Friday Open Thread — Halloween Movies Edition
This week, The Daily Beast is featuring the Top 11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time as selected by the total film geek Martin Scorsese. What is cool about this list is that they also provide some clips of each of the movies Scorsese has selected.
So for Halloween, we’ll kick off this Open Thread with a somewhat different focus:
- What are your Top Scariest Horror movies?
- Which of the movies on the Scorsese List have you seen?
- And what do you think Scorsese missed in his list?
We need lots of scary movie choices for the weekend, so give us your list in the comments!
Tags: Movies, Open Thread
Reagan in 2012!!
The wave of public appearances reported by the North Korean propaganda machine since then to show he’s in good health convinces some analysts that North Korean actors are portraying the Dear Leader, too – but in dead seriousness.
“That’s possible,” says Choi Jin-wook, senior fellow and specialist on North Korea at the Korea Institute of National Unification. “These dictators always need look-alikes for security reasons. Kim Jong-il is giving ‘on-the-spot guidance’ too often for his health.”
Mr. Choi also says that North Korean photo editors are likely pasting in old pictures of Kim from previous times when he was in good health.
I don’t see a lot of horror movies, but Dog Soldiers scared the crap out of me.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Tv movie from the 80s. AWESOME if you can get your hands on it.
Well, I just watched all the Halloweentown movies, which had scary elements in them (many of them due to the acting, lol) …but that’s about as far as I like to go.
sary, but not a movie…
FBI: Radical Islamist Group Ruled by Inmate in “Supermax” Jail
The Weekly Standard ^ | October 29, 2009 | John McCormack
From the FBI press release on last night’s Dearborn, MI raid-turned-shootout that left radical Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, aka Christopher Thomas dead:
Abdullah was the leader of part of a group that calls themselves Ummah (“the brotherhood”), a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States. The Ummah is ruled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rapp Brown, who is serving a state sentence in USP Florence, CO, ADMAX, for the murder of two police officers in Georgia.
Interesting to note the active tense used in the release. The use of the phrase “is ruled” should raise an eyebrow or two for those following the debate over where to relocate the terrorists currently housed at Gitmo. Two of the most mentioned locations being considered by the Obama administration are the federal prison in Standish, Michigan and the federal Administrative Maximum (aka “Supermax”) prison in Florence, Colorado. One of the left’s core arguments in the debate rests on the belief that the security provided by such a facility would render Gitmo’s terrorists totally unable to organize and convert fellow prisoners eager to learn from the jihad-masters.
In this case, not only did a domestic Islamic terrorist organization arise from within the walls of our prison system, but the “Supermax” facility currently serves as the headquarters for this radical group.
It appears FBI Director Robert Mueller’s “relevant concerns” about bringing Gitmo’s terrorists to the United States are not so far-fetched after all.
So far as we know, no terror cells are currently being run from inside Guantanamo.
Lizard just totally killed my halloween buzz.
sounds like another awful gang in a prison. Didn’t you ever watch Oz?
How about The Ring. That movie was disturbing. And we always end up watching The Sixth Sense. Do these help your Halloween buzz, V?
Blair Witch Project.
Shining – good. Anything by Hitchcock – great. Masque of the Red Death with Vincent Price (actually, almost anything with Price. Showgirls was so bad it should be considered a horror movie.
As for SuperMax in Florence – there is no communication between prisoners. It is 24/7, 365 solitary confinement. They don’t eat, exercise, or shower with any other prisoners. No uncensored mail. No TV. No radio. Kind of hard to see how any type of terror plot could be coordinated from inside SuperMax, much less serve as a HQ.
One movie I found really scary was Jacob’s Ladder.
Also, Silence of the Lambs when it first came out. There’s been so many copy cats since then though that it lost its punch a little bit.
The people arrested in the cell were in DETROIT not in prison. And he murdered on Sheriff’s Deputy, not two. And this business about criminal enterprises continuing from even the Supermax prisons is not new – major gang leaders are often also said to be able to keep up running the business too. But lock them up we do, and the fact that the system may let criminals do what they do isn’t an argument for not closing Gitmo. It is an argument for fixing these high security prisons.
RICO won’t get any of that because The Weekly Standard didn’t tell him to believe it.
Not in any order . .
Poltergeist
The Shining (Kubrick)
Salem’s Lot (book)
IT (book)
Twilight Zone (original TV show)
Dark Shadows
Silence of the Lambs
Rosemary’s Baby
Night Stalker (TV movie)
Halloween
Night of the Living Dead (original)
House of Leaves (book)
I’m not so much a fan of horror movies because I am not very good at being scared. That said, just like MJ, I love Hitchcock movies — because all of the scary stuff happens in your head. That is quite a feat of storytelling — getting you to scare yourself.
House of Leaves, huh? Talk about your big baggy monster of a book…
ooh not necessarily a traditional horror film but “American Psycho” usually finds it’s way to my dvd player at least once this year. Something about extended commentary about Phil Collins that keeps me up at night.
On a related note, any of you guys been to Bates’ Motel just over the state line? I maintain that it’s THE BEST haunted attraction in the area, and we’ve got a bunch of good ones.
A small, independent film made in the 1970s called Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things which was low-budget (shot primarily with a handheld video camera–I have always wondered if it influenced Blair Witch Project) is without doubt the creepiest and by the end the scariest movie I have ever seen.
As an aside: whoever thought it was a good idea to do a remake of Jack Nicholson in the The Shining deserves impalement.
There’s a Shining remake?
Yeah, Cassandra, it was done as a made-for-TV atrocity with (I think) Stephen Weber playing the Jack Nicholson role. Watching it was so painful that whoever produced it should have by tried for a war crime, except that the Hague cannot impose the death penalty.
I like Nem’s list… it’s like “portrait of a era” Poltergeist 1982 The Shining (Kubrick) 1980 Salem’s Lot (book) 1975 IT (book) 1986 Twilight Zone (original TV show) 1959-1964 Dark Shadows 1966-1971 Silence of the Lambs 1991 Rosemary’s Baby 1968 Night Stalker (TV movie) 1972 Halloween 1978 Night of the Living Dead (original) 1968 House of Leaves (book) 2000
It reminds me of how long I’ve been completely out of the flow of popular culture. 😀
“As an aside: whoever thought it was a good idea to do a remake of Jack Nicholson in the The Shining deserves impalement.”
It was Stephen King’s idea. You know, the guy who wrote it. It’s actually a lot more faithful to the book (except he added on the ending). As someone who devoured all of his books as a teenager I kind of like it. I like the original, but consider it a totally different thing than the story it’s based on. They kind of ripped him off and he’s been pretty vocal about it. Kind of like The Running Man (also an awesome movie, also nothing like the SK story it’s based on).
I like Brooke’s assessment of Nemski’s list. I could be wrong, but I think that’s the nicest way I’ve seen someone called “old” in quite a while. And what is “IT”? The story of a deranged, rogue help desk guy? “It’s time you got rebooted! Bwha ha ha ha!” Scary.
Hey, I wouldn’t recognize the era if I didn’t share it. Who you callin’ old, sonny?
Pet Semetary wasn’t overall scary, but there is a string of scenes in there that had my heart beating.
Carrie scared the shit out of me, as did Salem’s Lot. Carries hand at the end freaked me out as a kid.
Blair Witch was pretty good.
As a kid, I used to watch Creature Double Feature every Saturday afternoon on channel 48. There was movie on there called Equinox that I called my favorite horror movie for about 10 years.
The Sixth Sense still give me chills.
Trailer Park of Terror
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892109/
Not too scary, but funny. The soundtrack is hilarious.
Grandmom took me to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” when I was 6. She said she thought it was a nice movie about pretty birdies. I haven’t been the same since. I still remember the birds nailing what’s her name in a phone booth.
Not scary at all, but hilarious to watch in a group? the Creepshow movies. There were a requirement at my high school gatherings.
It This was the last Stephen King book I read and I didn’t finish this one.
Did not see any of the King movies except for the Kubrick Shining, which I thought was pretty brilliant even if it wasn’t so faithful to the book. But I’m not one to demand faithfulness to a book once a film version appears. They are two different ways to tell a story and need to stand on their own. But I don’t go out of my way to see film adaptations of books I really like.
But I cannot begin to fathom how King could feel ripped off by the Kubrick version of The Shining…
King’s Pet Cemetery (the book) was completely riveting as was Cujo. Perhaps my favorite King book is The Stand.
9 months late and less than 1% complete:
Obama names 110 White House visitors
MSNBC ^ | October 30, 2009 | Bill Dedman
The White House on Friday released a small list of visitors to the White House since President Barack Obama took office in January, including lobbyists, business executives, activists and celebrities.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33556933/ns/politics-white_house/
more hope, change and transparency
I, too, was an avid King reader in high school. Here was my beef about the movie The Shining: In the book you had no idea that Jack Nicholson’s character was the bad guy. In fact, through the entire book, he was the reader’s hero. So when the movie trailers first came out, my only thought was that they gave away the ending. It would have been like knowing Bruce Willis, Sixth Sense, was dead before you went to see the movie.
For all the gore in King movies, his writing is far more creepy.