Oct 30, 2009

Scorsese's top horror movies

MARTIN SCORSESE HAS chosen his favorite horror movies for the Daily Beast. The list has a distinct case of the cobwebs and lace curtains. There's a couple of haunted house pics, The Changeling and Robert Wise's The Haunting (“You may not believe in ghosts but you cannot deny terror!”), a couple of hoary English classics, Dead of the Night and The Uninvited ("the tone is very delicate, and the sense of fear is woven into the setting, the gentility of the characters"), Val Newton's fusty Isle Of The Dead, Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, Jacques Tourneur's Night Of The Demon, the Barbara Hershey sex-possession pic The Entity, plus Kubrick's The Shining, Friedkin's The Exorcist and Hitchcock's Psycho. The British pics and haunted house stuff don't do it for me; readers of this blog will know I can be a little heartless when it comes to old horror movies. I would have included Halloween, the purest fright-machine I know, The Sixth Sense or Jacob's Ladder for their emotional punch, The Brood, which is my favorite Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen and Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. No horror movie from before 1967, anyway. I can't be scared by stuff made before I was born. I can try but it just doesn't work. Same with comedy.

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