A blog by Cameron and Shannon

Alright, here’s the deal. One of our friends (one Ray Hancock) posted a MySpace blog entry asking for everyone’s top 10 scary movies. (His original list can be found here, if MySpace will let you look at it without being ‘friends’ with him.)

Naturally, Shannon commented with her favorites, and I was motivated to respond in kind. Shannon’s list is pretty dang solid, and hopefully she will post it here. I did my best to make mine without overlapping hers or Ray’s so it’s not comprehensive, but these are 10 scary movies that you should make every attempt to see sometime (especially, during, you know, Halloween).

1. The Shining

This is, to date, the scariest all-around movie that I have ever seen. (I mean the Kubrick version, not that other one that floats around at Blockbuster.) However, I assume you’ve probably seen it, so let’s keep moving to #2:

2. Event Horizon

This movie is about an abandoned space station and a dimensional portal to hell. Oh, and it stars Lawrence “Grand-Canyon-Tooth-Gap” Fishburne. That should be enough motivation to watch it right there.

3. Mindwarp

I saw this about a month ago, thanks to the fabulous FearNet On Demand service. It stars Bruce Campbell, set in a post-apocalyptic future where people either live in virtual-reality machines with plugs in the back of their necks (keep in mind, this is 10 years before The Matrix) or out in a radioactive desert with cannibal mutants. It’s low-budget (in the sense that you can tell which scenes they spent money on) but it’s gleefully ridiculous, with a couple of downright scary scenes. Anyway, your mind was totally made up as soon as I said “Bruce Campbell”. Right?

4. The Thing (1982 version)

My all-time favorite use of fake tendons. I can’t say enough about this movie, so I won’t say too much, other than that the special effects in this movie are the only argument the movie industry needs against computer-generated effects. There are two absolutely unforgettable scenes in this movie, and the rest isn’t too shabby either.

5. Eraserhead / Blue Velvet / Mulholland Drive

See any of these 3 David Lynch movies to be creeped right the heck out. Mulholland Drive contains the one scariest movie scene I have ever experienced. Blue Velvet is the easiest to process (and one of my favorite movies of all time), but is also arguably the most disturbing; Eraserhead is an amazing film (in my humble opinion, only millimeters behind Blue Velvet), but is particularly taxing for the viewer. Bottom line: just be prepared for what you’re getting into; David Lynch is never messing around, man.

6. Evil Dead 2

I am positing that due to its exaggerated bizarrity, Evil Dead 2 is scarier than Evil Dead 1. That’s how it worked for me, anyway. The entire trilogy (well, it’s kind of a trilogy) is essential watching. The first two are terrifying and the third is just good, awesome fun.

7. Alien

Movies don’t get much more hard on the nerves than the first Alien movie, with the lights out.

8. Creepshow

The perfect Halloween party movie: a bunch of short scary flicks, all not super-scary, a little silly, a little 1980-style gory, and just the right amount of bizarre. Good fun for all.

9. The Wizard Of Oz

I find this movie all kinds of scary. Could be just me. Ever since my early childhood, I have considered every aspect of this film to be either creepy or downright terrifying.

10. Grindhouse

If you haven’t seen Grindhouse, watch Grindhouse. I absolutely loved the theater experience for this, and if you didn’t see it in the theater, I am really sorry you missed it. They’ve split the two movies up separately - try to get the full back-to-back combo and watch it, complete with the fake trailers and all that good stuff. The whole experience is around three hours, but both movies make more sense when combined like Rodriguez and Tarantino originally intended. Definitely the most depressingly underrated movie event of the last few years.

However, in the process of writing this post, two more important films have come to me:

BONUS #1: The Gate

I have only seen the last 2/3s of this movie, but holy cow was that a scary 45 minutes. It’s about a kid who opens up a portal to hell (or some such) in his own back yard. There are things that happen in this movie that would have terrified me as a child. The kid’s house gets invaded; his parents turn evil; everything you could be afraid of as a child happens. Everything. I fully intend to watch this one from the top sometime soon.

BONUS #2: Brainscan

This is a movie about a killer video game. If you know anything about me, you should probably know that if a movie involves a video game, I will watch it, and doubly so if said game manages to kill people in some nefarious and completely illogical way. This film stars Edward Furlong as Edward Furlong, and T. Ryder Smith as The Trickster, who looks kind of like Hellraiser’s Pinhead back in his clubbing days. It also features 2 or 3 twist endings, and the whole thing basically takes place in the same cul-de-sac.

Alright, now I’m done. I hope you enjoyed this list (even though I was too lazy to take the time to put pictures on it) and pop a couple of these into slot 142 on your Netflix queue.

Happy Halloween!