Your personal favorite horror movie?

How does Exorcist try to hurt you? I'm curious. I know I've seen Exorcist except it's been many-a year and I barely remember it. I don't remember being all that scared though... I think for 1974 it would have been terrifying. Context is important for stuff like that.

Psycho has the climax that made my heart drop. The shower scene wasn't too terribly frightening though.

The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is unsettling throughout although it doesn't have any ebbs and flows. It's just consistently creepy.

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The film has no comedy, no counterpoint, no relief. The film moves one direction and does so relentlessly.

This direction involves harm to children. It means business. There are no limits. We watch a child sexually assaulted by a demon using a crucifix to violate her.

The film mocks the efficacy of the theistic beliefs the audience brought in with them. In 1973, audiences were much more credulous of God and the horror in this film is predicated on that credulity. That is, you're only sold on the idea of a Devil out to get you if there is also a God out to save you. But the God-ritual is not triumphant. Religion fails. The Devil can still claim you even with heavy hitting litigants from the firm of Rome called in to save you. You're screwed. The film doesn't end in triumph so much as a desperate exchange. The film wants you to believe in God and wants to mock you for believing God will save you.

The film is nasty. It is cruel. It is dark. It is a heavy dose of irrational fear. When I was a child I thought I hated it for holding the power of Christ in contempt (God doesn't lose!). As an adult I realize that I hated it because it spoke to precisely that fear---but what if he does? Or what if he's off somewhere else sometime when there's a thing under your bed or behind the shower curtain or at the side of some lonely road in the dead of night, just at the periphery of your vision.

In this sense, the film is really a test of faith (and, paradoxically, of total non-belief). If you didn't have the Beetlejuice response, then it turns out that you do believe after all, just not enough to save your own soul.

A difficult question for me to answer.

My favourite film is Jaws. But I don't think of it as a horror film, so it can't be my favourite horror film. The highest horror film on my 100 is Interview With The Vampire but, while it is a horror film, I also don't really think of it like that either (despite having no doubts that it is and that's how I'd categorise it) there isn't any real intent to scare or even horrify. I think The Exorcist is the best made horror film and there's no argument that it is a horror film, but it's certainly not my favourite. If I take the OP at its word, then I'm stuck because horror films don't scare me at all, so I don't have a favourite, but I obviously do as I love horror films. Also, the only films to ever scare me did so as a child and they were The Entity and Pinocchio. (Although The Curse Of The Werewolf also scared me but only on the way home and not while watching the film) so is Pinocchio my favourite horror? I didn't finish it, so it can't be, plus I hated it plus it's not a horror film. Can you hate your favourite horror film? So it's The Entity? But I've seen it since and it's not scary and isn't a favourite film.

It could be Near Dark. I love that and it's a horror film, but it's also like a Western and that feels like it can't be the 'correct' answer to this. Scream could be a good call but, is it too knowing and amusing to be a horror film? It can play like straight up horror (if you've not seen the stuff it references/meta stuff then that's how it'd play isn't it?) but, again, it feels like the fact it's not a straight faced horror means it shouldn't be #1. I could be all pretentious and esoteric and go with All Quiet On The Western Front or Schindler's List. I don't think anyone would question the horror of either of those films but they're not horror films even if what they present is horrific and horrifying. So what is the answer? What feels right to me? I'd go with one of the following - Dawn Of The Dead (1978), A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) or Halloween (1978) and, probably, one of the last two as I find quite a comfort in Dawn Of The Dead because it provides a nostalgic comfort for the first time I saw it, although I probably like Dawn better than the other two but zombies? They're just not scary, are they?

So, as I love slashers, it's probably A Nightmare On Elm Street or Halloween. I prefer Freddy over Michael, but Halloween is probably the better film and I feel has aged better too. But ask another day and I might pick the other? Or, if I find a hole in my feelings/arguement I might choose one of those I rejected earlier or suddenly remember one I forgot.

In other words, I think I know, but I'm not really sure.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

I think I may have found the true epicenter of horror...

Here's how I see it: Jaws: first two acts are horror, third is adventure. Only real flaw for me is the genre shift (you can even tell from John Williams' soundtrack that it totally changes vibes), but I've seen it three times and loved each go.



Interview with a Vampire: horror drama, straightforward.

You really struck a nerve there with me, a good nerve I mean.
One of the weird quirks of my film and Horror fandom has always been that The Exorcist does nothing for me. Doesn't give me even one chill from its start to its finish. I've seen it on HBO, I've seen it in the theater (re-release), I've seen it on DVD. And the only effect it's ever really had on me is that I actually got kinda bored and started checking my watch.
I have also been an atheist since I was a teenager, starting almost 40 years ago. That long and you get way past the "but what if" stage to a level of certainty that's as woven into the fabric of your world as water being wet. A Truth so fundamental and foundational you don't even think about anymore, like the existence of dirt under your feet.
And I was probably ten years into that when I saw The Exorcist in one sitting for the first time. And I was actually a little baffled. How was this the scariest movie ever? How was it scary at all?
To be clear, I did not think about it in terms of my beliefs, not at that time and not for many years to come. I just didn't find anything remotely scary about the movie and I was perplexed. How could The Scariest Movie Ever fail to raise a single goosebump on my flesh in 2 hours and 2 minutes of trying?
It was not til many years later, after one or two more viewings, and pretty recently really, that I started to consider that it was because to me Devils and Demons are on the level of Dungeons and Dragons. Fun fantasy at most but not something any rational adult or even teenager could actually be scared by. There is no test of faith for me, I've never had any. There is no "What if God doesn't show" to me because there are no gods in my world. So there was no tension, this whole thing was just a spook-show and one where I wasn't scared of the spook.
Now I also know that witches and ghosts don't exist and yet I have been scared shitless in a couple of Witch or Ghost movies so I can't account for that yet.
But what you've said here, your explanation of what the effect of the film was to you really shed some light to me on why it doesn't work on me.
Which has been considered by many who've known me to be the most bizarre stance for a Horror-fanatic ever taken.

Gonna have to go Top Gun.

Perhaps, if you will indulge a few more comments, I might add to that categorical moment of clarity with a reminder of the quality of being embedded in that category.

Imagine being six-years-old or so,
peeling the onion of dogma
of that mainstream religion
into which you were born.

You learn,
from the wisest most trusted people you know,
that if you disappoint some invisible super-parent
you will be tormented for all eternity.

In fire.

By demons.

You're not yelled at.
You're not shown pictures.
You are assured that only really bad people go there...
...so just make sure you're not bad.

This just sort of comes out as a "matter of fact,"
like learning that the grocery store is a half-mile away,
or that Timmy is your second-cousin.
It's just how it is.

These are the same people who are telling you that there's nothing under the bed
(don't be silly!).

A few years later, you watch The Exorcist.

Did you make that up?

No, I lived it. The words are just what I happened to type in the attempt to capture the existential dread of it. The experience was quite typical for my time and place.

At some point, someone pulls you aside and deflates the idea of Santa Claus. Hell? It remains as an article of faith. It's another large piece of psychic baggage that is added on to your death-awareness.

Hell is separation from God, IMO. Vast majority go there. Only few keep on straight and narrow, through Jesus Christ.

It's certainly much nicer to think of someone hurting themselves by running away from the light, than an angry God casting people into the burning pit. As C.S. Lewis put it, either we say "thy will be done," or God says the same thing to us.

Even more appealing, to my lights, was learning that Jehova's Witnesses don't believe in Hell at all. You either make it into Heaven or you're just consigned to non-existence. Cool. The downside is that they think on 188,000 get in. I did the math on that one and quickly decided that I was not in the top one percent of one percent of all humans who have ever lived. And if the only punishment for not making the grade is non-existence, there is no real motivation to "be better" than you would have been anyway. The carrot is mathematically unlikely. And there is no stick, so you might as well live it up in this life and let the JW's fight it out to find who is the best of the best of the best. Good luck, lads!

Overall, the old "fire and brimstone" approach to Christianity has faded considerably. The tension between justice and mercy has resolved in the modern church decidedly in favor of mercy. Cotton Mather is out. Cotton-Soft Jesus is in. This takes the edge off of the idea of God being a "sky bully," but it also takes away the sense of there being real stakes involved in sin. Jesus loves you, so come to the Lord. Sounds good. But it also comes with a vision of God as something like Santa Claus, a way to get healthy, a way to get rich, a way to feel good about yourself without ever having to really change (as there is no stick if there is no Divine Justice).

In horror cinema, we've seen an opposite pattern. That is, we're offered the promise of Hell and/or demons and/or possession, but without reference to God or Religion. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are typical examples of this. We have "Hellmouths" from which all sort of monsters emerge. Even so, the Buffyverse is not big on God, preferring to rely on vague "powers that be" as competing with the forces of darkness. Faith is passe. The moment of transition that made The Exorcist so effective is now over for general audiences.

And again, a favorite film of mine that marks the tail end of this transition is Frailty, which is a spooky movie for non-believers. The fear in this one comes from the getting Pascal's wager wrong and discovering that there is indeed Divine Justice. Great little film and a good scare for secularists (Boo!).

I suspect that our future sources of horror will be uncanny AI's. Not ghost in the machine, but machine-as-ghost.

Separation from God by sin is no picnic, but neither is it burning in the fires of hell for eternity.

Santa Claus is the good side of Satan, who was the most perfect angel Lucifer who rebelled against God. Even so, I'm not sure if Satan is in hell or not, because his rebellion was with good intentions.

I surmise statue of Liberty is statue of Lucifer in Satanic US.

What I meant was that that was very good. I have a friend who's a poet who sends me stuff all the time and it's a lot like that.

As for the latter point, yeah, I feel ya.

Also, we should probably curtail this conversation to save the thread. I expressed my personal religious belief directly as it related to the film and as a specific point about why I don't react typically to that film. But I don't want to push us into conversation that violates forum policy.

The Exorcist isn't getting enough credit if we start thinking its horror is aimed exclusively towards upsetting the religious. The movies reach is much wider than this. What it is attacking is our belief systems, our understanding of the material world, our trust in the authority of those who say they have the answers but maybe do not. And this absolutely includes atheists, who trust only in what can be empirically proven, science being the navigational force they use to guide them through life. That is what is so important about The Exoricst's use of realism. It is not sold to the audience as a horror film (even though marketers may have eventually done this). It is sold as a drama. It's not played as kids fare, as a lot of horror films had done up to that point, nor does it have a lot of overt cinematic stylization to put a distance between it and the audience. It is presented as truth. Exactly the kind of truth that something like science says we can trust and believe in. And then it overtly pulls that rug out from us. All the authority figures are wrong. Parents don't know anything. The world is a place of confusion and we are helpless within it. Not only can't your faith in God save you, neither can your supposed rational atheism either.

Nuh-uh. She was hot as hell.

Was she really though? I looked up the word "basic" in the dictionary and found a picture of Eliza Dushku in a leather jacket waiting on a pumpkin spice latte. Her approach to the character was basically "Joe" from Facts of Life. Her dialogue was cut-and-pasted from James Cameron (e.g,. "Stay frosty," "We're five-by-five"). She was supposed to be Dark Buffy (like evil Spock with a goatee), but she was more of a Dork Buffy who just didn't fit in well with people. Her best moment is when she knocks the crap out of Connor (who was somehow an even more annoying character, at times).

Yes. It's really that simple.