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I'm more a fan of psychological horror than hack-and-slash flicks. Hitchcockian suspense gets my interest far more than your serial killers, Mike Myers, Leatherface, and what have you. (Besides...too much on-screen gore, and my mind automatically starts trying to figure out how many gallons of Karo corn syrup were used in the scenes that made it to the screen.)
- Alien — which, despite being found in the science fiction section of most DVD sites and classification systems, was most decidedly a gothic horror film. Had you on the edge of your seat the whole time, wondering where the big bad was, what it looked like, and (most important to ailurophiles) would the cat survive.
- Poltergeist II — the most chilling and menacing of all three, IMHO, largely because of the actor cast as the main antagonist. He really did an amazing job embodying the megalomaniacal preacher determined to hold on to life and power at all costs...and to use any tool at hand to do so. Whenever I watch that movie, I have to leave the lights on for a week.
- The Shining — Jack Nicholson's version, not the Steven Webber remake...which was okay, but not as emotionally wringing.
- House on Haunted Hill
- Rose Red — uneven pacing, but pretty chilling. Though since I grew up in the shadow of the infamous Winchester Mystery House, some of the mystique of the house itself was kind of...sapped.
- Army of Darkness — technically, this and its two prequels Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 are parodies. That aside...I love AoD. Love, love, love. (Though a horror purist would argue that I'm missing more than half of the jokes because I'm not familiar with all the tropes of the genre. Eh, well...that's that.)
- The Bone Collector — could be either horror, or detective thriller; though for my purposes
- Wes Craven's New Nightmare — I've watched two of the other Nightmare films, and they're okay. This one, though, this one pokes fun at the series, at the cult following, and examines the mythical forces and triggers behind any horror figure, including how it shapes and is shaped by us.
- The Happening — one could argue that any of M. Night Shyamalan's movies either are horror, or none of them are. I think that this one is. There's plenty of stuff going on around us that we simply can't explain...and the theory behind what caused the happening is valid, it has happened (though not quite in this way), it could conceivably happen. Which is kind of creepy...to realize that we do share the planet with more intelligences than we realize.
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