Saturday, October 13, 2007

This is Halloween...


It's that time of year again! Jack-o'-lantern on every porch, gingerbread in every oven and children repeating that same old mantra in every street: « Trick or treat?! » Well, I thought this was the perfect time for me to share my passion for horror movies with you. If you thought your English assistant was a creep, well, wait until you read all this...

Yes, I am a big horror movie fan. The gorier, the better. But like for all cinematographic genres, I think we need to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to horror movies. In what follows, I will try to make a few suggestions of what I consider good horror flicks.

The goriest movie of all time has to be Peter Jackson's « Braindead », but then again I wouldn't say his movie is frightening. It is actually quite funny to see so much fake blood, or at least I find it funny and I believe at least one person in BAC2 agrees with me (you know who you are).

No, if you're looking for stuff that will scare the hell out of you, well try Stephen King's « IT », Michael Haneke's « Funny Games» or Takashi Miike's « Ôdishon » (sometimes spelt « Audition »). This last one starts of as a regular Japanese movie, a bit like « Ringu », but after about 45 minutes, everything goes south to say the least. If you're into vampire stuff, try "Shadow of the Vampire" with John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe. Dracula has never been scarier...

I also love Zombie movies, especially early ones by George A. Romero (we're not related, I guess) such as « Night of the Living Dead ». By the way, Romero (not me, him) will be releasing a Blair Witch-kind of movie called « Diary of the Dead » which looks very promising. There's another such Blair Witch-esque Zombie Flick called « The Zombie Diaries » and it sure looks scary.

If you're into the apocalyptic kind of movies, you should definitely go for Danny Boyle's « 28 Days Later » and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's sequel « 28 Weeks Later ». And let this be absolutely clear: real Taboulé is made with lots of parlsey, and the « 28 XXX Later » series is NOT about zombies; it's about infected human beings losing it. Like most Zombie fans, I am eargerly awaiting the film version of Max Brooks's « World War Z ». Now THAT is a scary book if there ever was one.

1 comment:

FX said...

What a surprise to see such a post on this blog! I'm also a big fan of horror movies (the zombie quadrilogy of Romero, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, ...)

You've got to see 28 weeks later, it's not as good as the first one but it's always a pleasure to see such a gore movie in theaters! :D

I highly recommend 'The Thing' (John Carpenter), which is just the greatest horror movie of all time (according to me of course ;))

A last thing: SHAME ON ME, I've never seen Brain Dead or Bad Taste from Peter Jackson. So if anybody has the DVDs ... Pleaaaaaaaaaaase :)