Good Horror Movies?

Cafe Society
21

Attack from the 3rd dimension might be right about putting slashers last. I figured those would be where the most interest would be so I bumped them up the list, but they be more intense and they are, by definition, not low on violence. That said, the ones I mentioned are quite good. Others like Prom Night or Black Christmas are, well, less good, but also fun.

Check with your Dad, and maybe start with the Evil Dead or other funnier movies first. Horror is a fun genre, but it’s probably best to ease into it.

FYI I suggested skipping Evil Dead the original because it is more graphic and less funny, but I like the movie. You have to have seen Evil Dead 2 to get Army of Darkness, but you don’t lose as much by skipping Evil Dead.

Peter Jackson’s movie The Frighteners (with Michael J Fox) is also a good lighter supernatural horror. And Sam Rami’s Drag Me to Hell which came out not too long ago, is not high on violence and is pretty entertaining. Particularly if you look at it as an allegory about eating disorders.

22

For that kind of horror without gore, see the 1956 original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And the 1978 remake (some . . . not so much gore as body horror.) (Later remakes I wouldn’t recommend.)

23

:o . . . I just introduced a teenage newbie horror fan to TVTropes.org.

Sorry, kid. College woulda been nice.

24

No J-horror fans?

I love The Ring. I thought this was much scarier than the original Japanese version. It’s my all time favorite and more horrifying movie. The first Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s pretty good too, but for that film I prefer the Japanese version.

25

I’d go with Rosemary’s Baby. The best horror movie that never shows anythuing horrific.

26

I think most Japanese (and Korean for that matter) horror is more intense than the OP is asking for. Good stuff is being made by those film makers though.

27

I’ve enjoyed many horror movies over many years, but only three have actually frightened me: The Exorcist, **Alien **(only the first installment, the rest failed miserably to re-create suspense) and, though not technically a movie, the *crème de la crème **of sheer, unadulterated horror…<shudder>…*I give you *(do not click if you have cardiac arrhythmia or anxiety induced incontinence), the Zanti Misfits! :eek:
*

28

Another vote for Poltergeist. I just watched it the other day on Neflix and it’s still plenty scary. Skip 2 and 3, though–they’re not worth the time (and much gorier).

My favorite cheesy horror film (it will be hard to find, I think, and it is really cheesy) is The Manitou. Graham Masterton is a very good but extremely gory horror writer. This movie is gory but since it was made in the '70s it’s not too scary.

I’ll vote for *The Sixth Sense *and Silence of the Lambs, too. Both very good films, more suspenseful than gory. The Ring, too.

Some of the old Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee films from the 60s/70s are good too, if you like oldies.

*The Blair Witch Project *is creepy, though I think it’s one of those films that you either really like or can’t stand.

Oh! You’ll have to find them on DVD, probably, but the Stephen King TV miniseries It, Rose Red, and *The Langoliers *are all spooky and cool. *It *suffers from kind of a bad ending, but everything leading up to that is great. *Rose Red *is really cool. I love *The Langoliers *because I’m a fan of one of the actors, but I must admit some of the acting in it is cheesy/wooden, so YMMV.

If you didn’t hate clowns before watching *Poltergeist *and It, you will. :slight_smile:

29

I thought Paranormal Activity was genuinely creepy.

30

Let the Right One In is, in my opinion, not only one of the best vampire movies, it’s one of the best movies ever made. Be sure to watch it with the original Swedish language track with English subtitles turned on. The English dub is terrible and will ruin the experience for you.

31

Ah, the Hammer Horror films! Those were supposed to be gory and perhaps were for their day, but they seem incredibly tame in that regard now.

32

I read King’s book years ago. I also classify horror movies into three main groups, though there’s a lot of cross-over: Slashers, Creepers, and Creatures.

Slashers, as the name implies, rely on blood and/or gore for shock and horror. Usually these films are about human horror, a murderer stalking someone or several someones, something that could theoretically happen in real life. Some good titles in this genre: Inside, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the older one), and Halloween (Carpenter’s original).

Creepers are the great ones, and the hardest to make, because they rely on a strong story and well-executed visuals to create fear. When they fail, they fail miserably. The Blair Witch Project is a Creeper; you hardly see anything frightening, it all happens in your mind. Paranormal Activity is a more recent one. One classic is The Wicker Man, which is even more unusual because most of the action takes place in broad daylight. Yet, the settings and characters create a growing sense of unease.

Creatures could very well be the oldest horror movie form; a Creature is a horror movie that relies upon some unusual animal, or supernatural humanlike animal, as its driving force. Werewolves, vampires, and zombies all fit in here. And with cheap CGI, today we’re treated to a host of absurd movies about ice spiders, genetically-enhanced bats, monstrous snakes, sharktopuses, or whatever. My personal favorite sub-type here is the “Giant Killer Something” movie, such as Eight Legged Freaks, which is fun.

Anyway, to the OP: you kinda have to figure out what scares you, and work toward that type. If you’re afraid of some psycho lurking in a shadowy corner, watch Halloween. If you’re afraid of ghosts, watch Paranormal Activity. If you’re afraid of spiders, but you still want to laugh, watch Arachnophobia or Eight Legged Freaks.

33

Lucky you. The SyFy Channel makes hardly anything else any more. :frowning:

34

If you can find a local video store that carries them, and you probably can, check out some old horror/SF TV shows. I recommend The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits (B&W original only), and, more recent, Tales from the Darkside (the TV series, not the movie). The TZ episodes, in particular, are classics.

Your parents should find these unobjectionable, as all were made for broadcast, when censorship and social standards alike were much stricter than now, with respect to the gore and the grossout (and, of course, the sex). That required the directors and artists to focus on suspense/terror/storytelling. TZ, for instance, practically copyrighted the general approach where a character suddenly finds the familiar world and facts and causality shifting for no immediately apparent reason – generally a rich metaphor, and TZ was only the first to mine that vein, for the future shock of what seemed at the time to be breakneck cultural and technical modernization in the United States in the 1950s and '60s. (The Beverly Hillbillies was a comic take on the same – there were a lot of real-life American yokels who were, again as it seemed at the time, moving up in the world amazingly far and fast, and not really knowing what to be, now.)

35

I would recommend:
Psycho
Fraility
Silence of the Lambs
Def by Temptation
The Wicker Man (1973) This is the original version with Christopher Lee. Accept no substitutes!
The Innocents
Nightmare on Elm Street

36

Ditto on Changeling; one of my favorites.

And I’ll suggest the original Alien. Everyone remembers it as violent, but when you watch it, you’ll see that most of the violence is imagined. And that makes it scary as hell.

37

Generally I would agree with you, but I’ve had arguments with my friends over The Ring in particular. I thought what worked for the US version was the admittedly cliched blue tint on everything. It made the whole movie darker and even daytime scenes looked like it was nearly night. In the Japanese version, there are several scenes that are done with daylight streaming through the windows. To me, that ruins the atmosphere a little. Plus, the Japanese Sadako was very light on the makeup, while the American Samara was made up to look much more decrepit and corpselike. And you cannot discount the creepy looking victims left behind in the US version with the weirdo slimy face. Japanese victims of Sadako looked like a person with his mouth open; it just wasn’t scary enough for me

38

To be fair, Aliens was less a horror flick than an action/horror mash-up, with much more emphasis on the action.

39

These are really great replies, super helpful, thanks guys! A few of these suggestions I will have to wait to watch, but they are still great recommendations. I will keep those ones in mind for later on. A lot of them are movies that I can watch sooner than that, though. For example, my dad, says that The Blair Witch Project, Alien, Shaun Of The Dead, Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, Eight Legged Freaks, The Twilight Zone An American Werewolf In London, Poltergeist, and Lost Boys will probably be okay, among many others. The only ones that I have actually seen out of all of these suggestions are Carrie, Gremlins, and The Mummy, so that’s kind of the viewing audience that I’m thinking. I guess I will be seeing a lot of horror movies this weekend, as well as checking out some horror and horror-related books. :slight_smile:

40

I once saw the French original of La Femme Nikita – and, later, No Way Out with Bridget Fonda. I recommend that or a similar exercise to all Dopers. It seems to be a general rule that the Hollywood take on a story will be . . . more. In this case, more action, more explosions, more sex, etc., but it also applies to The Ring as described above.

I am not here condemning American filmmakers for their vulgar excess. Sometimes more is better.