Best Horror Movie Ever

[Darren Hill]

I never thought of Wicker Man as a horror movie. It's a great movie, but it's not scary. Only one person died, and he deserved it.

In that film, the pagans were the bad guys - they were performing increasingly desperate and deadly fertility sacrifices, which weren't working.
All Edwoodwoodwood's character was guilty of was being a bit repressed.

[talysman]

I never thought of Wicker Man as a horror movie. It's a great movie, but it's not scary. Only one person died, and he deserved it.

In that film, the pagans were the bad guys - they were performing increasingly desperate and deadly fertility sacrifices, which weren't working.

See, that's just it. They weren't bad guys at all. They made a tough moral decision. The wrong choice, but they didn't act out of malice and didn't hate Howie, even after the way they treated him. They gave him plenty of warnings, then gave him the opportunity to flee at the end. They wanted to be released from their horrible plan.

That's why it's not horror, although it's close to it. Heck, it's not even very suspenseful, in the conventional sense, because you know what's going to happen; it's Howie  who doesn't know, and the story is really about how one man refused to see the truth until it was too late.

Horror is about discovering secret evil under a pretense of good, but Wicker Man is about discovering your own idealized version of the world is a lie, and real world people make real world decisions out of desparation that won't fit your ideals. Strip away the christian-vs-pagan disguise, and Howie is just a man arrogantly convinced that his way is right and being right is somehow going to save him.

AND SO IS LORD SOMERISLE. That's why Howie tells Somerisle at the end that when the crops are bad next year, he will be next. Because, at the end, Howie realizes that he and Somerisle are the same.

[Darren Hill]

I wasn't actually responding to the "wicker man isn't horror" part of that quote, I was responding to the "and he deserved to die" part.

[talysman]

I wasn't actually responding to the "wicker man isn't horror" part of that quote, I was responding to the "and he deserved to die" part.

The analysis still stands, even without going into whether Howie was just repressed or rather viciously destructive. If someone is doing something that will kill them, they receive multiple warnings to that effect, and yet they stubbornly persist in their self-destructive course of action, aren't they getting what they deserve?

[Brennan Taylor]

Remember when CBS (or whichever network) showed Oz once a year on TV? Yeah, pretty much fucked me up every year until I hit double-digit age or so. Fucking witch and her freaky ass monkeys!

You're not the first one I've heard that from. The one that got me was Willy Wonka. That boat scene freaked my shit!

[Eric J-D]

Glad to know I wasn't the only one freaked out by the boat scene!


I don't know if they are the absolute best, but here are my nominees:

George Franju's Eyes Without a Face and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

The scene where Shelly Duvall discovers what her husband has been writing is chilling and (because it's Kubrick) all the more horrific because its filmed in almost complete silence (there's some music playing I think, but not a word spoken).

Cheers,

Eric

[talysman]

George Franju's Eyes Without a Face and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Oooh, that title reminds me of another movie, Fiend Without a Face. The movie designed to scare little zombie children.

[Latreya Sena]

I find horror hysterically funny most of the time. My wife can't believe I belly laughed the entire way through The Shinning. I mean c'mon, "Honey, I'm home!"

Having said that as an adult there has only been one horror movie that genuinely gave me the creeps: Blair Witch.