[QUOTE=Quartz]
Schindler’s List. I missed the start, but had to turn over after at most 5 minutes.
[/QUOTE]
Really? You must have missed about half of the movie because nobody gets killed on screen until about half way in and that crazy woman was yelling at the Nazis, telling them that they built the concentration camp wrong.
[QUOTE=astro]
…
[“A.I.”] was so calculatingly manipulative I lost [a] lot of respect for Steven Spielberg after that.
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I know what you mean, but it still floored me. I loved it and hated it all at once. I’d never had quite that reaction to a film, before or since, but it really had a powerful effect on me.
The John Malkovitch character in the Secret Service drama *In the Line of Fire * is seriously twisted. His scenes with Clint Eastwood, just talking on the phone, are masterfully creepy and manipulative. He plays upon Eastwood’s sense of guilt and responsibility and self-loathing and regret like an evil psychologist.
[QUOTE=Smid]
When did they start appending “Porn” onto genre descriptions?
I noticed it appearing when they started calling some horrors “Torture porn”… Hey, why all of a sudden sexualise a genre which has been (trying to, but failing in my case) scare us for years…
[/QUOTE]
In simple terms, “horror” is intended to horrify the audience. In many (though certainly not all) classics of the genre, this is done largely through suspense and power of suggestion. “Torture porn” has nothing specifically to do with sex (unless we want to start getting all Freudian), but is labeled as such because it’s primary appeal is allegedly that it uses graphic imagery of torture to appeal to its audience’s prurient interests, much as true porn uses graphic imagery of sexual acts.
No, it too lable something that a person doesn’t like and wishes to censor with something that is already censored.
People who didn’t think Saw 3 should be in theatres used ‘torture porn’ as an attempt to get the film banned, or at least demean the people who wanted to see the movie.
[QUOTE=shy guy]
I just watched the movie this weekend and completely agree. His character made me squirm whenever I saw him, even though it’s difficult to put my finger on exactly why.
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I still haven’t decided if his understated creepiness was in the script or he added it, either way its a great step out from his brothers shadow. I don’t blame Jesse’s wife for not liking him, I wouldn’t leave my girlfriend alone with him either.
David Edelstein is given credit for coining or at least popularizing the term. I’m not aware that he has called for banning or censoring anything.
[QUOTE=Zebra]
No, it too lable something that a person doesn’t like and wishes to censor with something that is already censored.
People who didn’t think Saw 3 should be in theatres used ‘torture porn’ as an attempt to get the film banned, or at least demean the people who wanted to see the movie.
[/QUOTE]
It could be used as shorthand to describe something in the “if you enjoy x, you’ll really get off on this!” That’s the way I’ve mostly heard it used, and the way I intended it above.
[QUOTE=Freudian Slit]
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover…just disturbing how manipulative and controlling abusers can be. Plus…cannibalism.
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That was going to be my vote. It’s a beautifully filmed movie, but it’s deeply disturbing. The whole movie is suppose to be an allegory for Thatcherism.
My other vote might go to the movie “The Astronauts Wife” – that movie was messed up. LOL
[QUOTE=thelurkinghorror]
Frailty
[/QUOTE]
GOOD movie.
I don’t like dark comedies, so I was very much put out that “Serial Mom” was promoted as a light-hearted film. Same with “War of the Roses.”
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
I don’t know the other film you mentioned, but I’d always thought of Clockwork Orange as a horror film. A psychological horror film, but still horror.
[/QUOTE]
Really? Because imdb lists it as Crime / Drama / Thriller.
I think they should create a “Creepy” genre, creepy movies seem to be my favorites.
A lot of Kubrick’s stuff is creepy.
Full Metal Jacket had a pretty creepy vibe. Especially the basic training segment.
For me it has to be The Others
When Nicole Kidman realised she was dead and so were the kids and servants.
Fuck!
[QUOTE=LateComer]
As for Tideland and Pan’s Labyrinth, As a film study I’d recommend watching them back to back to see two very different treatments of almost identical themes: young, innocent girl living in a bad situation falls deeply into a fantasy world (in an Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz way) to escape the real horror of their lives.
[/QUOTE]
Capitan Vila was a genuinely terrifying villain, because you felt that he was literally capable of anything in pursuit of what he felt was right: he wasn’t just some Disney evil step-father who locked his step-daughter in the attic and made her dress in rags; after the torture scenes I was genuinely afraid for the girl whenever he was onscreen with her - was he going to beat her, maim her, disfigure her, rape her? He seemed capable of any atrocity in his dapper, cold-blooded way, and you never knew what he was going to do next. Truly a chilling performance, helped by the fact that the actor looked a lot like a young DeNiro.
[QUOTE=chowder]
For me it has to be The Others
When Nicole Kidman realised she was dead and so were the kids and servants.
Fuck!
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but I think that counts as “horror”, or at least, “suspenseful and supernatural.”
I nominate The Miracle of Marcelino. God, I still curse my fifth/sixth grade teacher for inflicting that on us.
[QUOTE=elfkin477]
Yeah, Tideland is disturbing.
You know what else was unexpectedly creepy? *Really * unexpectedly? Jumanji. It’s different in tone than any other kids’ movie (besides the Secret of NIHM) I’ve ever seen. Anticipatory dread just isn’t common to films made with children in mind, and it accomplished it better than several horror movies I can think of off the top of my head.
[/QUOTE]
Been a while, but Jumanji stuck in my memory. Good movie! Another “kids” movie that is quite frightening is Watership Down.
Does Haneke’s Funny Games count or is it considered horror proper? - Either way it is definitely one of the more disturbing films I have seen.
Haneke’s compatriot Ulrich Seidl makes the creepiest documentaries I have ever seen - nothing unnatural about them, but the people he cast are just … creepy. Especially in Animal Love - a documentary about people and their pets. After having seen the film Werner Herzog said: “Never have I looked so directly into hell”. Creepy as.
[QUOTE=KneadToKnow]
It could be used as shorthand to describe something in the “if you enjoy x, you’ll really get off on this!” That’s the way I’ve mostly heard it used, and the way I intended it above.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve heard it used more by people who oppose the genre…
I like horror movies. I like it best if they have actually disturbed or scared me. That is their point. It was their point when I first started watching them in late 70’s and was their point with the recent rise of what they call “torture porn”.
However, in between these there was 20 years of bad bad “horror” movies which seemed to be an excuse for cartoonised unkillable villians with cliches galore, ie:
*The music is building up to someone opening door? It stops. Silence. Nothings there.
1.2.3.4.5 NOW THE HORRIBLE THING HAPPENS*
I was bored when Freddy stuck spikes through teenagers. I felt sleepy when Jason wore a mask and chopped people up in inventive ways which perhaps only a professional butcher might appreciate…
I do however, object to the recent trend this labelling of effective and scary horror movies in a way which makes out people are sexualising them.
If anything, I’d say most 80’s and 90’s horror films should be called cartoon horror…
A classic moment of real disturbance is the moment in what someone has labelled “Torture Porn” was in Wolf Creek, and it is associated with the phrase “Head on a stick”… It still gives me the shivers two years after I watched the movie…
In whose list? Just because somebody compiling a listsays that “Eraserhead” is “Horror” doesn’t make it so. I seriously doubt if Lynch thought of it as horror. It’s an art film, albeit really weird art. It certainly doesn’t have the trappings or the philosophy of a horror film.
Elephant by Alan Clarke a docudrama showing terrorist murders in Northern Ireland,theres no story and virtually no dialogue,it is by turns chilling,sickening and then incredibly desensitizing .
Violent death becomes banal.
My other candidate is Angelheart which every time I’ve seem it manages to creep me out even when there is nothing overtly happening.
[QUOTE=Zebra]
Really? You must have missed about half of the movie because nobody gets killed on screen until about half way in and that crazy woman was yelling at the Nazis, telling them that they built the concentration camp wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Um, the cleansing of the ghetto and the shooting of the old one armed man who couldn’t shovel? Didn’t those happen on screen?
Is *AngelHeart * considered horror? Because I spent the last bit of the movie, as Robert de Niro explains all to Mickey Rourke, hiding behind a pillow and whimpering.