Trick or treat: 50 best horror films of all time

[Psychic Warrior]

As soon as I saw The Wicker Man at number 7 I stopped reading. That wasn't a horror movie just a horrible movie.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

As soon as I saw The Wicker Man at number 7 I stopped reading. That wasn't a horror movie just a horrible movie.

As a typical horror film, yeah, it's not very good. I was disappointed when I saw it the first time, expecting something very different.

But I watched it again a few years later, and found that it's not a bad film, as long as you aren't expecting a horror film in the way we usually think of them. It is quite creepy and unsettling, although quite slow at the beginning. It also apparently has been released in several different edited versions, which could account for some of the mixed reactions to it. The full version is quite a bit better than the edited versions.

 

[Arnix]

Bleh.

The list is just bad.

Evil Dead is a great movie. It, however, is NOT a great horror movie.

The list left off things like Ametyville Horror (original), Arachniphobia (maybe), The Omen, etc.

This list even fails at a list of "gore" since some of those movies aren't even that gorey, just scary.

Yes, Alien should have been higher, but then so should A Nightmare on Elm Street.

 

[David Howery]

The Blair Witch Project always struck me as a good idea done poorly. The biggest fault in logic I had with it was the damn stream in it... how much brains does it take to say to yourself, "Hey, we're lost in the woods.. here's a stream... let's follow it downriver, and it will have to come out somewhere... " But no, the stupid kids walk away from it and end up going in circles...

 

[JoeGKushner]

1 THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 1974
Cutting deep: Tobe Hooper takes horror to the bleeding edge.

No way this goes up to #1...

2 HALLOWEEN 1978
Hawks meets Hitchcock as the slasher cycle finds true Shape...

Good movie...

3 SUSPIRIA 1977
Sighs and whispers (and screams) in Argento’s baroque bloodletter.

Been a while...

4 DAWN OF THE DEAD 1978
George A Romero’s definitive document of the walking dead.

I think that the remake was better. I like the fast moving zombies.

5 THE SHINING 1980
Loving family man tries to put an axe through his son’s head.

Ah, this should be much higher.

6 PSYCHO 1960
Come on up to the house. Oh, and don’t mind Mother...

A classic.

7 THE WICKER MAN 1973
Creeping pagan terror on a remote Scottish island.

Another classic, but might be on best camp horror movies.

after that the list has a lot of hits and misses...I mean, did I just miss In The Mouth of Madness, and Event Horizon? What about old classics like the Sentinel?

 

[trancejeremy]

Blair Witch Project fooled a lot of people into thinking it was real. I thought it was silly, but a lot of people liked it.

Part of the trouble I think "horror" is personal. I mean, some people like the really gorey splatter stuff, others like the more creepy suspense, and then you have a whole campy subgenre



Most of the movies on the list I found silly (like The Wicker Man) or boring ("The Shining") or pointless (most the splatter movies). And I don't really "get" Zombie movies. The only one I've ever really liked was "Versus". But most people don't share my views on horror movies, so while I don't like that list, I'm sure most people people found something on it they liked.

Still, I was shocked that "Prince of Darkness" wasn't on that list. To my mind, it's the best horror movie ever (either that or "Alien"). Not so much scary, but very very creepy. Hard to look at a mirror the same way after watching it.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Noone dare mock The Wicker Man. One of my favouite movies.

But it ain't Horror. It's Mystery.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Yes.

It's best if you go in knowing next to nothing about it. Even the tag line in the list gave away entirely too much about it. But yeah the last 20 min of this movie is pretty disturbing and hardcore. Not so much for what you see but for what you hear...

"Deeper, deeper, deeper...."

Yeah, knowing anyting about it really ruins it. But I still almost couldn't watch the ending.

That are some very good, unconventional movies on the list (like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). But some I would not call horror movies are on the list as well (Eraserhead).

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I'm not a particular fan of horror so maybe that explains why I've never even HEARD of half the movies on that list, but the rankings of the ones I do recognize is clearly more than just a little questionable. The reason it seems like such a bad list is likely due to who created it - the staff at the website. There's no indicaiton how they compiled the list or determined ranking which to me suggests they just made it up without much of any "rules" at all. It would be one thing to do polling or at least get voting from a large, interested body of horror fans, but to just set a dozen people down and have them declare a 50-best isn't going to produce a terribly reliable or meaningful listing. It is after all a highly subjective thing to declare what's the 50 best movies for a given genre. The way for those subjective opinions to be more relevant is to collate a LOT more opinions.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Good criminey, that is a weak list.