Hey it's me, back from my extensive hiatus which included, starting a new job, a trip to the East Coast and the beginning of the school year. No excuse for 3 months of silence but there it is. Anyway, the fall is my favourite time of year, especially October, so I'm back just in time for a big month long Halloween celebration!
Over the next 31 days I'll be recommending a new horror film every day. Just a few sentences about each but hopefully enough to interest and intrigue you. To make it clear from the get go, this is not a "best" list. Not everything I include will be a classic but all will be of interest, that I promise you. To make it easier on myself I have included no films predating 1960 very few made before 1970. This is not because I don't appreciate the older horror films, on the contrary I love and cherish many of them, it's just that it's going to be hard enough to whittle the list down to 31 films released in the last 40 (!) years.
So, unfortunately no masterpieces of German Expressionism, no Universal Monster Classics, none of the great Hammer Studios productions and none of the Roger Corman Poe films (personal favourites of mine). It pains me to not include these, but it's going to be tough enough without them. Also, let's face it, as great as many of these movies are, how scary are they really?
I just want to reiterate this is no meant to be in any way a comprehensive list of the greatest ever horror movies. It is a completely arbitrary collection of films, broadly categorized as "horror", that I like, or at least find interesting. You will be annoyed by my many omissions, and indeed it was annoying for me to make them, but 31 really isn't as large a number as you think.
So lets begin with a doozy:
"All that blood and violence! I thought you were supposed to be the love generation!"
LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)
Directed by Wes Craven
Almost 40 years later this film is as transgressive and provocative as ever, even if it has lost much of it's shock value. I hesitate to actually "recommend" this movie as it's, to put it bluntly, crude, artless and exploitative. It's also unquestionably powerful. A primal story of rape, murder and revenge, audiences in 1972 must have been completely unprepared for it's unblinking portrayal of violent atrocity and it's uncompromising bleakness. All the fears and resentments of the Vietnam era, those between young and old, the lower and middle classes and conservative and liberal are all fodder for the filmmakers. The horrors of war were being splashed across TV screens nightly so Craven and company wisely asked themselves, "What sort of film would we have to make to get through to a culture so inured to violence and cruelty". Well they came up with one.
I've always been personally ambiguous about the movie, so why am I even writing about it? It's simply one of the most important films of the genre, one that broke new ground in ways both good and bad. Director Craven went on to make a career in horror with slicker, more artful films but never one as brutally effective as this.
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