Best Horror Film of 1986 (part 8 of a series)

The Fly. TCM2 is really a comedy, in my book.

Chopping Mall and Zombie Nightmare are both hilarious and must see, btw.

Demons 2. I'm a creature of habit.

Wow, I missed a lot from this year. Have only seen:

Aliens
April Fool's Day
Crawlspace
Critters
The Fly
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
From Beyond
House
Invaders from Mars
Maximum Overdrive
Night of the Creeps
Poltergeist II: The Other Side
Psycho III
TerrorVision
Vamp

My heart tells me to go for Aliens, my head says The Fly, and my inner 16-year-old is still snickering over the kid getting run over by the steamroller in Maximum Overdrive. Plus, Invaders from Mars has Louise Fletcher being eaten by a giant Mars monster.

Still, gotta go with Aliens.

BTW, if you've never seen TerrorVision, you absolutely must. It's AMAZING. Gerrit Graham, Mary Woronov, Jon Gries, a porn star and an insanely silly monster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxkELa9w2j4

oh man this is much harder than 85

man if aliens qualifies it seems like blue velvet could

Seriously. Aliens has horror elements but its an action movie.

The Fly!

anyhow voted tcm2 but quick shoutout to this -
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guh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RkH1N9VlrY

a lot I haven't seen on here. probably the most obscure/minor thing here that I have seen is Neon Maniacs, mostly cuz it was shot in SF and features a chase scene on a MUNI train. also some very campily costumed radioactive mutants cavorting around the Presidio. pretty shit film though.

Went with the Fly

love some of the titles I haven't seen tho (Killer Workout lol)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K44PqV2Idk

I remember Class of Nuke 'Em High being very entertaining, but (like pretty much every Troma movie that's made its way into one of these polls) nothing that really resembles horror.

I'll have to go hella mainstream and say Aliens or The Fly. I would love for someone on ILX to send me a copy of this wonderful and watchable Texas Chainsaw Massacre II they're such big fans of. The one I watched was one of the worst movies I've ever seen, so I assume I must've seen some chopped and screwed version or something.

thank god for that split second of cutaway to next scene cuz if it had ended w/ implied 'and then this steamroller chases a kid on a bike while this ac/dc song plays' i was totally going to watch maximum overdrive this weekend.

I have fond memories of Class of Nuke 'Em High (radioactive weed that turns jocks into murderous mutants!) but haven't seen it in years. agree that it's horror only in the most nominal sense, it's more like a parody.

Some of the best titles to ever grace VHS boxes came from this year.

Chopping Mall
Class of Nuke 'Em High
Killer Workout
Neon Maniacs
Rawhead Rex
TerrorVision

The Fly is a pretty easy vote.

Poltergeist II represents one of the biggest drops in quality from the original ever.

apparently you've never seen exorcist II

at least poltergeist II has julian beck going for it

watched from beyond recently, some of the fx are kinda cheezy but it has held up pretty well on the whole

man i am trying to figure out if 13 year old me was right about the believers being really good and pretty terrifying - worried i am mixing in some serpent and the rainbow/angel heart
good vibes and confusing myself

13yo you was wrong, the believers is awful

thank god for that split second of cutaway to next scene cuz if it had ended w/ implied 'and then this steamroller chases a kid on a bike while this ac/dc song plays' i was totally going to watch maximum overdrive this weekend.

Yah but that next scene has a really, really annoying Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson) in it, so it's still worth your time.

big budget hollywood garbage, the scariest scene is a household accident in the beginning

xp

Has anyone actually seen "Rawhead Rex?" I've read the Clive Barker story, which had a line that always stuck with me, in which the titular monster kills a little boy: "He was sick down its throat as it bit the top of his head off." If the movie can deliver on that, I'm renting it ASAP.

The Fly is on here but not Blue Velvet, and most people would agree with that. For me, The Fly has the superficial conventions of monster-movie horror--and is of course a remake of an infamously cheesy '50s horror film--but in fact has virtually nothing in the way of actual scare scenes (I can think of one). Blue Velvet has none of the conventions, but Frank Booth's first appearance made my heart pound more than any horror film of the past 35 years, and Frank himself is just about the greatest non-monster monster in any movie ever. They're both great films, but I find it interesting that one is immediately classified as horror, while the other is generally viewed as existing outside the genre.

I thought about including Blue Velvet, but ultimately decided that was a slippery slope. Plus, these polls are limited to 50 selections, so kind of feel I should stay within fairly strict perimeters of the genre.

lynch's films are terrifying but I couldn't in good faith call them horror films

Absolutely understand--the slippery slope is always a problem. By the way, I saw a different House last week, a Japanese horror film from the late '70s that was sheer lunacy. Truthfully, the trailer's better than the film itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN0HVJ5tkIM

I thought I remembered that Killer Workout had an awesome poster & looking around for it, I found that I had confused it w/ Death Spa!

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LZ92yTgKeAQ/SMFocuqn24I/AAAAAAAAEc4/4_K7vz_OIxA/s1600-h/deathspa.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LZ92yTgKeAQ/SMFocuqn24I/AAAAAAAAEc4/4_K7vz_OIxA/s1600-h/deathspa.jpg

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/vhs-videos/2387-1.jpg

omg

zombies gotta keep in shape too eh

Man, I loved House at the time. My cousin and me watched it again and again on video that winter. I'd dread to see it now.

The Fly might be the best film of '86 (never a big Blue Velvet fan).

Rawhead Rex absolutely does NOT live up to Barker's story. it's a wretched film. Barker's concept of a pre-Christian hyper-phallic deity gobbling its way through the British Isles translated into a disjointed series of stalk-and-chomp scenes featuring a hulking, utterly unconvincing man in a suit and mask with glowing red eyes. still, i'd kill for a copy of it on DVD.

no zombies in Death Spa - aka Witch Bitch. just a supremely pissed-off ghost responsible for a number of memorably juicy kills (by blender, flying frozen fish, acid shower, butterfly machine, and exploding tiles and mirrors).

recently revisited Witchboard. it has held up well. TBH, all i remembered about it was Tawny Kitaen's flash of full-frontal nekkidness. which is still there. but it's Kathleen Wilhoite who steals the show as a punked-out psychic. hokey ending disqualifies it from Best of '86 contention.

Raiders of the Living Dead is one of the worst movies of all time.

really like Anguish and Neon Maniacs in spite of their many shortcomings. so it's between The Fly and From Beyond for me. The Fly is far and away the better film. but From Beyond has Barbara Crampton in S&M get-up and Jeffrey Combs sucking out eyeballs. gonna have to sleep on this one.

Nightmare Weekend is the other worst movie of all time. certainly the most incomprehensible.

elsewhere, we have...
Terrence Stamp and Elizabeth Shue squaring off with a super-intelligent chimp (Link);
Tim "Joe Gage" Kincaide overcompensating as a "straight" director by throwing all of the naked virgins in NYC into a tub of alien spooge (Breeders);
Japanese pinku insanity with a mud-slathered rapemonster boning amateur porn filmmakers to death (Entrails of a Virgin);
30-something Brits poorly play-acting as American teens picked off by a mean-spirited slasher (Slaughter High);
Ken Russell's puerile Shelleyan fantasia (Gothic);
the giant safety pin aerobicides of Killer Workout;
and the immortal, if grammatically questionable, tag line, "Please do not disturb Evelyn. She already is." (the ultracampy MMM).

whatta rollercoaster year in horror.

is that Jiri Barta's Pied Piper. freakin' LOVE that one. but it's a real stretch to call it horror.

just noticed Night of the Creeps. goddamnit. a very strong contender.

The Fly might be the best film of '86 (never a big Blue Velvet fan).
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius)

Agreeing with you happens so rarely, it's that much more exciting when it does happen.

from beyond is so sick

This year has a lot of great B-rate fun. House, Night of the Creeps, Witchboard, Critters ... and Invaders from Mars, while overshadowed by TCM2 here, is pretty sweet if only for the spectacle of Oscar-winner Louise Fletcher swallowing a frog whole.

"Rawhead Rex" sucks. One of those terrible monsters with such a stylized toothy mouth that it can't even chew properly in its bite-off-your-head moments. "Maximum Overdrive" is maximum stupid, too, and only worth it for the AC/DC. But some of these other ones, genre straddlers or not, have aged really well: "Aliens" and "The Fly" are both masterpieces.

Better than it could have been: "April Fool's Day." Which suddenly reminds me that when I was little, I used to go to this sort of Amish market. The market had this fly by night bookseller that used to sell paperbacks with the covers ripped off, something like 5 for a dollar. Ten-year old or so me was really into buying, for no good reasons, novelizations of horror flicks, which means that of this batch I have read, no joke, the novelizations of "April Fool's Day," "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives," "Aliens" and "Poltergeist II." And no, the books are not better than the movies.

Hey, just noticed "Vamp" in this list. Grace Jones!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfVewf36ugs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFTvJVHnbAs&feature=related

i have no problem accepting aliens as horror, gets my vote

but damn the spooky guy in Poltergeist II almost tipped it

The Fly is arguably not horror either. That thing is a straight up tragedy. Really bums me out. I love how it just ends right as we reach the saddest moment-- yeah, that's it fuckers! Life sucks!

OMG Absolutely understand--the slippery slope is always a problem. By the way, I saw a different House last week, a Japanese horror film from the late '70s that was sheer lunacy. Truthfully, the trailer's better than the film itself.

― clemenza, Thursday, July 29, 2010 9:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Thank you so much, this is so awesome.

The Fly is on here but not Blue Velvet, and most people would agree with that. For me, The Fly has the superficial conventions of monster-movie horror.... Blue Velvet has none of the conventions, but Frank Booth's first appearance made my heart pound more than any horror film of the past 35 years, and Frank himself is just about the greatest non-monster monster in any movie ever.

― clemenza, Thursday, July 29, 2010 1:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I thought about including Blue Velvet, but ultimately decided that was a slippery slope. Plus, these polls are limited to 50 selections, so kind of feel I should stay within fairly strict perimeters of the genre.

― Darin, Thursday, July 29, 2010 2:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

see, this is where i get off the horror purist bus. cuz while i agree that the fly ought to be considered a horror flick, i'd put blue velvet in that ballpark, too. and as he progressed, lynch only gets more and more horrof-ific. to my mind., lost highway, mulholland dr. and inland empire are the THEE best and most iconic PURE horror movies of the last couple decades. the failure of horror, as a culture, to accommodate this (while making room for tons of non-scary thrillers like saw) = the biggest failure of imagination and aesthetics in genre filmmaking we've seen in decades. lynch IS a horror filmmaker, and his best movies are simply the best horror movies anyone's made since polanski in the 70s.

lots of edits to above, most crucial = "lynch only gets more and more horror-ific. to my mind, lost highway..."

but damn, if dead-end drive in (a character-driven drama with no horror/gore content whatsoever) and aliens (combat action) get to pass, then blue velvet definitely should.

my pick from these = the fly, or maybe gothic. ken russell on some kind of incredible roll in the years between the devils and the lair of the white worm.

klaus kinski in crawlspace also worth more than a passing mention. not a great movie, but a brilliant fucking performance.

just reading this list really takes me back to a different time. so many nostalgic picks. really tempted to vote for house, but i have to go with the fly. it's too good to be on this list, imo.

i dunno, maybe it's just because I didn't find Blue Velvet particularly scary at all, but I don't see it as a horror film, in the way that case could be made for something like Peeping Tom.

I remember being disappointed by Link, but I forget why

And Lost Highway is as much a horror movie as a lot of vintage film noir movies are - not really.

but it is SO GODDAM SCARY!!! more genuinely terrifying than 99% of the run of the genre, esp in its opening hour. therefore, i see it as where horror should have gone in the last decade. like the road not taken.

fair enough - if you want to discuss those Lynch movies w/me, we can do so off-board.

fair enough

God, you guys, Blue Velvet is not a horror film. The horror genre doesn't just encapsulate everything that is in any way scary. What about thrillers? They are NOT horror. A good drama can also be scary, especially if it focuses on the psychological.

Anyway, I think I'm going with the obvious and voting The Fly.

Also, clemenza, there is a thread for Hausu, although not a particularly long one from what I can recall. I really thought the whole film was awesome, although I possibly liked the incredibly surreal bit BEFORE the horror starts coming even more than the rest.

Zombie Nightmare is the worst film I have ever seen. You know when a film is so bad it's good? Zombie Nightmare is worse than that. One fucking zombie and it's Thor!
(no, not that Thor! Zombie Thor would obviously be the kickingest ass zombie ever - it's the Jon Mikl Thor from Thor Thor).

Good soundtrack though.

I understand why it's here, totally, but "The Fly" is barely horror to my mind, though it's more so than "Aliens." It's sad and romantic and tragic. But it's hard not to place such virtuoso gross-out make-up and FX in this category, I suppose. I don't think of "Blue Velvet" as horror at all, nor "Mulholland Drive," but I do think of "Lost HIghway" (and "Fire Walk With Me," for that matter) as horror, for some reason.

Definitely a tip of the hat to Fred Dekker. Also, to "Troll," for ultimately inspiring "Best Worst Movie."

Nah, The Fly is definitely horror. I agree that it does something different with its narrative and characterisation than an archetypal horror movie, but it does it within the genre. I have mixed feelings about Aliens, and I think I would accept it into horror, but it's an amalgam of horror, sci-fi and action that never stays in one boundary.

Yeah, but is it more an amalgam than "The Fly?"

The Fly is more like SF to me (experiment goes wrong) and Blue Velvet is not horror either.

Maybe its because I watched it first in my early 20s but I remember laughing at Frank Booth, it just seemed so cartoonish.

I've always felt that 'mad scientist'/'crazy experiment' was more a trope of horror than sci-fi. The latter to me is distant worlds/future tech/space ships etc. I mean, unless we're going to get into an argument that states that Shelley's Frankenstein is sci-fi?

Scientists playing god can be an SF trope. (I've not read Shelley, only seen aadptations on TV, btw)

I guess because Goldblum becomes a fly/monster it could be an argument that it takes on a horror aspect but because of what Cronenberg was also doing at the time (Scanners, Videodrome) its more SF to me.

Scientist in "The Fly" is not mad. The experiment goes wrong and drives him mad, with tragic results. I mean, if memory serves, no one even dies but Goldblum, right? And even that is really sad. Basically, gross =/= horror. But then, that complications the perception of "Videodrome" (and most Cronenberg), so who knows?

'Mad scientist' as a trope is often just 'hubristic scientist', though, which Goldblum's character certainly is. And certainly, gross does not imply horror, but The Fly sticks to SO MUCH of the horror genre, even if its pacing is more character-driven and tragic. Come on, 'the monster is you'/'you have become the monster' is so massively a horror motif I can't believe we're even doubting this.

Hmmm, missed Aliens at the beginning or I would have picked that over The Fly, though avoid the director's cut. Remember enjoying Gothic.

i dunno, maybe it's just because I didn't find Blue Velvet particularly scary at all, but I don't see it as a horror film

99% of all horror films would be instantly disqualified if you were to use scares as your yardstick.

I don't know if I would call Blue Velvet horror, but MD and IE would certainly seem to qualify.

The Fly is definitely horror. It's an internal horror, something like a cancer metaphor, wherein your body turns on you and you're completely incapable of doing anything but succumbing to it. I find that style of horror particularly horrifying, and I wish there was more horror in that mode.

the Fly is horror just because of the birth-scene nightmare

the fly is a remake of a 50s creature feature, and it's not so radically diff in its conception that it can escape the horror tag

imo

The reason I question The Fly as a horror film is because it's so...I don't know; sad and contemplative, something like that. There's some gross stuff, but things don't jump out at you. At the same time, I understand the point of view that says not calling it a horror film is absurd. The reason I view Blue Velvet as a horror film is simply because three or four of its scenes are so terrifying. (When I saw it on release, I was 25; xyzzz is made of much sturdier stuff than me.) But I encountered the same slippery-slope problem on an ILM power-pop thread. "If I count the Monkees, that opens up the genre to bubblegum; if I count Beau Brummels, that leads to all sorts of folk-hippie drone. Is that accurate?" So I understand not wanting to go down that road.

Simply put, the horror films that tend to be more effective in my eyes are those that evoke dread. Facile spooks and scares are a dime a dozen. Any hack can make you jump out of your seat. It takes real skill, though, to create an air of sustained dread or wrongness. And that mood is one that sticks around long past the end of the movie. It's kind of sad how that quality is so undervalued in horror films.

Dread is a good barometer, and on that count, they both qualify.

Nah, your logic doesn't work. Saying 'a good horror film requires a sense of dread' doesn't mean 'any film with a sense of dread must be a horror film'. Dread is a necessary but insufficient quality of horror films (that are good according to your tastes, anyway).

I should note, also, that I like a bunch of horror movies that don't evoke any dread whatsoever. I just don't think they're at all effective as horror (i.e. not in the least bit for-real scary).

I dunno Deric - this has come up before on these threads and I'm hesitant to agree to any genre definition that depends on something as amorphous as the evocation/invocation of a particular feeling or effect. Maybe this makes me sort of conservative when it comes to genres, but in general I'm more comfortable with sort of formalist definitions along the lines of a Western = a movie set in the west, featuring cowboys, wide angle shots of landscapes, etc. Horror genre has common tropes that can be easily identified, and if a movie contains enough of those tropes then it counts as horror in my book. somsething that is simply "frightening" or "scary" doesn't cut it, it's too general.

The catch is that a lot of these crappy '80s horror movies evoke neither fear nor dread but, instead, mostly nostalgic laughter.

these threads are leading me to feel like I may have to go on an 80s horror binge, dunno if my wife will be able to handle it

The more I think about it, though, dread is a really good way to separate run-of-the-mill horror films from those that I count as truly great horror films. Texas Chainsaw, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Psycho, Night of the Hunter--more than anything, an underlying sense of dread is what links them for me.

that might be what makes them GOOD, but it isn't what makes them horror movies per se

Zombies, exploding heads, creepy-crawlies and a date for the formal. This is classic, Spanky.
Voted Night of the Creeps

"The Fly" doesn't have much in the way of dread as opposed to doom, as is the case with any tragedy. Dunno. "the monster is you'/'you have become the monster'' themes abound in film, horror or no, as do cancer films and/or cancer metaphors. "The Fly" isn't scary. No one dies. There's little suspense. There's no evil, as such. Again, I totally understand why it might ultimately fit the horror bill as a convenience, but I still think it gets that tag mostly based on the make-up and FX. Just as a (further) point of debate, how is "The Fly" a horror film and, say, "The Elephant Man" not? Or "Safe?"

sometimes I feel guilty that I haven't seen any Lynch movies since Wild At Heart but everybody said how great that one was and it just seemed like bad self-parody

Wild At Heart is probably his worst movie fyi

I believe you but between that & Fire Walk With Me (was that after? I saw that one too) it felt like he'd just started suckin real bad

I think that was around the time that I decided I preferred horror & martial arts movies to smart dude stuff anyway

Horror genre has common tropes that can be easily identified, and if a movie contains enough of those tropes then it counts as horror in my book.

I should probably clarify further and say that most of the movies in these polls totally qualify as horror films in my book for exactly the reasons you state. I do generally feel, though, that the closer a horror movie hews to those familiar tropes, the less truly horrific (in the sense of evoking horror in the viewer, specifically me in this case) it's going to be. Familiarity breeds a degree of comfort, and to the extent that expectations are met, there isn't much room for an effectively uneasy ambience to settle upon the viewer.

I'm sure loads of people will disagree, but (just by way of completely random example) this is why I felt that some of the latter scenes in Hannibal were really effective as horror. The movie essentially started out as a psychological/crime thriller of sorts and slowly meted out these horrific tableaus leading up to the finale, wherein the general ambience had shifted completely from where the movie began. There was an uneasy, dreamlike feel to the ending which was effective precisely because the film wasn't a formulaic horror film.

But I also love Pieces to pieces, so...y'know. Lots of love for the by-the-book horror films, as well.

I haven't seen any Lynch movies since Wild At Heart but everybody said how great that one was and it just seemed like bad self-parody

it is self parody, but i like that aspect. think he struggled to integrate his interests post blue velvet (wide-eyed american innocense, goofy wtf humor, psychedelic dread), and wild at heart shows the cracks. then again, he didn't write it from the ground up, and his self-penned films are generally way better than his adaptations, the elephant man excepted.

yeah in general I just think Gifford was a bad match for him. They both share obsessions with Americana as well as a penchant for random interjections of jokes and abrupt shifts in tone, but they just don't gel - Lynch is at his best when he's evoking kinda dreamlike states, and Gifford doesn't go there. Personally what I've read of Gifford's books were fairly annoying, lots of set-up and development of multiple plotlines/characters only to be resolved by ridiculous deus ex machina devices.

a typical Gifford plot device, for example, would be to have a story build up to a confrontation between the outlaw protagonists and the law enforcement villain, only to have the villain accidentally impaled on a stop sign prior to the big showdown. story's over! thanks for reading!

But I also love Pieces to pieces, so...y'know. Lots of love for the by-the-book horror films, as well.

well, being good or entertaining as a horror film and being effectively scary/disturbing/whatever are very different things. generally agree that the more genre bound a film is, the less likely it is to be REALLY scary or shocking, for the reasons you state. there are exceptions though. a bit of clever thinking and cinematic invention can go a long way towards refreshing the power of even the most played-out tropes. thinking here of films like the descent, haute tension and [rec]. all strongly bound by the genre's traditions, but nonetheless effectively scary for that.

question of what defines horror is an interesting one, though unanswerable. sure, if you color within the established lines (vampires, foggy castles, wolves on the moor, etc), most people will describe your film as horror, but then again, films like dead alive sometimes get excluded on the basis of being too comic. so vibe and intent matter, too. therefore the cinematic construction matters. if your movie has creepy music when things that aren't explicitly creepy happen, drawn-out suspense scenes that culminate in sudden jolts of terror, lots of ominous low-angle shots of spooky-looking places in which bad things will eventually happen, and generally concentrates its attention on unnerving the viewer, it's probably horror no matter what its subject might be.

that's the sense in which i consider lynch a horror director.

Even "Mulholland Drive" has that creepy devil thing living in the dumpster behind the restaurant.

sometimes I feel guilty that I haven't seen any Lynch movies since Wild At Heart but everybody said how great that one was and it just seemed like bad self-parody

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, July 30, 2010 4:12 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Wild At Heart is probably his worst movie fyi

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, July 30, 2010 4:13 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I believe you but between that & Fire Walk With Me (was that after? I saw that one too) it felt like he'd just started suckin real bad

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, July 30, 2010 4:14 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

if that's yr reason for not seeing mulholland drive, it's kinda like saying dylan started sucking real bad in the 80s so I'm gonna avoid time out of mind.

it hasn't aged well at all, but I really liked wild at heart at the time, which can be chalked up to my infantile delight with the gonzo absurdities the guy was putting up on the screen in major motion picture houses across the country e.g. nick cage as elvis doing interpretive dance in strobe lights to speed metal.

Even "Mulholland Drive" has that creepy devil thing living in the dumpster behind the restaurant.

^^^ That might be the scariest scene I can recall from the last decade.

yeah, also the confrontations at the end of both inland empire and mulholland dr, the approach to the body on the bed in MD, grace's betrayal of her spouse in IE, the dark hallways in the first half of lost highway. i don't think anyone in contemporary horror can touch lynch's ability to deliver fear.

yeah I'll get around to Mulholland Drive eventually I'm sure - the only movies I actively enjoy to the point of wanting to see them in the theater are, lol, genre-bound horror movies & documentaries so I'm generally not in a hurry to see much else

"devil thing behind the dumpster" just increased the probability of me seeing it sooner tho, that sounds way cool

u will love

how is "The Fly" a horror film and, say, "The Elephant Man" not? Or "Safe?"

the latter two are sympathetic portrayals of damaged people (one physically, the other mentally), and while there's some similarity of medical conditions in the fly, I don't recall john hurt or julianne moore trying to turn their pregnant girlfriend into a monster-fly or dissolving anybody's feet with their stomach acid. maybe those parts are in the director's cuts?

that said, wes craven did call safe the scariest movie of the year when it came out.

i don't recall john hurt or julianne moore trying to turn their pregnant girlfriend into a monster-fly or dissolving anybody's feet with their stomach acid.

though you're kind of joking, this is a good point. horror perhaps demands a particularly ghoulish fascination with the object of horror itself, an interest in exploiting it in such a way as to disturb (and thrill) the audience. horror is like a little kid turning over rocks so he/she can get all grossed out by the bugs underneath. also tends to employ cinematic effects that amp the experience up: long suspense sequences before the SHOK! revelation of awful things, creepy music to make sure that you are fully feeling the creepiness, etc.

would say that the elephant man shares some of these qualities/approaches, so i think it's fair to consider it a horror film, while safe doesn't so much, so isn't.

if the fly ended with geena davis keeping jeff goldblum in a nice furnished apartment where he built church models with his feelers until he died quietly in his sleep maybe I'd say ok human drama, but the guy turns into a scary monster with bad intentions so

my main thing in bringing up blue velvet was pretty much anytime you mention 'movies' and '1986' i'm gonna rep for blue velvet - this could've been 'best date movie 1986' or 'best sports movie 1986' and i'd be all 'BLUE FUCKING VELVET' (sang 'in dreams' at karaoke last nite - do NOT recommend). plus it scared me more when i saw it (at 12!) then any movie before or since so to the extent that horror movie = scary movie it's way up there for me. but there's thrillers (which reminds me - was 'thriller' on the 83 poll?) and blue velvet definitely feels more akin to vertigo and rear window than psycho or the birds. so i can see it not being here. the only post-blue velvet i'd really argue as horror is lost highway (mullholland drive is a love story, still haven't seen inland empire) aliens is a monster movie so i can see it being here but i always thought it was understood that alien was a scifi movie that was actually a horror movie while aliens is a scifi movie that is actually an action movie (ie a james cameron movie); it would just seem really weird to me if someone said aliens was their fave horror movie, like if they said ghostbusters was or godzilla.

marketing is marketing but I don't think anybody was woefully misled by this trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IidHjCm3xGI

He may have had bad intentions, but that's only because the splicing made him nuts. He dissolves the dude's hand in defense (and also to show off FX), but that also underscores what I've been saying as the gore being the main thing that makes "The Fly" horror (though "horrific" is a better adj.). Regardless, the Brundle-fly's last (sympathetic) action is to point a shotgun at his head and, unable to pull the trigger, make Geena Davis do it. So he's not all a bad bug.

I brought up "Safe" mainly as an example of body-horror minus the gore. If the movie were the same, but Julianne Moore's fingernails and teeth fell out, would it then be horror?

actually, yeah, if safe had a bunch of gross-out body horror scenes it probably would get called a horror film, especially if she spent the last part of the film attacking ppl w/ her super gross-out powers

melting any part of james legros for instance

^ this. dividing line being, again, a fascination w the ghoulish & grotesque

this in large part is what makes a movie like robocop feel like a horror film, though it's obviously not

if Shelly's Frankenstein is Horror, then so is The Fly

No answers, just questions. Is Night of the Hunter a horror film? Twin Peaks (TV series)? Hour of the Wolf? There was a horror-film series at one of the early-'80s Toronto Film Festivals--I can't remember if it was programmed by Cronenberg or Robin Wood--and Hour of the Wolf was included, as was Forbidden Planet. I'm not sure if either would qualify under some of the criteria spelled out here.

x-post Again, if memory serves, Jeff Goldblum kills no one and attacks only that one dude, and said dude (who survives, btw) is wielding a shotgun, hoping to kill him. So hardly some monster on the rampage.

Frankenstein is similarly tragic, I suppose, but the difference is the monster is, you know, cobbled together from dead parts and brought back to life. It's slightly less tragic because we know the monster is made of murderer parts. With "The Fly," we see the before and after, and the after is definitely sad, not least because the main (sole?) victim is the couple's relationship.

"Night of the Hunter" is a thriller. "Twin Peaks" has glimmers of horror, but it's mostly just nutty characters. "Hour of the Wolf" - is that Bergman or Haneke? Bergman, right? What am I thinking of?

I get what yr saying about the fly being an inherently tragic/sympathetic figure

but that's part of the story, even in the original, which is definitely a horror movie, I mean this is one of the most horrifying scenes in film history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqYDRxdgnC0

x-post Again, if memory serves, Jeff Goldblum kills no one and attacks only that one dude, and said dude (who survives, btw) is wielding a shotgun, hoping to kill him. So hardly some monster on the rampage.

Frankenstein is similarly tragic, I suppose, but the difference is the monster is, you know, cobbled together from dead parts and brought back to life. It's slightly less tragic because we know the monster is made of murderer parts. With "The Fly," we see the before and after, and the after is definitely sad, not least because the main (sole?) victim is the couple's relationship.

"Night of the Hunter" is a thriller. "Twin Peaks" has glimmers of horror, but it's mostly just nutty characters. "Hour of the Wolf" - is that Bergman or Haneke? Bergman, right? What am I thinking of?

hour of the wolf is bergman, time of the wolf is haneke

if Shelly's Frankenstein is Horror, then so is The Fly

when you look at the building blocks of horror as a genre (ghost stories & grimm's-type fables, stoker's dracula, shelley's frankenstein, stevenson's jeckyll & hyde, nosferatu & german expressionism, universal studios horror flicks of the 30s and 40s) you see a lot of emphasis on character and even some sympathy for the monstrous. cronengberg's the fly seems 100% in line with the tradition, not a variation or an outlier of any sort.

I'd call hour of the wolf a horror movie, it's a ghost story

hour of the wolf is 100% completely and totally a horror film. can't imagine any criteria by which you'd exclude it. it even takes pains to establish explicit links to the genre (the very lugosi-esque shots of the bird creature, for instance). plus yeah, it seems to be a ghost story, one of the most traditional horror story forms.

would say that night of the hunter and twin peaks have a lot in common with horror, and that it seems reasonable to describe NotH as horror film of a sort, but neither really fits comfortably into the genre.

this discussion is making me want to watch the 1958 version of the fly

oh look both versions of the fly are streaming on netflix brb

when I was a kid that 58 version of the fly freaked me out so fucking bad, like 100% terror at that ending. and at this frame:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Yn-A3bddDcc/SwOWO0BfD6I/AAAAAAAAAHM/gHRsriIY7Jk/s1600/the_fly_1958-779691.jpg

Sympathy is totally a part of lots of horror. But again, I'm curious: what about "The Fly" constitutes horror besides the effects? It's not scary, it's not suspenseful, it's not evil or dark or menacing. And no one gets killed but the monster, who does it to himself (as with the original).

Again, stressing, I totally get why this gets called horror. But I'm trying to pinpoint just why the tag comes so easy to a movie not so easily categorized as such.

Put more simply, I guess, from another angle: does the presence of a monster always = horror?

almost always - especially if the monster's appearance is horrifying - if it inspires, or seems intended to inspire, feelings of disgust. a monster is kind of the physical emblem of horror - he is the real-world totem for feelings of horror. monstrousness is like the #1 most interesting concept in literature/film to me and I will go on like an undergrad about it for days

what about "The Fly" constitutes horror besides the effects? It's not scary, it's not suspenseful, it's not evil or dark or menacing.

have tried to suggest the film's ghoulish focus on & fascination with brudle's condition makes it horror, but also consider the way the telepods are 1st presented. ominous music, low-angle photography, stark lighting, scary design, clouds of almost comically horror-gothic fog. i think the film makes its adherence to the formal qualities of the genre very clear from early on. and then there's the dream sequence, which pushes into territory that anyone would think of as pure/true horror. though that sequence it short, it resonates, lingers over the rest of the film. and the final action/kidnapping/confrontation scenes ARE suspenseful, dark and menacing. brundle sees the emergence of the animal consciousness within himself as something terrible, something pitiless that will destroy not only him but those around him if he lets it. in that sense, the film is about evil, too. it's about the passive evils of both technology and nature, presenting "humanity" as this fragile dream ("i was a fly who dreamed he was a man") that attempts to excuse itself from the fundamental horror of biology.

I guess that's a good point. Those telepods are pretty menacing/"evil," even if they're not actually evil.

Though it is a slippery slope, I suppose. If it weren't played as satire, would "Robocop" indeed be a horror film? It has even more shades of Frankenstein than "The Fly."

when you look at the building blocks of horror as a genre (ghost stories & grimm's-type fables, stoker's dracula, shelley's frankenstein, stevenson's jeckyll & hyde, nosferatu & german expressionism, universal studios horror flicks of the 30s and 40s) you see a lot of emphasis on character and even some sympathy for the monstrous. cronengberg's the fly seems 100% in line with the tradition, not a variation or an outlier of any sort.

YES.

what about "The Fly" constitutes horror besides the effects? It's not scary, it's not suspenseful, it's not evil or dark or menacing.

This is just your opinion, though. I think it is scary (if for nothing else than the theme of one's body and mind undergoing such a horrendous change, but there are also genuine scares along the lines of the birth-dream etc), there is suspense, and it's definitely dark.

Also:

If it weren't played as satire, would "Robocop" indeed be a horror film? It has even more shades of Frankenstein than "The Fly."

You've kind of answered your own question here. If Robocop was an entirely different film but retained the concept of a robot-man hybrid then it could be horror, yes. But it isn't an entirely different film, it's Robocop.

So the reason "The Fly" is horror the lack of LOLs?

I think any scares in "The Fly" are purely metaphorical, barring the occasional kid convinced the Brundlefly is real and is going to get them. But clearly opinions vary. I still think it's more broadly horrific, which is why I first brought up both "Elephant Man" and "Safe," two sorta extremes of the same idea, one gentle, one disconcerting, neither horror at all.

yeah it mean it seems like your definition of "horror" is extremely orthodox - the presence of other elements "dilutes" the horror quantity for you, etc. I think there's plenty of horror that doesn't provide scares/chills at all but just gives a vague sense of unease (Robert Aickman is amazing with this). It's a broad genre, not a limited one.

Also Josh, weren't you one of the people scoffing at the notion of ppl being scared by A Nightmare on Elm Street? I think maybe your ability to not be horrified plays pretty heavily into how you define horror.

So the reason "The Fly" is horror the lack of LOLs?

Er, no. Not at all. What I was saying was that in order for Robocop to be a horror film, it would have to be written, shot, directed and edited completely differently to the way it is. However, the main premise of a man-robot killing machine could be turned into horror, but it would be a completely different film.

I think any scares in "The Fly" are purely metaphorical

How is this different from many other canonical horror films?

the fly w/ lols would basically be an american werewolf in london and still horror

What? The Fly by Cronenberg has plenty of lols - not as many as Robocop - which is played more as a satire and less as a horror movie.

Never would have guessed Trick Or Treat was as old as April Fool's Day for some reason

monstrousness is like the #1 most interesting concept in literature/film to me and I will go on like an undergrad about it for days

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, July 30, 2010 10:47 PM (Yesterday)

oh dude my final thesis as an english major (before deciding lol english i should be a philosophy major thats where the ladies are at) was about exactly this, looking at the definition of monster antagonists and how their proximal "difference" is what establishes them - ie why is grendel way more creepy and rong than his mother for most readers - it is a subject that totally fascinates me.

i of course never finished the paper because i am lazy as hell.

I've mostly been thinking out loud here. I'm pretty sure I've always considered "The Fly" horror, too, until it popped up here and I asked myself why. It's actually trickier than I had imagined. Like, again, "Dead Alive" is (intentionally) funnier than most comedies, but it counts as a horror film and not a comedy. Or at least a horror-comedy, which I guess the presence of zombies will automatically get you. At least "Shaun of the Dead" was wise to call itself a RomZomCom, which kind of circumvents the horror field at all.

By "The Fly" not being scary, by the way, I mean it sort of generally lacks jumps and suspense and stuff. Mood and malaise galore, but the "horror," as such, is almost entirely of the OMG look what's happening to him could that happen to me? variety, which is a different kind of scary. Agreed it's an underlying theme of many many horror flicks, but I guess many of those horror flicks are similarly ambiguously (minus the presence of a gooey monster as tip off). Once again, there's no "evil," as such in "The Fly," and the events are always played with sadness and tragedy rather than convention dead, which lessens the menace of the monster, particularly because, once again, no one dies but the monster. How often is that the case in horror films?

The lack of scares thing is sort of related to that famous John Carpenter anecdote where he notes the most visceral audience reaction provoked by "The Thing" was the close up of the dude slicing his own thumb open for the blood test. For all the creatures and killing and gore and "proper" scares, that was the scene that made the audience squirm. I guess Cronenberg in particular likes to walk this thin line himself. So many of his films are totally horrific and squirm inducing - "Dead Ringers"! - but not many are formally (or easily) categorized as horror.

Once again, there's no "evil," as such in "The Fly," and the events are always played with sadness and tragedy rather than convention dead, which lessens the menace of the monster, particularly because, once again, no one dies but the monster.

And one very unfortunate test monkey.

The Fly might be the best film of '86 (never a big Blue Velvet fan).
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius)

Agreeing with you happens so rarely, it's that much more exciting when it does happen.

― 2 + 2 is vah-gi-nah (Eric H.)

Awwww, you say the sweetest things once or twice a year!

also from '86, in the same vein as Death Spa...

http://www.obscurehorror.com/aerobicide4.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

We've now reached the point in this series where if I have not seen some of these (about 50% in this case), I at least am familiar w/ most of the titles from pouring over the horror section of my local video store bw the ages of 10-14.

Whoever pointed out Julian Beck as a saving grace of Poltergeist II is otm. I would never vote for it overall (pretty shit aside from him & the Geiger worm), but dude was creeeeeeepy. That translucent skin - I don't think that was makeup.

A lot of these that I dug as a kid are also probably crap (Chopping Mall, Critters, Rawhead Rex, Troll, Witchboard, April Fool's Day, House, Demons 2) - maybe not in some cases, but I can't recall most of them well enough to make a proper call.

The Fly will win & it deserves to. Aliens is obv great as well, but I don't think of it as a horror flick, really.

Going w/ TCM2 b/c it is one of the best, most madcap fucked up horror comedies.. of the 80s? Ever? The sequences w/ chainsaws on the highway & at the radio station & Bill Mosely w/ his steel plate & coat hanger! Dennis Hopper in full scenery-chewing mode laying waste to the compound (sunken amusement park!). It was the only tasteful way to make an actual sequel to the original imo.

got my vote 2 - what a good & enjoyable movie it was, and really the only way to follow up on the original without looking like an asshole

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

huh.

def would not even make my top 10. (voted TCM2 btw)

someone needs to explain their vote for Entrails of a Virgin.

the version I saw didn't have all this nsfw work stuff that is on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAgHbs_Kqgw

also, I don't know why I voted for it, because the top three winners are all better. Nice wrestling scene though.

really NSFW

WHOA

uh holy shit wtf

can't imagine that's gonna be up for long

Going w/ TCM2 b/c it is one of the best, most madcap fucked up horror comedies.. of the 80s? Ever? The sequences w/ chainsaws on the highway & at the radio station & Bill Mosely w/ his steel plate & coat hanger! Dennis Hopper in full scenery-chewing mode laying waste to the compound (sunken amusement park!). It was the only tasteful way to make an actual sequel to the original imo.

otm, glad someone said it. one of my favorite movies of ever, and easily the best thing tobe hooper ever put his name on. so funny, crazy, incoherent & brilliant. though i'd recently posted a similar defense ITT, but i guess not. maybe in one of the (many) other horror threads? dunno, too much threads to keep track of...

on 1981 thread, sparked by the funhouse iirc?

Speaking of "Entrails of a Virgin," this is the best movie of whatever year it was made in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE54kTxAGcc&feature=player_embedded

sup

http://static.zoovy.com/img/redford/W414-H414-Bffffff/2/269968_1020_a.jpg