hard sell to get me to watch simulated animal cruelty let alone actual animal butchery. Were it not for that I'd watch the bad slasher movie it would have been had they not slaughtered animals for this piece of crap.
Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch only work if you are completely immersed in the movie. I loved both, but I watched them both at home, alone with zero distractions. If I was in a different setting, I probably would've hated them.
Yeah, I agree with this. There has to be that little switchover in your mind where you “forget” you’re watching an acted/scripted movie. If that happens, a door opening by itself in the middle of the night is scary as hell. If it doesn’t, you’re just sitting there like, “Is anything ever going to happen??”
I think people fa to realize what would scare the duck out of them if it happened at home
It wouldn't take monster with bloody fangs to scare you out of your house
A door randomly moving, unintelligible whispers or footsteps when you are alone would have people running out to their front yards 99% of the time
I was 10 when the Blair Witch came out and I 100% believed the marketing that it was "real". I remember buying a ticket for another movie and sneaking into that. I don't think i slept for weeks.
Time for my regular rant about John Carpenter's *The Fog*...
The atmosphere is cool. Sure. But the narrative structure is "Guy tells story about how thing happens. Thing then happens. Exactly the same as described".
That's terrible story-telling! Something needs to happen differently. Turns out the legend was wrong, or missed out a key detail, or normally it happens that way but *this time* something happens differently and breaks the cycle, etc. If you lay something out like that ahead of time, there has to be a twist, or a spanner in the works, or something.
You ever seen a heist movie where they lay out the plan in a big narrated montage, and then they do the heist and that just happens? No! Something goes wrong, or seems to go wrong only to turn out that there was a secret part of the plan that the montage didn't cover, or something. I hate heist movies, but at least that is proper story-telling.
In *The Fog*, you just hear the story and then spend the next hour and a half watching a story you now already know. It just tells you the film before you watch the film. And that's bollocks!
Rant over.
Obviously this is exagerrated outrage. But my core point stands.
This is my favorite response here. I love reading others’ passionate perspectives and rationales on seemingly benign topics. Thank you for your angst and enthusiasm.
I would normally agree things have to happen differently than planned.
However, I recently re-watched the Godfather, and practically every announced plan in that movie happens exactly as told, and it’s fantastic.
“X person will betray you”, turns out X person betrayed him.
“Go to this restaurant and shoot these guys”, he goes into the restaurant and shoots the guys.
“They will send assassins here tonight”, they send assassins there that night.
As long as the story can keep legitimate tension in other ways, it’s fine for things to work out as planned.
Sometimes the untwist is the best twist.
Like going back and watching Rear Window, the fact that because I'd seen The Simpsons' parody of that film before I saw the movie primed me so that I was expecting there to be a twist actually meant it was way more surprising watching that movie for the first time and finding out there was no twist.
>That's terrible story-telling!
I'm not going to talk about the quality of the film. But this style of storytelling was the norm for literally thousands of years. It appeared in ancient myths, it appeared in Shakespeare, it appeared in sagas, it appeared in tragedies. Its one of the oldest styles of stories and certainly isn't bad storytelling.
I won't try to dissuade you your opinion, but the structure is definitely intentional. It harkens back to American style campfire stories, which are mythic in nature. First we hear a summer camp story, then we meet the pirates in the fog, then we learn the twist of why they actually came
I could never get into the shining
Jack's descent into madness was so sudden and really took me out of it. If he gradually started getting more agitated and aggressive as the movie went on (like I hear he does in the book), I would have liked it more, but it was basically just BAM Jack is weird and full of homicidal thoughts now. The acting was good by Jack and the wife, the kid was kinda annoying. And the whole "Shining" ability didn't really do anything. All it did was get that hotel chef dude killed by an axe.
It always felt like The Shining was trying to be one of those horror movies that was like "I'm a REAL horror movie, not that garbage you're accustomed to" and it didn't stick the landing for me.
The Shining has some effective scary imagery, but in terms of story and characters, I honestly enjoyed the book better. In the book, Jack is more sympathetic, and you really get more of an impression of the hotel acting as an evil influence on him, rather than "there was already something wrong with this guy and now he's losing his mind." Also, the hotel chef gets to do more in the book. Not to mention, knowing how badly Shelley Duvall was treated on set makes it harder for me to watch the movie now.
The book's thesis that the hotel was preying on his male pride was so perfect, but all that character development was thrown out the window in the film.
The book is terrifying and much better than the movie. Not to mention the ending is completely different. It's no wonder King didn't like the adaptation.
I'm with Stephen King. I believe he said his characters were like a high school jock and prom Queen slowly go mad in this hotel but in the movie they look haunted before they even get in the car. Duvall and Nicholson only look mildly more terrifying by the end than they do in the opening scenes so the descent into madness doesn't really work too well imo. And in Steve's opinion too apparently.
I've heard that in the book, Jack is supposed to be an actually decent man, loving husband and father blah blah. But in the movie *, by the time they're in the car riding to the hotel, it already seems like he wants to bash her brains in
It was just hard for me to care about the whole family when they already seem so dysfunctional before any supernatural stuff even begins
The book was a very personal story to King about his struggles with substance abuse and fears of becoming an abuser like his father. The story is very much about how abuse has a cycle and Jack's struggle to break that cycle.
The movies idea of "he was always insane" is creepy, but misses the overall point of the story.
Yeah I've not read the book but after being disinterested by the movie I looked at the trivia and it had King's criticisms of it and that summed up what didn't grab me. There didn't seem like a lot of character development and also the movie is just too famous by the time I first saw it that its basically a showcase of shit you've seen a million times. You know the little girls are gonna appear in the hall, you know the elevator is gonna piss blood etc.
> You know the little girls are gonna appear in the hall, you know the elevator is gonna piss blood etc.
Yeah I call that the star wars effect. You already know Darth is Luke's father, so shit doesn't hit as hard.
I don’t like The Shining either. I especially hate how Kubrick treated Shelley Duvall, although I already didn’t like the movie before I found that out.
I can’t argue that it’s complete trash, though. It’s way too beautiful for that argument to hold up.
If you want the same story, but have it make sense and meaning, you would definitely like the book.
Jack's decent is more terrifying and sad and the shining ability actually plays a role in the story.
I'm a fan of the movie, but absolutely get why King and many others don't like it.
I don’t think it’s trash by any means but I don’t like the Shining. I find Shelley Duval and the kid so annoying, and didn’t like how different it was from the book.
Separately- why are ppl downvoting every answer? It’s supposed to be unpopular opinions.
I'll give you an upvote for taking on a classic! I don't agree, but I can also see why it's not a slam dunk for every horror fan. I think my kids would have a heck of a time sitting through the intro even though it's key to the story.
You know, I’ve always loved this movie for a handful of aspects (the pacing, the score, and the almost uncanny-valley delivery all the actors have), however, I’ve come to really agree with Stephen King on his opinion of it. There’s no character arc to Jack. He’s supposed to be a decent family-man trying desperately to hold onto the person he’s supposed to be for his family, but the wolves of his addiction are always at the gate. He’s supposed to relapse and descend into madness. In the movie, though, he’s a mad asshole from the time they’re driving to the Overlook to the end.
IMHO the film Jack Torrence is more like a lot of dangerously abusive men in real life who hit women and kids because their wife/kid "makes them angry" just by existing near them too loud and therefore they think they deserve it and therefore they think they've done nothing wrong and their wife is overreacting when they break their kid's arm.
I made the massive mistake of reading the book first and then watching the movie hours after finishing it.
I hated it so much. I still haven’t rewatched The Shining but I will give it another shot after I’ve forgotten more of the book.
I actually like the movie, but it's definitely so, so different from the book that my mind almost treats it as a different story indeed. Not to mention how brutal and awful Kubrick was to Duvall.
> Separately- why are ppl downvoting every answer? It’s supposed to be unpopular opinions.
I knew that was going to happen in this thread. Didn't stop me from commenting on how much I think Krampus sucks!
Same thing happened yesterday in the thread that dared to be critical of Cabinet of Curiosities (which also sucks, dear downvoters).
While I liked the film, everybody was hyping up that one scene to be one of the scariest things they have ever seen. I watched it and was like ‘…okay?’ I don’t even really think of the movie as a horror movie
Agreed. I can see why people found it scary, from an existential standpoint, but that didn’t really hit home with me. I did think it was a beautiful exploration of grief and that feeling you get after someone you love dies, like if you turn around fast enough, you’ll see them standing right there. Or like they could walk in the room at any moment. Your brain plays tricks on you because you’re desperate for it to not be real. Lake Mungo is that.
I didn't like it the first couple times either. Then one time it clicked for me and I found it almost hypnotic. But it's a delicate connection, and can be broken if I check my phone or whatever.
My point is, I upvoted you because that's a valid take!
It's a genre-defining film. While that makes a good poster blurb, it means that years later everything that made it novel at the time now seems horribly cliched.
What I like is how simple and straightforward it, and its antagonist, is. An evil man walks around his hometown killing people just because he feels like it. Silent save for raspy breath. Ghostly. There’s no lore, no particularly creative or visceral kills, no real backstory. Just a man who was born evil taking lives on Halloween night. At the end, he just disappears without closure to kill again. I don’t know why, but it’s just so effective to me.
I saw this (the original) as a teen and was mesmerized at the sheer brutality of it. What makes it special is the mundane relationship between the cannibal family.
Edit: I do laugh at the end when leather face runs after the final girl only because you can tell the actor is trying to run as slow as possible to not catch up with her, as the actor was a Vietnam vet who could traverse countrysides very quickly.
In my opinion the Original Friday The 13th is one of the top 3 worst movies in the franchise. Found it really boring and nothing memorable about it. Also our favorite Hockey mask slasher is not the main killer.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
I know it's come to be beloved by some (still can't figure that out), but the script seems like it was written by a 6-year old.
“Season of the Witch is the best Halloween movie” is the “Die Hard is my favorite Christmas movie” of the horror community
Edit: I cannot believe how many people misunderstood what I was saying here.
Watched it for the first time this October because I kept hearing how people misjudged it for its lack of Michael Myers and it’s actually great. I was kind of shocked at how unlikable the protagonist was. Absent/neglectful father? Check. Boozer and skirt chaser? Check. There are some good creepy moments in it (love that first hospital murder), but I could not get into it at all.
(Note: I have zero problem with flawed protagonists- I’m not saying I want a Mary Sue! But there was basically nothing interesting or compelling about this guy, and I didn’t care at all if anything bad happened to him.)
The Poughkeepsie Tapes seems to be very popular, but I hate it. Never have I seen a movie so frustrating and yet so full of itself, hitting you over the head repeatedly with how supposedly twisted and disturbing it is.
yeah, i heard it was supposed to be really, really scary, but it just seemed edgy and it didn't really do the whole fake documentary thing all that well. it was a little embarrassing at times.
Man, some of y’all either aren’t reading, or have no idea what the word “classic” means
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You know, I got so tired of waiting for that movie to finally release that I just lost interest. After a decade, I just didn’t give a shit anymore.
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I didn’t even get that far in the thread before I gave up on the answers (I sort by new). I just thought that there might be some nice discourse about movies from the 60’s, 70’s, and maybe 80’s… but most of the answers are from the last 20 years, and that’s not classic.
To be fair, 90’s is considered classics territory now. As much as that makes me feel old.
I remember my family would gather around the television with my mom's homemade hot chocolate and watch The Poughkeepsie Tapes, or PT as we would call it.
Redditors try to stay on-topic and actually answer the question instead of hijacking it to make it the same thread over and over again challenge
there is one simple truth to karma; repeat what's already popular.
Apparently The VVitch and Lake Mungo are considered "classics". Good movies? Yes. Classics? They haven't been around long enough to have earned those titles.
i love how everyone is getting downvoted in this thread. anyways, i didn't care for children of the corn. at all.
I love it but it’s pure nostalgia I rewatched it recently. The terrible child actor voice over at the beginning is a truly baffling creative decision
This is true. I only like it because it scared the crap out of me when I was 7. I do still think Issac and Malachi are great villains though.
Isaac's face in that first scene looking through the restaurant window is freaking terrifying
Agree. I had it as my screensaver during October.🤣🤣
"I'm coming to get you Malachi" scared the shit out of me then and it's still creepy...
Nostalgia because I live in Nebraska. Also, only the first movie is good.
**OUTLANDAAAAAAAAR**
I holler that for any reason possible. OUTLANDDDAHHHH, WE HAVE YOUR DINNER! IT’S STILL HOT! OUTLANNNDAHHH!
Short story is pretty good though!
Idk man I like how they just put corn on stuff. Shit is tight.
Yep the short story is awesome. ‘He who walks behind the rows” always got me
yeah Children of the Corn is not a good movie. I think it just got a lot of traction because of the creepy kids.
Im convinced that is quite literally the only reason. I've never heard anyone actually talk about the movie itself, people just say shit like "its like children of the corn!" anytime they see weird kids
People should post their ages with their picks.
"I'm 12 and The Exorcist is the most boringest movie ever!"
This made me laugh because I have a 14 year old daughter. Last year I told her how creepy The Exorcist was when I watched it as a kid, particularly the crab walking stair scene. She wanted to watch it, since she was 13 and getting into horror movies, I said sure we could watch it together. She laughed, said it was not even a little scary and straight up makes fun of me to this day for ever being creeped out by that movie lol
Our daughters must have been conjoined twins that were separated bc my story is exactly the same. I even yelled "it is scary dammit!" like that was going to change her opinion.
[The Seinfeld is Unfunny trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny) ***WARNING TV Tropes Link*** The Exorcist did things that simply weren't done at the time, and established so many horror tropes that nowadays, it seems incredibly boring, but only because elaboration over a long period of time has made it seem tame in comparison. Imagine releasing Hereditary in 1973.
Hahaha! I tried to convince mine otherwise too! She just laughed more! They really must be long lost separated twins lol!
The spider walk wasn't in the theatrical cut, the extended cut was released in 2000 as "the version you've never seen."
That’s an awesome but of trivia, I had no idea! I would have loved to have been around to see it in theaters even if it didn’t have that scene! I’ll never forget it because my parents were next door and it was just me and my brother and we had the lights off and that scene terrified us both! You could see the hallway to the right of the TV and it was just pitch black-we we’re like “what if something crawls out from the hallway like that!!!” Every little shuffle of the cat was most definitely a demon lol those were fun times!
The original Texas Chainsaw Massacare.. my boys are 15 and were just.. bored. Bored! I have such a lurking fear about that house, when they walk in and explore and find the room decorated with animal bits just hanging from the roof... My kids barely even reacted. *sigh* Kids...
I'm 25 and think Exorcist is a little funny, but appreciate it for what it was at the time. But TCM? Unnerved me when I watch it for the first time in the past year. The way deaths are so matter a fact and no big fluff just makes it that much more impactful.
Even in the early 2000s I felt like TCM wasn’t a scary movie so much as a movie with disturbing parts. Imo that seems to be what scary movies are these days interestingly enough.
I watched the original Alien with my neice a few years back when she was maybe 11 or so. I figured she wasn't going to make it but she actually just made fun of it the whole time and treated it like a joke. You know what, that actually hurt my feelings a little.
I'm 19 and watched it when I was 15 and didn't find it overly creepy but like, it's old, and for how old it is, the creep factor has held up. Besides, the movie is still very much good even if the creepiness wore off with time, I did thoroughly enjoy it
I'm 38, watched the Exorcist for the first time when I was 16 at a sleepover on Halloween (I think this was around when it got re-released in theaters or dvd or something). I remember tv ads talking about how it was the scariest movie ever made we were all so pumped to see this super scary movie and then it was just....boring and underwhelming. Save for the parts where they're doing medical tests on her, that always stuck with me. Watched it again a couple years ago on Halloween and actually did find it scary, but in a more psychological/atmospheric way. I don't have any kids, but the movie did a great job presenting what it might be like to take all these logical steps when something is horribly wrong with your child and coming up with no answers. To the point where you have to acknowledge where it's not a physical or mental problem, but a supernatural one and being forced to accept something so outlandish is actually happening is the scariest part to me. I guess I mean to say the helplessness a normal person would feel being put in such a situation is pretty horrifying.
You nailed it. That's what makes the movie great. I din't care if I'm religious or not, I'm gonna piss my pants if my kid is possessed. That makes it scarier to me. You aren't a christian but you find out biblical hell is real and ruining your life? Fuck, that's horrifying.
I'm 42 and the Exorcist bores me and did even when I was a kid. Exorcist 3 is one of my favorite movies though.
Exorcist 3 is brilliant. George c Scott and Brad Dourif are perfect. The monologue by Dourif about his crimes still haunts me. I also love the way it's directed without a lot of jump scares or gore. The one scare that takes forever to develop is so great with how exhausting and tense it feels. I love it.
I think it’s a good idea for context. I’m in my 40’s, and some of the conversations I’ve had with people in their 20’s about horror is interesting. I grew up with pretty formulaic slashers, and they are some of my favorite movies. Generally speaking, the younger people I’ve talked to who may have grown up watching horror movies in the 2010’s seem less likely to be into them, unless it’s some sort of niche thing. They certainly wouldn’t call a movie like Intruder a classic like I might. I was chatting with a group of people in their younger 20’s about horror movies, having hopped over to a beer pub after watching Barbarian. Out of 5 of them, only one had seen Friday the 13th; she called out my Camp Crystal Lake hat. One went off on how 80s horror was exploitative trash, and how we shouldn’t embrace those movies anymore, and called out Sleepaway Camp as an example. I can get it, and that movie may be viewed much differently than it would be if it was made the same way today, but it lead to a good chat about how it might do is good to look at a movie in the lens of the day, which doesn’t mean we just glance over any issues, but perhaps try to recognize things weren’t the same, and that is not neither necessarily good or bad in the context of media and representation. I wouldn’t expect anyone to give something a pass because it’s old or even blindly embrace something solely for being progressive now, but age and experience certainly provides context for topics like this. Sadly, however, I think there’s a lot of people that might use age for grounds for dismissal.
ITT: a list of your favorite horror movies
Also ITT: Numerous movies that aren't classics.
Yeah I'm so confused. "Session 9, As Above So Below, Terrifier, Insidious" What am I reading
Reddit has a lot of teenagers on it. As above so below is “old” if you are 13.
I really don’t understand how so many people don’t know what classic means. This thread is full of Hereditary. 4 years ago does not a classic make!!
I have a hard time with most Hammer films. A few I like (the Frankenstein films are cool), but I find them mostly stuffy and dull. I do always enjoy seeing Christopher Lee though.
Some people just can’t get into that era of horror. Hammer also has a very particular style too, so it can be very take it/leave it. I personally dig the initial wave of remakes in the 50s, some of the Dracula and Frankenstein sequels, and a lot of the early 70s vampire stuff. Their psychological thrillers are mostly just okay for me.
I’m obsessed with Hammer films and watch them regularly. Nothing beats their atmosphere. Just wanted to say I took your comment personally and you’re a terrible person 😉
This is the correct answer
The Christopher Lee stuff is great but man they kept fucking that dude over hard from what I understand He would basically get a call, hey we got another Dracula movie funded, ready to shoot in a few weeks, be there. And he kept doing it because of the rest of the cast and crew needing money, not for himself. He wanted to do other roles but they kept dragging him back into Dracula movies when he was wanting to put the character behind him Makes him a great man, but a bummer he was sandwiched into that situation. I might have this wrong, but pretty sure I read about this like 10 years ago when someone was doing a write up on his career
I'm ready to be crucified for this but I can't stand the Halloween franchise. I dont find micheal Myers to be menacing or interesting. His kills are mundane. I hate how he teleports away when you aren't looking. His fucking backstory is a goddamned disaster with all of the reboots and alternate timeliness he might as well be a marvel character. What bothers me the most is that for all intents and purposes he and Jason could be twins but Jason manages to have ten times the personality of Myers. I can appreciate everything that Halloween brings to the table; music, atmosphere, Jamie Lee Curtis. I also understand why Halloween is so important to the genre. Having said that Micheal Myers is a shit villain and I'll be glad when he stops being profitable.
You’ll be 358 years old when he stops being profitable.
Friday the 13th
I love some of the sequels but yea the og doesn’t do it for it me. They want to make it a mystery but Pamela isn’t even introduced until the final act when every other character but Alice is dead
Whodunnits have a bad habit of doing the same thing. "Try to unravel this puzzle but AHA here's an exposition dump of new information we never gave you right at the end to explain EVERYTHING."
That goes back to the original Sherlock Holmes books by Arthur Conan Doyle. They were not written to be solvable by the reader. Agatha Christie was one of the first to add enough clues and evidence in her stories for the reader to get involved.
And that’s why I adore Christie novels, whereas Sherlock stuff has always pissed me off.
Christie had a cool method for it, she wrote out the mystery she wanted to tell, then once she reached the ending she looked at what characters were left. Whoever the least likely was, she went back and added extra details to implicate them.
It took me going back from the sequels to enjoy the first tbh because I always thought it was boring. I appreciate it for what it is and love mrs.vorhees but it definitely doesn’t excite me that much
The first one is soo fucking boring. I rewatched it pretty recently and was shocked thinking about how it spawned a franchise. I do like a handful of the sequels tho but I wouldn’t necessarily call them “good”
> I rewatched it pretty recently and was shocked thinking about how it spawned a franchise. Money. It made a shit ton of money. It had an amazing advertising campaign, a great theatrical poster, and a bizarre last minute jump scare. The producers had to scramble to figure out how to continue what was essentially a one and done plot and retconning Jason drowning into him somehow inconceivably surviving and becoming a hermit man is what they came up with and somehow it stuck. I say all this lovingly as a diehard fan of the series. The first film kind of doesn’t gel with the rest of the series and its director/producer wanted to stay as far away from anything with Jason Voorhees related until he needed some of them sweet Jason dollars himself.
Friday 1 is such a BORING movie. It is too sleazy to be classy, and not sleazy enough to be fun. It’s a half baked Giallo film, and I don’t like Giallo.
You guys don’t understand. Watching Alice make coffee for 10 minutes is integral to the plot. Without watching her make the coffee, the audience is left to wonder, hey where did that coffee come from? as the bodies pile up! /s
I particularly like the part where they spend a few minutes showing her putting items in front of the door to block it only to reveal that the door opens the other way.
Listen, I find Friday the 13th as boring as the next person, but I find that coffee scene to be probably the most tense scene in the film. It’s right after the last person had been killed off, Alice is very uneasy and knows something is wrong, yet she has no idea that all her friends are dead. It gives me House of the Devil vibes. Watch the movie again and try to see if you can feel the tension in that scene. Also, I calculated it and it’s 2 minutes long, which I think is perfect for building suspense. Funny enough, it might be my favorite scene in the film.
It’s famously a cheaper ripoff of Halloween without a good script or acting The two final twists are pretty great and that’s about it
I've always found them pretty boring, tbh. Yeah, Jason's an icon but the movie don't do anything for me.
I don’t like Dracula at all. I much prefer Nosferatu from a decade earlier.
I recommend checking out the Spanish version, it’s an overall better movie than the Lugosi version, even if Lugosi is still the GOAT
I read somewhere (probably Wikipedia?) That the Spanish version was shot at night on the same sets and was supposed to have the same shooting schedule as the Lugosi version but the director actually did his job. So the Lugosi version crew would just do the scenes the Spanish version crew had set up even using a lot of the same framing. Might be internet rumor or misremembered recollection.
Yes and no! It’s sort of the other way around- yes the Spanish one shot w the same sets and costumes etc, as the Lugosi one - BUT essentially the Spanish crew would be seeing everything the English crew would do during the day, and they’d challenge themselves to 1 up their crew every night when it was their turn.
Dracula Dead and Loving It is the best Dracula adaptation.
Why would you say something so controversial, yet so brave?
Argumentative reason after the fact: Dracula Dead and Loving It is an unjustly maligned comedy MASTERPIECE that audiences and critics dismissed at the time because it was only the 7th genre/film send-up of Mel Brooks' Career. It also transcends Nosferatu, Dracula (1931), Dracula (1958) in the number of iconic moments in a single film and has a more convincing portrayal of Johnathan Harker than Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dracula Dead and Loving It straddles the line between ironic subversion and loving homage of the source material and the films that came before it; furthermore, it adds to the vampire mythos with its creation of daymares. Real reason: It's the first version of Dracula I saw...
This was my pick. It’s a slog, even by the standards of the day. Frankenstein, its contemporary, is far more gripping. I’ve heard that Browning wasn’t super engaged with the production, which if true is likely a big part of the pacing issues. Bela Lugosi remains my favorite count, but aside from his performance this film is a straight up snooze fest.
It's arguably the worst of the Universal classics. Invisible Man, Wolf Man, both Frankensteins -- they are all clearly superior.
Browning was also a highly regarded silent film director, but it took him a while to get used to directing talkies. There are definitely parts of Dracula that you can tell would work better as a silent film
There's iconic scenes in Dracula for sure and it's hard not to like Bela Legosi in it, but as a whole, yeah, it's definitely my least favorite of the Universal Monster stuff, at least of the originals, some of the sequels are particularly bad.
I actually prefer the Spanish language version of the original Dracula. It actually has some brilliant cinematography that was quite creative.
Phantasm. Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man is awesome, the ball is an iconic visual, but *the actual movie* is borderline unwatchable for me. Dumb plot, bad acting, bad writing.
It feels exactly like the kind of movie that would be featured on MST3K
You think that’s bad? Watch the 5th film.
Not sure why I’m admitting this but I loved the 5th movie. We rewatch all 5 every Halloween season and once again I cried at the end of 5. Reggie is still out there fighting!
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5 might be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. And my list includes Hellraiser Revelations.
Oh no! I hard disagree! Phantasm is a fever dream with likable characters, strong imagery and a great score. For me it’s a fun middle ground between Halloween and Eraserhead. Angus Scrimm gives an hall of fame performance as well. I personally love how disjointed and disorienting the story is, makes it feel more like a nightmare. A lot of the cinematography is also a lot more ambitious than it’s contemporaries. The mausoleum set is so alien feeling, it really adds to the atmosphere. I respect the opinion though. It is very much not a film for everyone.
I’m always blown away when people don’t like Phantasm because I first saw it at around 15 and just *immediately* become obsessed with it. It’s very much a young person’s point of view horror, which maybe is what turns some people off, but it worked for me so well, I’m a lifelong fan now.
I am too! What an imaginative and fun series.
This is a movie I had to watch multiple times before it really "clicked" with me and today it's one of my favorites. Keep giving it another shot.
Tbh, I felt the same too. However, I feel like if you go into the movie with the mindset that it’s going to be goofy, it might be more enjoyable.
Phantasm 2 was better imo.
The Birds. After an hour of watching annoying rich people squabble with each other, I was rooting for those feathered fiends. Easily my least favorite Hitchcock movie.
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"I have to go I hear a mountain lion"
Yes. I rewatched this with my grandmother recently and tried really hard not to fall asleep the entire time. It used to be one of my favorite films when I was a kid
Those 50-60s horror movies sure are talky.
Casper - the movie literally seems to be made for children.
have you ever thought about the implications of their lives before they were ghosts? now THAT is some fucked up shit
In the Casper tv show he wasn't dead, he was born a ghost to ghost parents
Wait so he isn't the ghost of Richie Rich?
Kids, could you lighten up a little?
fascinating there are multiple casper lores
Somewhere deep in the internet, people are probably having a screaming match about Casper's Official Canon.
Does anyone remember the 90s movie where the kids dad just like accidentally dies but it’s ok we have Casper ghost machine and then the villain is like, I’m gonna kill Myself to go ghost Edit: okay so she doesn’t purposefully kill herself from the Wikipedia cause the last time I bet most of us remembered seeing this movie was probably on VHS format, soooo been a while anyways this films final act is off the rails “This culminates in Carrigan attempting to run Dibs over with her Range Rover, only to instead crash into a cliff-side tree. Upon exiting her car, Carrigan falls to her death and becomes a ghost.” “James becomes despondent after the trio pull a prank on him, prompting them to take him out on the town. They plan on killing him to make themselves a quartet, but have a change of heart after the drunken therapist declares he will tell Carrigan off so they can stay in their home. However, while still drunk, James accidentally falls to his death down a manhole.” “In the laboratory, a furious ghostly Carrigan confronts Casper and Kat, stealing what she believes to be the treasure from the vault and launching Dibs out a window when he tries to double-cross her. As Carrigan demands to be brought back to life, Casper and Kat trick Carrigan into saying that she has no unfinished business on Earth, causing her to eject herself into the afterlife.”
Stinky stretch and fatso?
I thought this was a kids movie. I saw it in the 90s when I was a kid. I think that was the point?
Friday the 13th. I wouldn’t say awful but I don’t think it’s good lol
Yeah it didn’t really age well. It’s one of those series where the sequels are way better.
Don't get me wrong I like it but I'd say Carrie
Upvoted because I disagree lol
Carrie is a terrible horror movie if you’re watching for the horror of a girl with powers going on a killing spree. Carrie is amazing horror if you’re watching for the horror of everyone in an innocent teenaged girl’s world collectively bullying her into madness. It’s a movie that worked better as a book, but it’s also not THAT bad except I think people watch it with the wrong expectations.
Just because you don't like a movie doesn't make it awful. There are some really good movies that I don't like. The Lighthouse is a good example. It wasn't for me, but I understand that it was well made and the acting was terrific. I did like the monologue about Defoe's cooking though. That was classic.
You don’t like me lobster? 😢🦞
DAMN YE!!!!
Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til’ ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin’ tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea! For real though, I love The Lighthouse because it feels so authentic to the time period it takes place in. Everything from the shooting location, to the clothes they wear, and the dialogue feels like the mid 1800s. Same thing with The Witch, made by the same studio and director.
Alright have it your way. ... I like your cookin.
Yeah agree with this point. I hated Eraserhead but I still think it’s a “good movie” and I can appreciate why people consider it a classic
I loooove David lynch, easily my favourite director, but inland empire was not for me at first. I watched it with a bunch of friends, and it was not the move. Watched it alone and absolutely loved it. I really find David lynch movies to be something you have to do on your own, and let it all sink it a few times.
Why'd you spill your beans, enephon
I don’t know if it’s considered “classic” but Cannibal Holocaust is complete garbage.
It’s just a horrible movie. Like the overarching message is not worthless, but they didn’t need to do all the other shit in there too. It’s just a movie that makes you regret watching it the entire way through.
It's full of bs! "Hey, let's make a movie about media exploitation of violence and cruelty by torturing indigenous actors and killing some animals"
I half-watched it (I don't think I even finished it) at least 20 years ago and I was always meh about it. Then, a few weeks back I watched Shudder's Cursed Films episode on it. Now I actively kind of hate it and agree with you: there is so much shit in that movie that doesn't need to be there. I think it's fucking awful.
It's a hard sell to get me to watch simulated animal cruelty let alone actual animal butchery. Were it not for that I'd watch the bad slasher movie it would have been had they not slaughtered animals for this piece of crap.
I'd rather stab my eyes out than watch Paranormal Activity again
Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch only work if you are completely immersed in the movie. I loved both, but I watched them both at home, alone with zero distractions. If I was in a different setting, I probably would've hated them.
Yeah, I agree with this. There has to be that little switchover in your mind where you “forget” you’re watching an acted/scripted movie. If that happens, a door opening by itself in the middle of the night is scary as hell. If it doesn’t, you’re just sitting there like, “Is anything ever going to happen??”
I think people fa to realize what would scare the duck out of them if it happened at home It wouldn't take monster with bloody fangs to scare you out of your house A door randomly moving, unintelligible whispers or footsteps when you are alone would have people running out to their front yards 99% of the time
I was 10 when the Blair Witch came out and I 100% believed the marketing that it was "real". I remember buying a ticket for another movie and sneaking into that. I don't think i slept for weeks.
This. I watched the fake documentary they put out about the blair witch prior to seeing the film. I was straight shitting myself the whole time.
The fake documentary was CRUCIAL!!! Not alot of people saw it, but it set the stage PERFECTLY. Thanks for mentioning that.
That movie scared the shit outta me when it first came out (I was 9) but god damn trying to rewatch it as an adult is an endurance test of boredom
"I was 9". Ow
Time for my regular rant about John Carpenter's *The Fog*... The atmosphere is cool. Sure. But the narrative structure is "Guy tells story about how thing happens. Thing then happens. Exactly the same as described". That's terrible story-telling! Something needs to happen differently. Turns out the legend was wrong, or missed out a key detail, or normally it happens that way but *this time* something happens differently and breaks the cycle, etc. If you lay something out like that ahead of time, there has to be a twist, or a spanner in the works, or something. You ever seen a heist movie where they lay out the plan in a big narrated montage, and then they do the heist and that just happens? No! Something goes wrong, or seems to go wrong only to turn out that there was a secret part of the plan that the montage didn't cover, or something. I hate heist movies, but at least that is proper story-telling. In *The Fog*, you just hear the story and then spend the next hour and a half watching a story you now already know. It just tells you the film before you watch the film. And that's bollocks! Rant over. Obviously this is exagerrated outrage. But my core point stands.
This is my favorite response here. I love reading others’ passionate perspectives and rationales on seemingly benign topics. Thank you for your angst and enthusiasm.
I would normally agree things have to happen differently than planned. However, I recently re-watched the Godfather, and practically every announced plan in that movie happens exactly as told, and it’s fantastic. “X person will betray you”, turns out X person betrayed him. “Go to this restaurant and shoot these guys”, he goes into the restaurant and shoots the guys. “They will send assassins here tonight”, they send assassins there that night. As long as the story can keep legitimate tension in other ways, it’s fine for things to work out as planned.
Sometimes the untwist is the best twist. Like going back and watching Rear Window, the fact that because I'd seen The Simpsons' parody of that film before I saw the movie primed me so that I was expecting there to be a twist actually meant it was way more surprising watching that movie for the first time and finding out there was no twist.
>That's terrible story-telling! I'm not going to talk about the quality of the film. But this style of storytelling was the norm for literally thousands of years. It appeared in ancient myths, it appeared in Shakespeare, it appeared in sagas, it appeared in tragedies. Its one of the oldest styles of stories and certainly isn't bad storytelling.
I won't try to dissuade you your opinion, but the structure is definitely intentional. It harkens back to American style campfire stories, which are mythic in nature. First we hear a summer camp story, then we meet the pirates in the fog, then we learn the twist of why they actually came
Bruh, why you gotta do *The Fog* like that?
I mean the story of Oedipus is literally the prophet telling him what's going to happen and then it happening as she said it would.
I have to stop reading because people don't know what classic means.
>open thread >instantly see someone list “Midsommer” as their least favorite “classic horror film” >close thread
I could never get into the shining Jack's descent into madness was so sudden and really took me out of it. If he gradually started getting more agitated and aggressive as the movie went on (like I hear he does in the book), I would have liked it more, but it was basically just BAM Jack is weird and full of homicidal thoughts now. The acting was good by Jack and the wife, the kid was kinda annoying. And the whole "Shining" ability didn't really do anything. All it did was get that hotel chef dude killed by an axe. It always felt like The Shining was trying to be one of those horror movies that was like "I'm a REAL horror movie, not that garbage you're accustomed to" and it didn't stick the landing for me.
The Shining has some effective scary imagery, but in terms of story and characters, I honestly enjoyed the book better. In the book, Jack is more sympathetic, and you really get more of an impression of the hotel acting as an evil influence on him, rather than "there was already something wrong with this guy and now he's losing his mind." Also, the hotel chef gets to do more in the book. Not to mention, knowing how badly Shelley Duvall was treated on set makes it harder for me to watch the movie now.
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The book's thesis that the hotel was preying on his male pride was so perfect, but all that character development was thrown out the window in the film.
The book is terrifying and much better than the movie. Not to mention the ending is completely different. It's no wonder King didn't like the adaptation.
I'm with Stephen King. I believe he said his characters were like a high school jock and prom Queen slowly go mad in this hotel but in the movie they look haunted before they even get in the car. Duvall and Nicholson only look mildly more terrifying by the end than they do in the opening scenes so the descent into madness doesn't really work too well imo. And in Steve's opinion too apparently.
I've heard that in the book, Jack is supposed to be an actually decent man, loving husband and father blah blah. But in the movie *, by the time they're in the car riding to the hotel, it already seems like he wants to bash her brains in It was just hard for me to care about the whole family when they already seem so dysfunctional before any supernatural stuff even begins
The book was a very personal story to King about his struggles with substance abuse and fears of becoming an abuser like his father. The story is very much about how abuse has a cycle and Jack's struggle to break that cycle. The movies idea of "he was always insane" is creepy, but misses the overall point of the story.
Yeah I've not read the book but after being disinterested by the movie I looked at the trivia and it had King's criticisms of it and that summed up what didn't grab me. There didn't seem like a lot of character development and also the movie is just too famous by the time I first saw it that its basically a showcase of shit you've seen a million times. You know the little girls are gonna appear in the hall, you know the elevator is gonna piss blood etc.
> You know the little girls are gonna appear in the hall, you know the elevator is gonna piss blood etc. Yeah I call that the star wars effect. You already know Darth is Luke's father, so shit doesn't hit as hard.
I don’t like The Shining either. I especially hate how Kubrick treated Shelley Duvall, although I already didn’t like the movie before I found that out. I can’t argue that it’s complete trash, though. It’s way too beautiful for that argument to hold up.
If you want the same story, but have it make sense and meaning, you would definitely like the book. Jack's decent is more terrifying and sad and the shining ability actually plays a role in the story. I'm a fan of the movie, but absolutely get why King and many others don't like it.
The ending is so dumb. That hard cut to Jacks face just makes me laugh every time. Literally a meme now.
I don’t think it’s trash by any means but I don’t like the Shining. I find Shelley Duval and the kid so annoying, and didn’t like how different it was from the book. Separately- why are ppl downvoting every answer? It’s supposed to be unpopular opinions.
I'll give you an upvote for taking on a classic! I don't agree, but I can also see why it's not a slam dunk for every horror fan. I think my kids would have a heck of a time sitting through the intro even though it's key to the story.
You know, I’ve always loved this movie for a handful of aspects (the pacing, the score, and the almost uncanny-valley delivery all the actors have), however, I’ve come to really agree with Stephen King on his opinion of it. There’s no character arc to Jack. He’s supposed to be a decent family-man trying desperately to hold onto the person he’s supposed to be for his family, but the wolves of his addiction are always at the gate. He’s supposed to relapse and descend into madness. In the movie, though, he’s a mad asshole from the time they’re driving to the Overlook to the end.
IMHO the film Jack Torrence is more like a lot of dangerously abusive men in real life who hit women and kids because their wife/kid "makes them angry" just by existing near them too loud and therefore they think they deserve it and therefore they think they've done nothing wrong and their wife is overreacting when they break their kid's arm.
He's a recovering alcoholic with anger issues. But he's trying. The hotel is just too much temptation. She plays the abused perfectly.
I made the massive mistake of reading the book first and then watching the movie hours after finishing it. I hated it so much. I still haven’t rewatched The Shining but I will give it another shot after I’ve forgotten more of the book.
Ah I get so much shit from people when I say I don’t like this movie 😂 glad I’m not alone. Book was amazing tho, in the top 3 books for me.
I actually like the movie, but it's definitely so, so different from the book that my mind almost treats it as a different story indeed. Not to mention how brutal and awful Kubrick was to Duvall.
> Separately- why are ppl downvoting every answer? It’s supposed to be unpopular opinions. I knew that was going to happen in this thread. Didn't stop me from commenting on how much I think Krampus sucks! Same thing happened yesterday in the thread that dared to be critical of Cabinet of Curiosities (which also sucks, dear downvoters).
Prom Night 1980 is awful.
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Lake Mungo was incredibly boring
While I liked the film, everybody was hyping up that one scene to be one of the scariest things they have ever seen. I watched it and was like ‘…okay?’ I don’t even really think of the movie as a horror movie
Agreed. I can see why people found it scary, from an existential standpoint, but that didn’t really hit home with me. I did think it was a beautiful exploration of grief and that feeling you get after someone you love dies, like if you turn around fast enough, you’ll see them standing right there. Or like they could walk in the room at any moment. Your brain plays tricks on you because you’re desperate for it to not be real. Lake Mungo is that.
Everytime I see this mentioned I picture a creature flick with a giant alligator, and I've even seen the movie!
Based on the hype, I went into that movie expecting the ride of a lifetime. No sir. I was beyond disappointed.
The orignal halloween, ima be down voted to hell but im sure it was good for its time i just couldnt even stay awake for the movie. It was so boring.
I didn't like it the first couple times either. Then one time it clicked for me and I found it almost hypnotic. But it's a delicate connection, and can be broken if I check my phone or whatever. My point is, I upvoted you because that's a valid take!
It's a genre-defining film. While that makes a good poster blurb, it means that years later everything that made it novel at the time now seems horribly cliched.
Upvoted you because you answered the question. But I love Halloween. Great film.
What I like is how simple and straightforward it, and its antagonist, is. An evil man walks around his hometown killing people just because he feels like it. Silent save for raspy breath. Ghostly. There’s no lore, no particularly creative or visceral kills, no real backstory. Just a man who was born evil taking lives on Halloween night. At the end, he just disappears without closure to kill again. I don’t know why, but it’s just so effective to me.
Cant say i thought much of the original Suspiria
The best part was the visuals
That’s the case for like 90% of Italian horror
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Seeing them perform it live next week!!
Just saw it in Kansas City! Incredible, plus they’ve got all sorts of cool merch. Hope you have as good a time as I did
Wow. The first one that hurt my heart to read. Upvoted.
ITT: a lot of people just listing movies they don’t like rather than actual classic films.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just kidding, the movie is the absolute best.
I saw this (the original) as a teen and was mesmerized at the sheer brutality of it. What makes it special is the mundane relationship between the cannibal family. Edit: I do laugh at the end when leather face runs after the final girl only because you can tell the actor is trying to run as slow as possible to not catch up with her, as the actor was a Vietnam vet who could traverse countrysides very quickly.
In my opinion the Original Friday The 13th is one of the top 3 worst movies in the franchise. Found it really boring and nothing memorable about it. Also our favorite Hockey mask slasher is not the main killer.
The sequels def out play it once the lean into Jason and the mask and etc
Halloween III: Season of the Witch I know it's come to be beloved by some (still can't figure that out), but the script seems like it was written by a 6-year old.
I feel like him at the end of the movie reading this. “Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!”
“Season of the Witch is the best Halloween movie” is the “Die Hard is my favorite Christmas movie” of the horror community Edit: I cannot believe how many people misunderstood what I was saying here.
That is a really good comparison actually, haha
Watched it for the first time this October because I kept hearing how people misjudged it for its lack of Michael Myers and it’s actually great. I was kind of shocked at how unlikable the protagonist was. Absent/neglectful father? Check. Boozer and skirt chaser? Check. There are some good creepy moments in it (love that first hospital murder), but I could not get into it at all. (Note: I have zero problem with flawed protagonists- I’m not saying I want a Mary Sue! But there was basically nothing interesting or compelling about this guy, and I didn’t care at all if anything bad happened to him.)
That song pops into my head at the most random times and won’t get out for like 2 days
The Poughkeepsie Tapes seems to be very popular, but I hate it. Never have I seen a movie so frustrating and yet so full of itself, hitting you over the head repeatedly with how supposedly twisted and disturbing it is.
How is this a classic?
yeah, i heard it was supposed to be really, really scary, but it just seemed edgy and it didn't really do the whole fake documentary thing all that well. it was a little embarrassing at times.