Best Horror Film of 1978 (part 12 of a series)

lol we're goin backwards now?

I've never even heard of the majority of these. The bigger name ones on here though (Piranha, Halloween, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) are all great.

kinda wanna go with Invasion...

eh, I couldn't get excited about the 90's

me neither, no worries

the only 90s stuff I dug were 80s throwbacks/sequels. Blair Witch and torture porn never interested me

Yay--we're reversing course. Halloween and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are both excellent. I'll vote for [i]Invasion, which hovers at the edge of my Top 10 for the decade. Sutherland and Brooke Adams are so good together. That scene where she gets him to "do that thing with your eyes" is as romantic as it gets. And the final shot, of course, is unforgettable.

dawn of the dead so easily

shit yeah. such a great sdtk too

Inclined to throw a LOL vote to The Legacy just for choking Roger Daltrey to death, but it's really pretty bad overall. So many to choose from that are absolutely great, and I'd normally vote for Invasion but it's going to win this in a walk. Instead, I'll vote for Piranha, which I saw when I was too young to get scary-funny and just found it scary but awesome, then saw again when I was older and liked it even more.

Will Invasion really walk this with Halloween and Dawn of the Dead on the board?

Voted Dawn, btw. Too much fun.

i am excited about the roll through the 70s, but man dudes srsly 90s horror gets short shrift, theres some stunning stuff in there

wanted to see barracuda sooooo badly when i was a kid; still haven't seen it. voted dawn of the dead (ditto to 'so easily' sentiments), and love halloween and invasion also, but just want to give a shoutout to eyes of laura mars here.

does this mean we are finally free of the cronenberg curse?

i could totally see myself voting for shivers whenever we get there

Halloween, though I'm not a huge fan.

I'd love to hear about some of these movies; I've only seen like 30% of the list.

Caribbean Papaya?

will no one rep for I Spit On Your Grave...?

I won't (a little too close to torture porn) but I know it's considered a milestone in some circles

Kyjen Puzzle Plush Egg Babies Dog Toy, 5 Eggs

"A team of geologists attempt to remove a native cannibal population from an island to perform atomic research, but the cannibals' female leader disposes of them one by one by seduction."

Man, what was it with Italians and cannibals back then?

mangia mangia!

saw spawn of the slithis (aka slithis) the other day. one of the worst movies of any sort i've ever seen. then again, it's hard to say cuz it was off an ancient shitty VHS dupe and consequently looked like a bowl of tar for the most part. never made it to DVD i guess. oddly endearing, but awful awful awful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s794AAKEw-Y

Slithis was released by Code Red a few months ago, apparently in a pretty clear presentation. I haven't taken the plunge, though.

The Jennifer trailer always fills me with glee during 42nd Street Forever Volume 3 — that DVD is one of my favorite things!

feel like i inadvertently killed "part 11" of this series. so i'll just shut up and vote in this one.

will no one rep for I Spit On Your Grave...?

i'd like to revisit this. totally repulsed me at the age of 15, but i'm curious how i'd view it now. a friend of mine says the Joe Bob Briggs commentary on the DVD is pretty great.

There are so many great candidates here, but ... shyeah, like I'm gonna vote for anything other than The Fury.

The Fury is pretty fascinating De Palma, for sure. some really amazing sequences. another one i'd like to revisit.

I loved jennifer when I saw it as a kid, it was a late night HBO staple around 78-79, but I've been afraid to watch it again. its shameless trashy fun is probably better off ossified in the amber of preadolescent memory.

will no one rep for I Spit On Your Grave...?

i'd like to revisit this. totally repulsed me at the age of 15, but i'm curious how i'd view it now. a friend of mine says the Joe Bob Briggs commentary on the DVD is pretty great.

― circa1916, Friday, October 1, 2010 3:36 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

It's certainly a better film than similarly infamous films like Last House on the Left.

Don't agree that I Spit on your Grave is 'better' than Last House on the Left - putting to one side questions of taste/decency etc, it's simply a more boring film, grindingly slow, repetitive, predictable. David Hess alone makes Last House a more intense and entertaining movie. See also: Cameron Mitchell's wonderfully OTT turn in Toolbox Murders, which overall has a great verite-sleaze ambience, like a grainily repugnant porno.

Voted Dawn of the Dead, which is pretty close to my favourite movie of all time, flaws and all. Also like: Damien: Omen II (great under the ice death sequence - parts of this were shot by Mike 'Get Carter' Hodges before he was sacked for being a fancypants auteur), The Fury (Cassavetes, Exploding Heads, say no more), Halloween, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Lives Again, Manitou (tribute to Tony Curtis), Patrick, Piranha and most especially The Shout, a great arthouse horror movie w/ an interesting electronic soundtrack - the UK DVD has a useful commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones.

Killer's Moon (aka Bloody Moon, a Jess Franco joint) and Mardi Gras Massacre were classified as 'video nasties' in the UK, thanks mainly, I'm sure, to their exploitation sleeve art:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LN_P9uZB4ig/S6B4t6PeNzI/AAAAAAAAC5M/JHlsvOJnr9g/s320/Mardi+Gras+cover.jpg

http://www.asylum00.com/images/bloodymoon.jpg

you guys are sleeping on the Manitou

j/k it's dawn of the dead obv

Dawn of the Dead is not even close to being in Halloween's league imo.

Zombies in a shopping center is a great idea. Nothing else about the movie is great. It's cheap, poorly acted, ugly. Just not a good film.

fuckin' kidding me. there may be no greater film as totally enjoyable front to back as Dawn of the Dead.

I love Halloween and will still be suffering unrequited love for Jamie Lee Curtis on my deathbed but Dawn of the Dead is a much, much better film than Halloween.

There's probably no other film so highly regarded of which I have such a low opinion. I'm honestly baffled at the praise Dawn of the Dead receives.

But I'm not pissed off about it or anything. Kind of just a shrug your shoulders thing.

Halloween is great but how many times can you watch it?

Once every year?

Agree totally with Matt Armstrong on Dawn of the Dead. As a concept, perfect; then you have to actually watch the movie. (To be fair, I saw it on release and never took a second look.) Night of the Living Dead is so much better--as a horror film, as social commentary.

NOTLD is truly in a class of its own, but I will not stand for this Dawn bashing. (Ditto Day.)

I saw a bunch of these on dates in high school. Of the ones that are still favorites, I seem to recall The Fury didn't scare either of us; Halloween scared her a lot more than me; and Dawn scared us both silly. Voted Dawn.

There's a lot of good movies here, but there's no way I can vote for anything other than Halloween.

I found Halloween really boring. Love Dawn of the Dead, but I think I'm going for Invasion of the Body Snatchers here. Still haven't seen the original, though.

I can't vote for anything but Dawn of the Dead in good conscience. Halloween and The Fury are great, and The Shout is one I've been trying to see for a while (though I'm not sure the actual movie can live up to my expectations based on the premise, effectively eerie trailer, hushed writeups from cult movie fans, etc). I still haven't seen the Sutherland Body Snatchers, to my lasting shame, which is kind of weird given how much I love the original and the cycle of 70's paranoia thrillers the remake kind of fits into.

Oh, I completely missed that The Shout was on there. Wouldn't really call it a horror film, though - more of a thriller, perhaps? It is good, though, but when I saw it I was expected something properly psychedelic, and it didn't really deliver.

'was expected'? Ummm. You know what I mean.

I'm committing auteur crime here, but I like Kaufman's Body Snatchers better than Siegel's original. Not surprisingly, there's some wooden acting in Siegel's (especially the lead woman, as I remember it). You lose the McCarthy angle in the remake, but in its place you get this amazingly funny look at 70's guru-speak.

is Jennifer pre-Carrie or just a goofy knockoff...?

Carrie is '76

Dracula's Dog is known in the UK as Zoltan, Hound of Dracula which is a slightly butcher title and one that I have always loved. Thought this was a Hammer movie but apparently not. Loved it as a teenager, vaguely remember it being a ton of fun.

I'm voting Dawn btw, maybe my second fave Romero movie after Martin.

Think I've seen Spawn of the Slithis maybe under another title? Don't recall it being a ton of fun.

Patrick is rubbish iirc,

patrick deserves better than it's getting itt. it's slow-paced, cheap and a bit derivative, sure, but it's also odd, creepy and surprisingly thoughtful. clearly more indebted to hitchcock's thrillers than to modern horror, and it doesn't entirely succeed on that level, but i admire the ambition, and the performances are generally pretty solid for low-budget 70s horror. definitely prefer the original australian version to the american dub/edit.

never seen the long weekend. have been curious since seeing it featured & praised (alongside patrick) in not quite hollywood.

You might be right about Patrick, it's been a long time. On these threads I only judge things on their merits as Horror movies tho.

Omen II is on TV in 30 mins. Good timing, will watch...

it's theirs to lose:
Dawn of the Dead - gotta side with the naysayers on this one. on-the-nose and a bit of a slog. Day is the more entertaining film.

Day of the Woman (I Spit on Your Grave) - crude, deplorable, but undeniably effective and influential.

The Fury - several dazzling slo-mo sequences offset by protracted tedium. so, typical pre-Femme Fatale De Palma.

Halloween - i'm not really a fan, but that doesn't mean that it isn't classic.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - horror?

Piranha

The Shout - offbeat (to say the least) chiller from the director of The Deep End. a happily married experimental musician (big points there) encounters Alan Bates, a drifter who has acquired the Aboriginal power of killing with a scream. original and quite disturbing. all this, and a very naked Sussanah York. might be my pick.

Sisters of Satan - Juan López Moctezuma's psychosexual feverdream about a convent infiltrated by evil. witchy orphan Alucarda takes an unhealthy interest in a fellow novice, the pure-as-snow Justine. the nuns fight for Justine's soul, countering black rites with orgies of flagellation and bloodletting. visually sumptuous, virulently anti-religious, (very) loose Le Fanu adaptation that is sure to be reevaluated if/when del Toro's Mexican horror retrospective emerges.

contenders:

Damien: Omen 2

The Eyes of Laura Mars

Jaws 2

Long Weekend - a slow, edgy, occasionally beautiful exercise in ecological Karma. unlike any "Nature's revenge" movie other than, maybe, The Last Wave. Nature's revenge is against a perpetually bickering, environmentally insensitive couple is insidious and sweet. a recent shot-for-shot remake (as Nature's Grave), too obviously approved as a tax write-off, runs the risk of negating much of the lingering good will one feels towards the producers of this memorable Antipodean oddity.

Patrick - too slow for me, but fairly well-directed. i prefer The Medusa Complex for my comatose psychic-psycho shenanigans.

Suor Omicidi - Killer Nun! the sordid, scathing saga of Sister Gertrude. Anita Ekberg plays the Bad Mother Superior, schizophrenic, addicted to narcotics, female flesh (in the carnal sense), and the occasional torture and murder. nunsploitation played a little too straight - aside from the lesbian scenes - to thrill or titillate. gialloesque, though not particularly jolly.

The Swarm - second worst killer-bee movie ever. which makes it the best, by default. redeemed by the dream cast. seriously, look it up. unbelievable.

The Toolbox Murders - great, nasty first half. then procedural and boring. the 2004 remake, which has nothing in common plotwise, is a considerable improvement.

some merit:
Alien Prey - only Norman J. Warren could have made the encounter between a jealous lesbian and a cannibalistic alien so utterly boring. nice climax, though getting there is grueling.

Barracuda - Piranha on an even lower budget than Corman's. frequent late-nite TV fare, billed as The Lucifer Project.

The Bloodstained Shadow - like Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, Antonio Bido's best giallo has a strong anti-clergy agenda and a solid mystery. unfortunately, it's slow and yappy as a Sunday morning sermon because of too much time spent on romantic subplots. at least it's an excuse for some good '70s-style nudity, a la Don't Look Now.

Blue Movie - giallo meets Salo in a one-time-only (fortunately) commingling of kidnapping and coprophagia. dull, and rather... unsavory

The Comeback - reclusive crooner (Jack Jones!) tries to retire to his mansion and write new songs, but he is dogged by his dead wife, and maybe also by the hatchet-wielding transvestite who did her in. Psycho variation succeeds due to Pete Walker's flair for nasty violence and psychological shocks. but it's no Frightmare.

The Evil - Richard Crenna and some friends renovate a mansion inhabited by ... wait for it ... THE DEVIL! in the basement, in a white suit, in the person of Victor Buono. effective paranormal hijinx, power tool and pyrotechnic mishaps aplenty. no classic, but i've always liked this one.

It Lives Again - Larry Cohen's killer baby plague spreads. more terror tots =/ more fun. minimalist budget and direction render this one stillborn.

Killer's Moon - inmates on a rape-and-slash rampage thro' and around the misty moors. England's first response to Last House on the Left, helmed by would-be grindhouse impresario Alan Birkinshaw, is atmospheric but cheap, lurid, and genuinely savage. a true video nasty.

Night Creature - if it had stuck with its Ahab-like tale of Donald Pleasance's obsession with the Thai black leopard that crippled him, it would have been a tense, unusual "when animals attack" item. but the B-story, about the estranged daughters who return to the family mansion, only to come between predator and hunter, kills it dead. too bad.

Satan's Blood - Polanski-esque swingin' "Satanic Panic" thriller with mucho softcore canoodling. enough to be rated 'S' for 'Sex'. for reals.

so bad, they're baaaaaaad:
The Bees - the horror! the horror! absolute worst of the killer-bee movies. and this in a year that included The Swarm.

Blood Stalkers - vaguest memories of this. something about vacationing couples tangling with an inbred family in the Florida swamplands. i seem to recall a dead dog and an axe in the gut, not much else. that doesn't bode well.

Dominique - Cliff Robertson is caught up in staid, murky, and possibly supernatural mystery with very little mystery - and even less dialogue. audience snoozes, misses nothing.

Legacy of Blood - the infamously incompetent Andy Milligan and his not-ready-for-Long Island dinner-theater players remake their own 1969 gore opus, The Ghastly Ones. Milligan always tries, bless him, but he simply knows not what he does. if his films weren't so goddamn boring, they'd be fun to watch, albeit for all the wrong reasons. if you must see one, hold out for 1984's Carnage.

Mardi Gras Massacre - barrel-bottom slasher that squanders a fantastic setting on a drab and repetitive series of rubbery guttings.

???
The Alien Factor - Don Dohler's first film, no? Dohler always gave it is all. true, it was never enough. don't remember much about TAF. may have to watch this one again.
Alien Zone - never even heard of it

Damned in Venice - i know this is an Italo Omen clone. but which one????

Killer's Delight
Mirrors
Primitive

how is it that you got through all that (and thank you) without a single solitary word about LASERBLAST?!?

one of my favorite jalloween memories involves re-meeting, after many years, a dude i knew from college by surprise at a longtime friend's halloween party - this over a decade ago. he was dressed in a full billy/laserblast outfit, complete with cardboard deathray arm and glowing "alien" accessories of various sorts. in addition to the lights, costume even had built-in sound & weapon effects. inspirational.

gah! my Laserblast comment got lost! i love Laserblast. a contender, for sure.

and that should be The Medusa Touch, not Complex.

medusa touch is great, always thought it was prime remake material

also, can it be you've never seen jennifer?

i.e. incredulous if I've seen a horror film mr hal jam has not

wasn't Jennifer already covered? if not: Carrie, with snakes.

valuable posting, Mr. Hal Jam.

I'm voting for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, partly out of nostalgia. It was one of the scary movies that I got dragged out to see in the theater by my parents at an inappropriately early age, and I have fantastically rich memories of the first time that I saw it. I didn't see Dawn of the Dead or Halloween until I was in my twenties, and Halloween in particular was so spoiled for me ahead of time that I didn't get any effect out of it at all.

thanks, dudes. hope it has some value. and that my prejudices don't influence the polling in any way. though i wouldn't weep to see The Shout walk away with this one.

man serious lol @ the idea of Day of the Dead being more enjoyable than Dawn. the movie is flat out boring for almost forty consecutive minutes. it only barely gets a passing grade. Yea, I know it's not the movie Romero intended to make, but that's all I can judge it on -- if you're going to make a dialogue heavy zombie movie, at least make sure said dialogue isn't soap opera-y stuff delivered by extreme overactors.

itt serious challops re; Dawn vs. Day.

Dawn = LET'S LIVE AT THE MALL!!!! OMFG ZOMBIE/BIKER INCURSION!! Day = 90 minutes of people screaming at each other, and also Bub. This is a contest?

I mean really tbh the only way I can enjoy Day is if I fast forward the boring shit and skip to the zombie moments. Not only do you have a less boring film, it only takes 30 minutes to watch!

Night > Dawn = Day

End of discussion.

Yeah, man, "Day" is a drag. Great effects, HORRIBLE overacting, and lots and lots of talking about nothing. I seem to recall a scene in a cafeteria that goes on forever. The "Day" DVD is relatively unique in that it has a commentary track from another totally unrelated filmmaker (Roger Avery) who tells stories of playing it in the video store with Tarantino to ward off customers, and even he doesn't pull punches when it comes to the flick's sheer tedium.

"Day" also marked the first time Romero leaned on the "sorry, ran out of money, you should have seen the original script" excuse. Which he has more or less been using ever since.

I do agree NOTLD was the best

Well it was.

Which is why I said it :)

It is amazing how many bad (horror) films get made.

I've never enjoyed watching any version of Dawn - Romero's or Argento's. it feels like a miniseries crammed into the limited time allotment of a feature film. All this Day hate is bizarre. It's imperfect but smart and filled with ideas and well-mounted set pieces.

the only idea Day had was essentially teaching the audience what operant conditioning was for 90 minutes.

I passed on "the Shout" being listed at first, I watched this by accident when it was shown on CH4 years ago, what a strange and copmpelling film, I was completely blown away by it. I've never seen it since. Voted for it!

Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRH_GQ2Tsw&NR=1

Probably it's not so much a horror film, more one of those weird otherworldly films that were made in the UK in the '60's and '70's, now not so much that I'm aware of, other examples being "If...."/"O Lucky Man"/"Brittania Hospital", "Morgan, a Suitable case for Treatment" and uh others I can't remember right now.

I just find the world of Day so much more compelling than that of Dawn. The notion of the living having been driven the proverbial six-feet underground by the unchecked rise of the dead is deliciously ironic. The claustrophobia, paranoia and ennui of subterranean life under a military mandate interests me more than Dawn, which feels like a Night epilogue grafted onto a clunky kitchen-sink action picture. But Martin is probably the only Romero picture for which I could declare my unequivocal love. all of the Dead films fall short of their tremendous promise, in some way. And I've come to realize that Romero is far too quick to blame his budget woes for what are in fact fundamental problems of conception and execution.

with hal jam on dawn vs. day. i wouldn't call day of the dead the "better film," but i generally enjoy it at least a little bit more. parts of it may drag, and yeah, the acting's generally atrocious, but it's more narratively coherent than dawn, and good deal shorter. and the gore effects are amazing, some of the best i've ever seen. it's nowhere near as groundbreaking, ambitious or funny as dawn of the dad, but i've always had a good time watching it.

night & martin kick ass over anything else romero's done, though.

And I've come to realize that Romero is far too quick to blame his budget woes for what are in fact fundamental problems of conception and execution.

otm. the best filmmakers tailor their projects to their resources, or else they do the seemingly impossible on whatever budget they do have. hard to look at romero's recent work (last couple decades) and see him as even a competent craftsman.

manitou, the class of this field, totally not getting enough love

saw the manitou once upon a time (or maybe just a few scenes on TV?), but remember almost nothing about it. an awful thing of some sort bursting out of a woman's back?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

wow, thought it might be tighter and definitely didn't think halloween would be that far behind. who voted for i spit on yr grave?

The Toolbox Murders is a pretty weird and interesting horror film imho. I know it has some sort of reputation, I've heard of it even as a casual horror fan, but looking it up just now it seems like nobody gives a shit. It's on Netflix OnDemand and it's October, would recommend.

Maybe it's seasonal, but now I wish I'd voted for Halloween. Some of the pop-up shots during the last 20 minutes are ridiculously staged, but as a whole, the movie sustains its creepy mood better than the scarier, OTT Dawn.

Watched Toolbox Murders on Netflix instant this weekend. What a strange movie. It's so obviously a completely tasteless piece of trash, and yet you cannot look away from it. All the big gore setpieces are in the first 20 minutes, it has the most gratuitous nudity I've ever seen courtesy of a former porn star, the police characters are completely irrelevant to the film, Cameron Mitchell is Cameron Mitchell . . . yeesh.

Fun fact: The girl-in-peril of this film, Pamelyn Ferdin, went on to become a super hardcore animal rights/PETA activist.

Might have voted for Sisters of Satan had I known it was Alucarda. It's certainly the loudest horror film. Very few lines are unscreamed. Good times.

The Manitou is on netflix streaming now. Just watched it and enjoyed the hell out of myself. Thoroughly disgusting visual hook, mystical bullshit, copious 70s san francisco scenery, Tony Perkins pizzazzing it up, Burgess fucking Meredith; a distinct sort of Fritz Lieber-ness to the proceedings, an awesome Lalo Schifrin score.

Gonna see Halloween tonight on the big screen. Curious how it holds up. Have already seen Piranha and Dawn of the Dead that way. The latter was a confusing experience as I had to choose between using the 3-D glasses to see the effects or using my own glasses to see detail on the screen.

poll results are rong, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is great but no way is it a better horror film than Halloween

That’s my impression as well. Hope the screening tonight doesn’t change that opinion.

Hope you had a full theatre (ideally, with many seeing it for the first time).

Saw Halloween again recently. I first watched it a year or two after it came out in a theater with a friend who had to go out into the lobby periodically because it was too intense for her. We weren't used to films like that back then.

In retrospect it was sexier in a late 70s way than I remembered at the time, also more comic

I watched Black Christmas (1974) tonight, which seems like a precursor to Halloween

WYNN: "Sam, Haddonfield is a hundred and fifty miles from here. How could he get there? He can't drive."

LOOMIS: "He was doing all right last night. Maybe somebody around here gave him lessons."

Hope you had a full theatre (ideally, with many seeing it for the first time)

It was quite well attended, one of those assigned seating theaters that had me crunched between strangers.

What made an impression this time was the stillness of that suburban neighborhood. And the surprisingly long stretches with minimal sound, no music, no dialogue - or just the most mundane bits of dialogue. Atmosphere is doing a lot in the film.

The script makes a big deal of P. J. Soles overusing the word "totally." I guess totally was the big new word of 1978 in youth culture.