BOO! Did I scare ya?

I think that in keeping with my semi-occasional Halloween themes, I'd really like to delve into the world of Horror Movies. I am a huge horror flick fan and I will watch anything and everything I can in the genre and, up to this point, I really have. I love Slasher, I love Hillbilly Gore, I love Gothic Hammer Classics, I love Torture Porn... I love it all. And, the bloodier the better, in my opinion. Alas, it takes so much lately from a given film to really bother or gross me out, and most often flicks fall short with their attempts. I can take a lot when it comes to graphic blood baths and I can stomach nearly everything without cringing or turning away. But, it wasn't always like this, oh no. I recall back in the mid-eighties when I was just a little wussy baby who couldn't glimpse a horror movie scene without conjuring up terrifying thoughts of my own life in dire peril. I forget the year exactly, maybe 1986, when I found myself at a sleep-over at my buddy Kerry Frieben's house. Now we used to while away the night hours kissing and cajoling each other... no, I'm just kidding, we never cajoled. But we did watch a slew of movies each time I was over there and horror selections were sometimes on the menu. Generally I would just ignore them and find something else to occupy my time, but, somehow, this time turned out to be vastly different. Kerry had rented A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2 and was bound and determined to get me to watch it. I told him I wasn't going to sit through a mess like this and spend the night in the basement on some ancient couch. He insisted yet again and said that it wasn't going to be that bad and that I should buck up and take it like a man. I told him that instead I'd like to go in the other room and toss darts into my own eyes because it just wasn't going to happen. Well, next came the selling point: Kerry informed me that if I did anything other than watch the damn movie with him he was going to thump me on my balls. Now any open threat to the boys is not to be taken lightly, and so I whimpered, shed a few tears for my soon-to-be-lost innocence, and hunkered down to what was sure to be an evening filled with agony and fear. Instead, what I came away with was a new love for a sometimes misunderstood movie type. Freddy 2 was absolutely what my life was missing at that time. I was so brainwashed with cheesy cinema that I was longing for something I had no idea I desired. Even though I've seen the movie a hundred times since, I can still remember those scenes as though it were still that night: Freddy peeling back his scalp and announcing that he was to be the brains of the operation between he and his victim, a gym instructor getting razzed to ribbons in the locker room shower... just so many more. Ever since that moment I have been a fan for life. So now, I present to you, my TOP TEN FAVORITE HORROR FLICKS OF ALL TIME!!!!! YEAH! 10) WRONG TURN TWO - Yes, yes, the acting is just atrocious but the story is solid and fits nicely into the real world. Hillbilly Horror reigns supreme here and really does a nice job of getting under your skin just a smidge. Plus, who can deny the chops of one Henry Rollins and a full body cleaving out of the gate? No one, that's who. 9) RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD - Linnea Quiggly flashing the goods atop a sarcophagus? A zombie oozing with 'tar' from a toxic chemical barrel? Punks getting slaughtered? A zombie calling for more paramedics on an ambulance radio? Yes and YES! Awesome stuff. 8) TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD - Spanish countryside overflowing with blind spirits bent on revenge for their own deaths wrongly served hundreds of years ago riding on silent horses slaughtering all in their wake. It's dark, it's pulsating, and it feels so real! Great stuff! 7) HELLRAISER II - Yes, the original brought us all into the hell that is exclusively owned by Pinhead and his Cenobites, but it was the sequel that really dug deeper into the history of the legacy. Blood upon blood and such a slick bastard in the dark one, Pinhead, for sure! 6) PET SEMATARY - Stephen King's movies tend to be really hit or miss, but back in the late eighties during the rise of the slasher craze, along comes this little number full of living dead kids and wives reborn through the evil magic of an animal burial ground. Watching little Gage slash out a man's Achilles tendons is something to behold long before torture horror made it mainstream. 5) POLTERGEIST - Something about haunted house flicks based however loosely on real life events really gnaws at my psyche. Watching this poor family slowly slip into insanity all because their home is possessed by a demon is really something to watch. A tree branch smashing into a child's bedroom and grabbing him! A guy peeling his face off in a bathroom mirror! Carol Anne saved from ghost in a television! HELL YEAH! 4) THE RING - I truly found this movie to be awsomely disturbing on so many levels. The simple fact that a movie, passed along unwittingly, can kill just from being watched seemed so intriguing at the time. The image of Naomi Watts plucking a fly from what was supposed to be a film reel and the thought that movies hold images that no one can ever really see is just so cool. And, just before the wet/long haired Japanese scare influence ran rampant, this one did it best. 3) THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (ORIGINAL) - This movie is so Grindhouse, so grainy, so rusty, and so damn classic that it should be a staple in everyones must-see list. It looks as though it was filmed through a movie projector from a junior high school and it feels so raw and stomach churning. Tobe Hooper is a master at his craft and this movie shows it stunningly. 2) IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS - Though not a classic gory horror by any means, Carpenter's masterpiece more than makes up for what it lacks in pure psychological mayhem. Loosely based on how one might see through a horror master (Stephen King's) eyes, a man named Sutter Kaine draws an agent to his town and sucks him into his twisted life. Nothing is ever as it seems and is always completely messed up. Great film. 1) A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET II - I have to go with the one that started it all for me here. We all know who Freddy Kruger is, so I have no need to explain. But I will say that I do like this one the best out of the series hands down. And there ya go. I think I may do another one of these since I thought of easily ten more... who knows. Stew