ok, kids... Horror movies.
Hard to go wrong with a good old fashioned Zombie movie. Night of The Living Dead is a good place to start, but if you hate black-and-white, rent/download/buy/steal the 1990 remake. It's out there on torrents.

Anyone have any favorites?

Last week I went to the theatre to see Romeros newest 'Survival of the Dead'. It was pretty cool.

I love the classics, but as far as more recent movies go I'd have to say I enjoyed 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devils Rejects.

The last one that I saw that I liked, well, I'm not sure if it's classified as horror, but I can understand how it could be horror, was "Knowing". I know it scared the crap out of me.

Then there was "Drag Me To Hell" which was interesting, a little stupid, but interesting.

There's very few current ones that I'm actually interested in, about all I'm interested in seeing lately is "Zombieland" as far as horror movies go. The rest are just gorefest lameass attempts at shock horror.

I can honestly say that I hate the way current horror movies are going, they're too predicable and they go over the top with the gore. I actually tried to sit down and watch one of those dumb "Final Destination" movies a while back, all I could ask was how can people watch this stuff as I turned the channel.

I didn't know Romero was still making movies. I saw "Diary of the Dead" earlier this year, I'll have to go find that one.

Shael

Reptilicus and the original War of the Worlds! Used to watch these all the time on Sci Fi when I was a wee one. And anything on MST3K.

Posted by Shael I didn't know Romero was still making movies. I saw "Diary of the Dead" earlier this year, I'll have to go find that one. Shael

Romero is still putting them out... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1134854/
I read he has one coming in 2010 call 'The Crazies'

Posted by Match Girl Last week I went to the theatre to see Romeros newest 'Survival of the Dead'. It was pretty cool.

I saw this at the Toronto Film Fest... by what standard could it be considered cool? It was terrible, even by the usual bad Romero standards.

Posted by yokes I saw this at the Toronto Film Fest... by what standard could it be considered cool? It was terrible, even by the usual bad Romero standards.

Depends on what you like I guess... I've always been partial to Romero movies, but I know they're not for everyone.

Post by Match Girl..The Devils Rejects.

.....Now that was one strange flick..."Why don't you like clowns?"

I think you should have named this thread, "Horror Movies prior to CGA"

Some thougts on remakes:

The remakes of Night and Dawn of the Living Dead - good & great, respectively

The remake of Friday the 13th was great

The remake of Halloween I was pretty good

The remake of Last House on the Left was bad. Microwaves don't run when the door is open! Still that kill made me lol

One of my all time faves, The Thing, is being remade. Only god knows if it'll be any good. Here's hoping....

And from the Alien series 1, 2 and 4 rule.

horror movies to me are scarier when you DON'T see the monster/ghost/malevolent force...
Alien was groundbreaking in that it had elements of science fiction (without being a Star Wars ripoff [it was 1979 keep in mind), but wasn't the centerpiece. It was a crew of workers on the job being stalked by a bad monster with an agenda. The horror aspect lay in the fact that you never really got a good look at the monster... just quick flashes, blurry movements, but the crewmen kept getting eaten left and right.

What made "The Thing" a horror movie was again, not so much the monster itself, but the fact that you didn't know who was the monster. It was inside the people. That paranoia is so huge an element to the sheer claustrophobic horror of The Thing that it would not have worked without it. But again, compare The Thing to Alien and you have that same setup... workers/crewman, claustrophobic environments inside a hostile environment, no place to run, no place to hide...

Then you jump ship to other aspects of horror like "The Blair Witch Project". If just watched knowing that it was a movie, ok, not so scary, although the last 15 minutes of the movie felt like I was the one being chased through the woods. When I first saw it, I was generally uncomfortable. Not because of what I was seeing, but because of what i [b]wasn't[/b] seeing. Anyone that has ever lived or grown up in a rural, wooded area knows that immediate terror of getting lost in the woods, even if just losing your bearings for a few minutes. It's pure terror. Add a supernatural force into that, man, you've got a recipe for brown trousers.

Another film that I thought was pretty frightening, and refuse to watch in the dark was the Michael Keaton film "White Noise". Again, if taken on face value, not a very scary film, but it's the audio tapes that provide the scary bits... i found that my mind was filling in the bits in the movie and towards the end, I was genuinely uncomfortable. It was what I was hearing, not what I was seeing.

Horror movies (and I use that term generally) have changed greatly over the past ten or fifteen years. I feel that they have been dumbed down. The viewer no longer has any responsibility to be frightened. The psychological aspect of the fear has been replaced with catering to the minds' inability to cope with gore and images of carnage. I feel that the two are not the same effects.

Take for example, the movie "Event Horizon". This was the first movie that tried to do both and although it was a good movie, it ended up just pummeling the audience with too much. It had the psychological elements of a haunted house, the science fiction element of being in space, the claustrophic element of being in a ship, and the gore of what would come later. It was too much all at once.

Later movies like Hostel, Saw, Touristas, The Descent all played on the gore factor... One thing that I did like about The Descent was the ending... it was a nice twist on the fact that not everything turns okey dokey, insuring a sequel.

eh, this is an overlong comment, no?

Sam, very much agreed. Another thing I really liked about the Descent was that it took it's time developing the mood so when you first see the creatures, it really makes an impact. I also liked how when you saw them a lot of the time it was just through the camera screen, which I think helped. Another part that was well done was the feeling of claustrophobia especially when the one girl was stuck in the narrow tunnel. Did you see the alternate ending where she never really makes it out of the cave? I thought that one was fantastic.

Alien and Aliens are one of my favorite movies. Another thing I liked about the first one was the design of the alien. It looked nothing like any alien we've seen in previous horror movies and since the creature was so elaborate and made with so much detail, it was that much harder for our mind to piece together it's image with the few chances we had.

I've always found supernatural thrillers to be the most terrifying (when they're made right) because there isn't much else that's more frightening than the unknown. Kinda like Alien in the sense that no one has any idea what they're dealing with, but spooky shit keeps happening.

The main reason I thought the Blair Witch Project was so effective is because of the way they filmed it. The director purposely withheld the vast majority of what he wanted done and basically told the actors to get a camera and go out in the woods. From there they received a series of instructions from time to time telling them where to go from there, but not much else. The fear they expressed was REAL.

White Noise didn't do much for me. I actually thought 1408 was scarier in the sense that it was more of a mindfuck. In the beginning we're skeptical of what people keep telling him about the room along with the main character, but when things get spooky, it becomes hard to tell whether the house is really some vortex of evil or if he's just completely mad. (One reason why I enjoyed reading The House of Leaves) The supernatural part comes when he believes he sees his daughter, who upon contact crumbles to ash. This we think is just another figment of his imagination... until the cassette is reviewed at the end of the movie.

Anything by Fulci is worth its weight in gold.
City of the Living Dead and The Beyond are a couple of my favs.

Sam, now you sort of understand why I thought "Knowing" was scary.

It's a supernatural thriller type thing, the story starts with this girl, who in the 50's began writing a series of numbers on a piece of paper, while the other kids in her class were drawing pictures to be put into a time capsule in the corner stone of the school. She's given dates, coordinates and times of just about every natural disaster, plane crash and horrible loss of life incident in the world for the next 50 or 60 years, 9-11, among other incidents, like the tidal wave, etc. Everyone thinks she's nuts, she even goes so far as to scratch numbers into a wooden door with her fingernails and move to a set of coordinates that she's given in the middle of nowhere.

A little boy gets this paper when the time capsule's opened and odd things start happening, he begins seeing and hearing the same things this girl saw, eventually they find out something even worse is coming than just plane crashes...and I'll stop there, don't want to spoil it. What scared me is what if someone knew, what if you could or did know when things were going to happen or lives were going to end and maybe you could stop it? What if you knew when the world was going to end and how, what would you do? I think what bothered me most is that the answers were in front of them all the time, not just in the numbers, but in what was happening and what had been happening for weeks, months and years, but no one was paying any attention.

It was more the way the movie was made than anything though. The story sounds silly, but if you see the movie, it's different, completely different and one of those movies that makes you uncomfortable when you watch it, but you can't stop watching because you want to see what happens next, mostly because of the way it was done, at least that's the way I felt about it.

Shael

the upcoming The Crazies is a remake of a Romero film from the early 70's.

my faves are of course the cliched answers of The Shining, The Exorcist, The Thing, Poltergeist, Halloween...but i also love The Descent, A Tale of Two Sisters, 28 Days Later, The Fog....

i consider The Exorcist III: Legion to be an underrated film as well.