Just as every kid’s quest is to find the house with the best candy, every film buff needs the perfect horror film to watch on Halloween. Good horror movies come in many packages, but the greatest ones are subtle, suspenseful and play on our everyday fears. Just as important as knowing what makes a good horror movie is being able to identify a bad one. So without further ado, here’s a list of three great horror films and three that miss the mark:

Three Great Horror Films

1. ‘Psycho’ (1960) — Skip the 1998 shot-by-shot remake and head for the original instead. Five decades later, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic hasn’t lost its power to make audiences scream. Its most iconic moment: the shower scene. This scene still delivers goose bumps because of its hyper-fast cuts and shrieking musical scores. Try showering home alone again after watching this — it won’t be easy.

2. ‘The Shining’ (1980) — The master of every genre, only Stanley Kubrick could turn a seemingly simple ghost story about an isolated writer going mad into something so frighteningly complex. It’s not just the axes and the blood that are scary, but the eerie musical score and chilling tracking shots. Twenty years after the release of ‘Psycho,’ ‘The Shining’ raised the horror bar to a new level. This time, audiences weren’t so much afraid of getting stabbed in a motel shower by Anthony Perkins, but of being axed in the face in a hotel bathroom by Jack Nicholson.

3. ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968) — At first, this story of a young couple settling into married life in Manhattan doesn’t scream horror. However, poor Rosemary may be the mother of Satan’s spawn. This is a horror film of sporadic dread, one in which fear and paranoia continually haunt the viewer. The final outcome of the film is both horrifying and devastating, but the most shocking part about Roman Polanski’s masterpiece is that the ending is actually moving.

Two Overrated Horror ‘Classics’ and a New Edition to Horror’s Worst

1. ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999) — ‘The Blair Witch Project’ defied all expectations by breaking $100 million at the box office on a budget of less than $1 million. With its shaky camera moves and it-could-be-true backstory, it became a generation-defining horror film. ‘Blair Witch’ attempts — and fails — to scare with cameras bouncing back and forth with the accompanying scream: ‘I’m so scared!’ Maybe what we don’t see is scarier than what we do see. But it’s impossible to be scared of the unknown if we have no idea what we are not supposed to see.

2. ‘The Exorcist’ (1973) — This entry might seem like blasphemy to most die-hard horror fans. A mainstream success in the gore-horror genre, ‘The Exorcist’ proves that people tend to forget that gross-out moments aren’t enough to make a great horror movie. Young Regan’s possession is too over-the-top to actually be scary. And almost 40 years worth of sequels and rip-offs haven’t helped, either.

3. ‘Birdemic: Shock and Terror’ (2010) — This attempt to simultaneously remake ‘The Birds’ and raise environmental awareness fails on both grounds. In the flick, all the birds of the world turn against humans because they don’t drive hybrid cars. The birds resemble paper cutouts pasted onto a green screen, and the fact that humans fight them off with clothes hangers makes the movie more hilarious than scary. The film attempted to build up suspense, but showing people driving around empty highways with no cutaways is not suspenseful. The worst offense ‘Birdemic’ commits against good horror movies? It just isn’t scary.

iaphilli@syr.edu  

Published on October 18, 2011 at 12:00 pm