Best Horror Film of 1976 (part 14 of a series)

a lot here I haven't seen, yeah. some great stuff on here though. I always forget Eraserhead was this early! And Massacre at Central High is a deeply strange, unsettling movie. Carrie obviously the other big standout, De Palma's real masterpiece imho ("dirty pillows" lol)

wow, lots of great stuff in 76! suppose it's gonna come down to eraserhead vs. carrie, both of which deserve to win, but i make my stand with jack nance in opposition to the forces of domesticity and reproduction. still, you also got:

blue sunshine
burnt offerings
god told me to
squirm
the little girl who lives down the lane
the omen
the witch who came from the sea (so great, wish eraserhead was out of the running so i could vote for this)
to the devil a daughter

interesting how different these films are than the horror films of the 70s. few mad slashers or wholly invented monsters. instead you get the occult, the natural world, even the 60s drug culture. much more open-ended view of what might be done in/with the genre, too.

uh, i mean, different relative to the horror films of the 80s, yeah

ah the omen, yeah that's a classic

can you elaborate on some of those other ones? I don't know anything about them

Wow, I've only seen Carrie and The Omen out of these. Really need to see Eraserhead, but I have an ongoing promise to watch it with a friend who doesn't live anywhere near me, so it may be some time before I get around to it.

"Squirm" is a nice gross-out: killer earthworms that come out of the shower by the thousands! "Grizzly" a banal "Jaws" rip ("Jaws with claws!"). "Omen," "Eraserhead" and "Carrie" still creepy, the latter also weirdly empathetic. "Food of the Gods" - this is the giant rat movie? Pretty dreadful. "God Told Me To" is prime Larry Cohen.

I finally saw Eraserhead last year. It's so much its own thing it's hard for me to approach it as a "horror movie" to be compared with Carrie or The Omen. I certainly don't know that I ever need to see it again.

Tempted to vote God Told Me To just because it's such a bizarrely gonzo piece of filmmaking. Like, could anyone BUT Larry Cohen have made that movie?

I found Eraserhead to be much more unsettling than Carrie or The Omen, tbh.

Squirm & Burnt Offerings are on Watch Instantly if anyone cares.

blue sunshine - cheap & awkward yet weirdly effective thriller about the long delayed aftereffects of a LSD-like drug called blue sunshine: otherwise normal-seeming people suddenly lose all their hair and become mindless killing machines. shades of early cronenberg, especially in the weirdly detached presentation of mayhem.
burnt offerings - cool little haunted house flick with a great cast: oliver reed, karen black, betty davis (!), burgess meredith. old fashioned and low key, more quietly creepy than out-and-out terrifying, but with nice moody atmosphere and a great location. anticipates the shining.
god told me to - shit yeah, larry cohen! random people go on killing sprees, saying that "god told them to." a cop investigates and is drawn into weirdness. great movie, maybe the best thing cohen ever did. bizarre amalgam of 70s occult paranoia, straight horror, sci-fi and religious fable. plus lots of gritty, grimy old-school NYC character.
squirm - killer worms: they fly @ u face. grisly, silly eco-horror from the guy who directed blue sunshine. nothing great, but a good time. nice early latex work from rick baker.
the little girl who lives down the lane - jodie foster as a mystery girl living on her own, trying to avoid prying eyes. martin sheen and alexis smith as eyes who would pry, and worse. simple story, feels like a TV movie, but well written and very suspenseful, with good performances all around. sheen is especially creepy as a pampered pervert.
the witch who came from the sea - strange and rather bleak story of a troubled woman who dotes on her father while obsessing about television personalities and razors, the sorts of thoughts from which no good can come. a dreamy, strange, and truly distinctive film that's more dark drama than what we'd now think of as proper horror, but excellent taken on its own terms.
to the devil a daughter - the last hammer film? not sure, but i think so. not their best, but hell, it's got christopher lee, so you can't go far wrong. plus a very young nastassia kinski. devil business, you know? anyway, it's a sequel to the devil rides out, and not quite as good as that. still a good time.

"Squrim" is terrible! That ended up on MST3K!

"Massacre at Central High" is a wholly creepy movie if seen when you are 8 or 9 years old and is likely responsible for the early sense of nihilism and complete distrust in people that I developed seemingly out of nowhere at around that time.

yeah, to the devil a daughter was the last hammer film. it's only a sequel to the devil rides out inasmuch as they are both based on novels by british occult hack dennis wheatley. the film is a mess, but an entertaining mess.

blue sunshine features a hilariously zonked lead performance from zalman king, who later went on to write/direct a string of 'erotic' softcore exploiters like wild orchid. blue sunshine auteur jeff lieberman also made squirm (so he was on a roll in 76!) and just before dawn, a sleazy backwoods slasher flikc - quentin tarantino's favourite director's commentary is apparently the one that lieberman recorded for the dvd of just before dawn, dude is quite a character

the witch who came from the sea was a borderline 'video nasty' in the uk. it was photographed by dean cundy, john carpenter's dp on halloween, the thing etc

bloodsucking freaks is a deliberately sleazy/unpleasant proto-torture porn flick from guy a named joel reed, think this has early troma-guys involvement, too

werewolf woman is seriously cheesy euro horror-porn, was still playing in uk cinemas in the early 80s!

love carrie and crazy crazy love for eraserhead but no way i'm voting anything but god told me to.

When it comes to movies with the v strong message of dear god never get pregnant or have a baby, "Eraserhead" is right up there with "The Brood" for me.

First time I ever saw Eraserhead was a double bill with Carrie, but I really don't classify it as a horror movie at all.

Need to think about that list a while, but one thing I'm sure of: Bloodsucking Freaks was, at that time, the absolute nadir of misogynist porn. Saw that one at a midnight screening and still haven't recovered.

Bloodsucking Freaks >>>> Snuff

I always forget Eraserhead was this early!

And parts of it were filmed in '71 or '72, I believe.

I would have to see The Omen again back-to-back with Carrie to see how each holds up.

But I think I'll be contrary this time & vote for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, which I saw in its theatrical release (...it's fun to be old!). I wonder if such a film could be made nowadays with its depiction of a 13-year old girl having a sex life. The '70s was the era when adolescents/young teens were doing a lot of adult things in movies. Whether that was true of real life is a question for sociologists to tackle.

interesting how different these films are than the horror films of the 80s. few mad slashers or wholly invented monsters. instead you get the occult, the natural world, even the 60s drug culture. much more open-ended view of what might be done in/with the genre, too.

Yeah this is dead on and why the films just keep getting better and better for me the farther we move away from Halloween and its sex-hating, post-Boomer-youth-killing spawn.

Still, there's a lot of caca here. I was all prepared to love Blue Sunshine, esp. since it stars my beloved Zalman King. But it just reminded me that drugs are, first and foremost, boring. Snuff is a loooooong bad joke with a stupid punchline. No one OVER 17 should be admitted into Bloodsucking Freaks. Massacre at Central High baffled me as a kid but I've since learned it's a Marxist parable... So I'm voting for that since it's the one I most want to see (again).

oh shit Burnt Offerings vs. God Told Me To for me, both incredible but wildly different films.

kinda bummed that carrie/eraserhead are going to take spots 1 and 2 here. carrie is uh ok but mostly a slog, and eraserhead is certainly something but im not sure if that something is horror or not.

Of all the automatic frontrunners in this poll, few are as close to my heart as Carrie. Fucking love that movie and am easily voting for it. Bummed I can't give God Told Me To some support, but it looks like it's already got enough.

(auto-frontrunners in this poll SERIES, I mean)

This one needs a CGI reboot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuSwwZ1n6KU

I can't imagine The Omen isn't going to give Eraserhead a run for its money on the poll. Easerhead is bizzarre and scary but it isn't a horror movie IMO, so I didn't vote for it.

To me its Carrie vs. Omen all the way.

Blood Bath - Joel Reed strikes again. but this little-known Hollyweird horror anthology is no TITS II. not a bad B-movie, though.

Communion - i suspect this is being overlooked because we know it better as 'Alice Sweet Alice.' for my money, it's still the best American giallo ever made, dripping with anti-Clerical vitriol that would have pleased Lucio Fulci. a potent picture made by one-film wonder Alfred Sole (now a big-deal production designer in TV Land. weird). 'Blue Sunshine' is tempting, but this is my pick.

Island of the Damned - oh, crap. hold that thought. from the date, this generic title must be hiding Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child?. i'll overlook the screaming idiocy of the couple confounded by the killer kiddies and call this the bar-none best horror of '76.

J.D.'s Revenge - vicious pre-"Roots" possession Blaxploitation classic that Louis Gossett, Jr. probably omits from his C.V. nothing to be ashamed of here. bloody, funky, and convincing.

Jack the Ripper - Jess Franco's?

Land of the Minotaur - ugh.

Mako: The Jaws of Death - my favorite Jaws rip-off, FWIW

Mansion of the Doomed - a sick American 'Les Yeux Sans Visage' variation. the motley eyeless survivors of an obsessed Beverly Hills doctor's failed attempts at restoring his daughters sight break out of their basement prison and grope their way towards unhappy freedom. Lance Henricksen's first major role - and he's quite good. but this is thoroughly depressing mess of a movie whose grimy ghastliness managed to suck in Richard Basehart and a near-death Gloria Grahame.

Naked Massacre - the Richard Speck story transplanted to Dublin. i remember this being rather disturbing, with a frighteningly committed performance by Mathieu Carrière. only available in hacked up public-domain prints. not a fun flick, but it deserves better.

Night of the Assassins - is this Jess Franco's 'Night of the Skull?'

The Premonition - eerie and offbeat semi-supernatural suspenser made and shot in Mississippi. multigenre icon Richard Lynch plays an unbalanced carnival worker who fell for a grief-stricken unfit mother while they were both institutionalized. he colludes with her to kidnap her daughter from the girl's foster parents upon his release. the adoptive mother is mildly psychic, but even this gift (curse?) fails to preclude inevitably tragic events. saw this once, when i was quite young, and its images of rimy mirrors, spooked horses, murderous clowns, and gory ghosts haunt me to this day.

Schizo - just got my hands on this. second Peter Walker film on the list. immortal tagline: "schizophrenia... when the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing."

SS Experiment Love Camp - i draw the line at Nazisploitation. someone else will have to field this one.

Track of the Moon Beast - pathetic MST3K fodder remembered only as one of Rick "Monster Maker" Baker's first gigs.

blanking on some of these. will post if i recover and feel i have anything else to contribute.

before someone jumps in, i know Sole made a few other movies. but they're not worth mentioning - unless yr a Smothers Brothers apologist.

Thanks for the clarification, Mr. Jam, Alice, Sweet Alice definitely deserves to be mentioned in the company of The Omen and Carrie. '76 is looking like a strong year to me.

Jack the Ripper - Jess Franco's?

yup - with Klaus Kinski. never seen it, but I'm intrigued.

if you have a multiregion player, you can get jack the ripper pretty cheap as part of this sweet franco set:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jess-Franco-Collection-Karine-Gambier/dp/B0002Z9YJ6/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1289752457&sr=1-2

I saw Massacre at Central High a few years ago, based on its inclusion in one of the Danny Peary cult books. Don't remember specifics, other than it was strange. I've only seen two or three of the rest, but I'm guessing Carrie would be an easy vote for me even if I'd seen all of them. I still have vague memories of what a commotion Snuff caused at the time.

I guess it's not fair to prejudge Bloodsucking Freaks.

watched God Told Me To over the weekend cuz of this thread. holy shit.

LOL. When "Sylvia Sidney alien rape" is the LEAST wacko part of your movie, you've really gone over and above.

really creative effects in it too

I watched the Omen last summer. To me it holds up extremely well -- it's such a clear Exorcist rip, but at the same time, its vibe is singular. The "it's all for you, Damien!" scene is just the creepiest.

I've never seen God Told Me, but Robin Wood raved about it in The American Nightmare. He was a huge Larry Cohen fan--there's a piece in there about It's Alive II that's hilarious (in a good way). You'd swear he's writing about The Seventh Seal or something, he applies such seriousness to it. (Again, I'm not accusing him of pretentiousness; I wish more critics took horror films seriously. The best ones, anyway.)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

funny, two of these films scared the living crap out of me as a kid

I convinced my mom to take me to see grizzly when I was 5, then lost it in the first attack scene where a girl gets her arm ripped off. wtf 70s PG movies? got taken to the next theater to see the bad news bears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCr5YecD580

a year or two later I was watching the little girl who lived down the lane on TV, when this scene happened it was so unexpected and realistic I turned off the TV and had a major freakout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PVefjJUUlQ

oh yeah, burnt offerings freaked me out too... this guy!

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/o_burnt_offerings.jpg

Bear cam!

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

Margin a little too close for comfort.

i give up.

That reaction made sense when blatantly not horror movies by Cronenberg were winning in landslides, not when pretty solidly horror movies by De Palma eke out narrow victories.

Yeah, how is telekinetic girl who kills her class any less horror than son of the devil mystery solving? Or "Eraserhead," for that matter, which may be horrific but is only loosely horror? "Carrie' is horror for the final jump scare alone.

(I'm pretty sure MHJ is exasperated by the these polls' results demonstrating a total unwillingness to dig beneath the surface of the canon. Which I sympathize with, but not when it comes to bitching about De Palma coming out on top just this once.)

that's not it at all. even if Carrie had been just under two hours of Pino Donaggio's score playing behind a blue screen, it'd be worth celebrating (and better than many of the other titles in this poll). Carrie is more than that, of course. it's a solid, stylishly directed "worm turns" horror. i have no use for Apocalyptic claptrap like The Omen, but others obviously do.

i keep rooting for the underdogs in these polls ('77 being an exception), hoping to do my part to shake up the canonical status quo, maybe start a groundswell of appreciation for the lesser-known titles. it never happens, does it? guess mine was the lone vote for WCKAC? but i'm frankly shocked not to see at least one vote each for some of the others, esp. with all the threadlove for Burnt Offerings and Alice Sweet Alice.

xpost - yes! that's it exactly, Eric.

i won't begrudge De Palma some recognition. but it should be for Dressed to Kill, not Carrie. as much of what doesn't work in that movie is his doing as what does. terrible sentence, but you know what i mean.

i'm voting for Femme Fatale if/when we get there.

not to be totally sour-grapes-y, i'm heartened to see multiple votes for GTMT and even some love for Blue Sunshine. Cohen and Lieberman are personal heroes of '70s cinema, both too often unsung.

Cohen's "Q" and "The Stuff" should get some love in their respective years (unless they didn't?).

I somehow doubt "Femme Fatale" will make it to any of the horror shortlists. ;) However, I heart "Femme Fatale." It's particular genius is not just in ripping off Hitchcock all the right ways, but as a sort of meta-rip-off of De Palma ripping off Hitchcock. I greatly prefer it to the ridiculous "Psycho"-isms of "Dressed to Kill."

i keep rooting for the underdogs in these polls ('77 being an exception), hoping to do my part to shake up the canonical status quo, maybe start a groundswell of appreciation for the lesser-known titles. it never happens, does it?

See, I don't think this is true at all. The underdogs never win, that much is patently obvious. However, what I see happening on this thread is discussion of films outside of the canon, which sparks interest and debate, and a longer-term "groundswell of appreciation for the lesser-known titles". I've been onto youtube and imdb to have a look at some of the things talked about here, and am now definitely going to track down Blue Sunshine and The Witch Who Came From the Sea, and quite probably a few others. I ended up not voting, but had a choice of two canon films to vote for had I done so, but this doesn't mean that the thread has had no impact at all.

I was going to vote yesterday but got sick and passed out on the couch all day instead :/

would have voted burnt offerings narrowly over god told me to

I missed the vote too. Would've gone for Carrie. (I've seen Eraserhead NUMEROUS times; was pretty obsessed with it when it was new, but I stand by the description on the movie poster: "a dream of dark and troubling things," i.e. not horror.)

emil.y otm, I've been researching some of these titles as well. I don't actually watch much horror any more, but God Told Me To looks really intriguing,

I'd echo emil.y's sentiment that the primary function of these threads is discussion and it's really encouraged me to seek out a lot of these films based on everyone's recommendations.

i can live with that. and you're right, Contenderizer. no offense/condescension taken.

Yeah, I love these threads & hope they keep coming. For some years, if we keep going backward, there won't be a canonical favorite, so the voting part will get interesting (if people don't stop voting, that is). I can think of consensus picks for 1973-1975 and two natural front-runners for 1968, but after that it gets wide open.

am i the only person that would still like to see us do some latter years? i know that peeps generally think of the 90s as a horror ditch, but there are some gems in there to be found

gems in there to be found = i still have a raging head cold and make the sentences not well

Yeah, I think the '90s will be fun for exactly that reason - I remember the period as a horror ditch as well, but then I sort of tuned out of the whole genre, so I need to catch up.

Maybe if everyone is into it, we can alternate polls moving both backwards and forward into the 90's.

i dig that idea

I remember seeing Shocker around 1990 and pretty much giving up on contemporary horror. It was back to watching old Italian cannibal movies for me - horror comfort food, if you will.

I wonder how Shocker has aged. Maybe I missed something there.

One other cool thing about these threads is that we're finding worthy aspects of imperfect films. No horror film is perfect, it turns out.

will no one rep for Strangeland lol

I didn't vote because I've only seen four on the list (top 3 vote getters + Burnt Offerings) and def don't feel qualified to comment on best horror or even favorite horror, since it's a genre I don't cotton to. But if I had voted, it would have been Burnt Offerings.

hey mr hal jam, burnt offerings is up to +3 do you feel better

I think results would've been slightly diff if the poll had been open more than 4 days

I don't know about anybody else but these polls usually cause me to revisit old flicks or search out ones I've been meaning to see, and a few days ain't enough time for archaeological cryptdigging, you'd barely get yr netflix discs by then

I remember seeing Shocker around 1990 and pretty much giving up on contemporary horror.

saw this in the theater in 1989 and your comment is strangely otm

not a fan of 'Burnt Offerings' offer too stodgy and formalist. and that isn't exactly a victory for my cause. BO was virtually a tentpole pic for UA, based on a bestselling book, with a major cast, and directed by Dan Curtis fresh from the successful first run of Dark Shadows.

But I do appreciate the strong showing of GTMT after the fact.

How did a hyphen become the word "offer?" the manifold mysteries of autocorrect...

true, burnt offerings was a big hollywood production, but it's also not very well-remembered, if at all nowadays. I give it props for ideas and mood, agree its execution is a little wobbly, but you've probably gathered by now that applying a sizzling critical approach to a genre based on triggering irrational fears is not my modus operandi in these here polls...

Co-sign on the ideas and mood, but felt Marasco executed both more memorably - i.e., the book is better.

It's cool. These polls tend to serve like a rallying cry to my inner Crusader. I can't help getting swept up in the momentum and passion and pomp and whatnot.

Carrie > Eraserhead >>>>>>>>>> The Omen

Carrie > Eraserhead > Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm >>>>>>>>>> The Omen

I think results would've been slightly diff if the poll had been open more than 4 days

I don't know about anybody else but these polls usually cause me to revisit old flicks or search out ones I've been meaning to see, and a few days ain't enough time for archaeological cryptdigging, you'd barely get yr netflix discs by then

I'll keep future polls open longer - I kept this one shorter, since in the past discussions seemed to peter out after a few days.

For all our cavils, Darin, have we ever thanked you for organizing these polls? Prolly not. consider this a belated but genuine gesture of appreciation.

thanks seconded!

damn, I was at the library yesterday getting some horror (Day of the Dead, Drag me to Hell) and I saw GTMT. at least I know where I can get it now

I'm thrilled that so many of you guys have been into it! Thanks for all the thoughtful posts and great recommendations.

yeah, sincere thanks from me too, darin. look forward to these threads more than almost anything else on ILX.

"I remember seeing Shocker around 1990 and pretty much giving up on contemporary horror.

saw this in the theater in 1989 and your comment is strangely otm

― death panel of the mods (Edward III), Thursday, November 18, 2010 9:49 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

strangely yeah. me too. that said, shocker was one of several nails in the coffin, circa 88-90.

watched shocker with former ilxor FB because his cousin was in it. its terrible.

oh man i LOVE the Omen, so many great brit character actors in it, chewin' the scenery (leo mckern, patrick troughton, david warner, billie whitelaw), some really evocative location work, one of goldsmith's most memorable scores - worth the price of admission alone for the decapitation scene

and for "it's all for you, damien!" - that scares me to this day

I think "The Omen" may have been my earliest exposure to horror. I was 8 years old in 1977, and we were stationed overseas, in Germany. The building in which we lived, a 14-floor high rise, had a "library" on one of the floors from which residents could borrow paperbacks. Among them was the novelization of "The Omen," which included a section of b&w stills from the movie, as was the fashion at the time. It had stills of all the setpieces: The "it's all for you, Damien" hanging, the priest impaled by the steeple, the decapitation . . . 8-year-old me just couldn't get enough of leafing through that book!

And that's why, today, I'm a serial killer.

tub girl time machine kill them all

watched shocker with former ilxor FB because his cousin was in it

You had a former fuck buddy who was ... a he?!

all the secrets are surfacing this week

i will admit that my doofus atheist upbringing kinda makes/made possession films kinda whatever for me, so yeah, not that spooked by the omen.

xpost haha whoops that would be former ilxor Fluffy Bear, but i should prob be more aware of all the acronyms you kids are using these days

his username is really not helping here is it

haaa

Whoops. :)

i am now lolling about the number of times i have used that abbrev all over ilx without thinking twice about it, may have to use search function and start a thread

for example:

John Justen wrote this on thread Silly McGoofsalot and the LeDuc Incident: a Cowtown Caper on board I Love Everything on Apr 11, 2007

FB - nailed.

i think dan is trying to get me to bone FB.

too late yall im taken

― NOT FUNNY NEEDS MORE CGI (jjjusten), Tuesday, August 10, 2010 3:28 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

plus you guys boned years ago

― people are for loving (HI DERE), Tuesday, August 10, 2010 4:19 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

BRAIN BLEACH NOW!!!

― Sara R-C, Tuesday, August 10, 2010 4:54 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You all knew what you were doing. Quit backpedalling.

yeah, sincere thanks from me too, darin. look forward to these threads more than almost anything else on ILX.

Ditto.

a couple days late but just wanted to say that I've been using these threads to check out tons of stuff I haven't seen as well. definitely appreciated! except now my netflix queue keeps hitting the 500 dvd wall. :-o

I will be starting the 1930s comedies poll shortly

And I'll be starting my 1960s Sunshine-Pop Fluff Movies poll. (So far it's just The Sterile Cuckoo, Goodbye, Columbus, and Georgy Girl.)

I watched Alice Sweet Alice (aka Communion) tonight, mostly because I remember catching it on television once as a kid and coming away certain that it was the weirdest movie I'd ever seen. It is still plenty messed up (and I'm grateful to have been directed towards Alphonso DeNoble's wikipedia page, which would be ideal for the Unusual Wiki Details thread, except that the whole entry is unusual details), but having learned a few things about the giallo genre in the years since, the film cannot help but feel somewhat less unique now as a result. Without getting too spoiler-y, I was disappointed by how unclearly the killer's motives were defined (trauma? enacting Catholic vengeance? madness?), and how the sequence in which the victims were murdered seemed determined by keeping up the misdirection of the plot, rather than following any logical sense. I realize this may be extended as a critique of giallo conventions as a whole, but I think that something like Tenebre (which has a far more ludicrous plot than this film) works particularly because of its stylistic excess, this film's grungy earthiness (for lack of a better term; this film looks and feels so authentically damp and cold that I actually paused to put on a sweater at one point) grounds it in a sense of reality that had me taking the plot more seriously than I would something like Tenebre.

Still, some good creepy moments, and more than a few WTF ones--"BUT YOU GAVE IT TO THE WHOOORRREEE!" is a line reading deserving of a high place within the camp lexicon. I can't imagine anyone who participated in this thread but who hasn't seen the film not digging it at least a little bit.

other than the disappointingly abrupt ending, really enjoyed my first-ever watch of Blue Sunshine tonight.