The Horror! The Horror!

As a Halloween salute, I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and do a list of my top horror movies (because I can never resist a good cliché). My list contains movies that scared me, ones that made me go “yeesh”, and ones that were just memorable to me in some way (even though the movie may have sucked). It’s my list, so I can do whatever I want. I’m even going to make it a top 13 list, not a top 10 list. Bwah ha ha!

13. Trilogy of Terror (1975) – I saw this movie on TV when I was about eight years old. The movie was an anthology of three stories that featured Karen Black in different starring roles for all three. I couldn’t tell you anything about the first two, but the last story was about a lady who acquires a tiny little African doll with big teeth. Somehow it comes to life and chases her around the apartment, biting at her feet. For an eight year old kid, this freaked me out. Little toys aren't supposed to come to life, and if they do they're supposed to be your friend.

A few years later, my family went to Universal Studios for vacation, and I saw the same little doll on display in an exhibit of horror movie props. Luckily, it didn’t chase me around the park.


12. Happy Birthday To Me (1981) – When I was in junior high, this was the very first slasher movie I saw in the theater. It was one of the many copycat movies made during the craze started by movies like Friday the 13th and Halloween. The gimmick for this movie was that a) the murders were supposed to be gruesomely unique, and b) the movie starred Melissa Sue Anderson, Mary from Little House on the Prairie!

Besides the shish kebab impalement depicted on the movie poster, the only other murder I remember went like this: a beefy teenager was bench pressing weights, and the killer (who the teenager knew, but didn't know he was the killer) was spotting him. Somehow the teenager gets stuck with a weight that he couldn’t get back on the rack, so he’s trapped holding the barbell directly over his neck. The killer takes a weight and holds it over the teenager’s groin; he drops it, and the teenager drops the barbell on his own throat. Splat! Nothing hurts more than getting a weight dropped on your package.


11. Carnival of Souls (1962) – I first saw this black & white movie on late-night TV, and it creeped me out. Many years later I saw it on DVD, and it didn’t really do anything for me. But it’s still a unique film, given that it’s a low-budget movie by a director that had previously only made industrial and educational films. Intentional or not, the movie has an eerie visual style that rises above B-movie cheesiness.

The movie is about a woman who survives a car accident and moves to Utah to take a job as a church organist. As she settles into her new life, she begins to see ghostly apparitions that only she can see. The ghostly encounters become more frequent, and she starts having her own trippy experiences where no one can see her. Ultimately she ends up at a deserted carnival for the big finale, and we learn the secret of her connection with the ghosts.


Stay tuned for more of the list! Wooooooo!