Halloween is here, my favorite non-holiday type holiday. It's not really a holiday since no one gets a day off from it, but it's a lot less depressing than Valentine's Day, and a lot more sober than St. Patrick's Day. Halloween represents fun to me, I love hanging around and watching scary movies, I usually have a few up my sleeve that are musts.
My favorite horror movie isn't exactly a horror movie, it's more of a dark comedy, it's "Bride of Frankenstein", it's a classic. You look at it today, and it's campy, but it's also funny, not "bad movie" funny, but deliberately funny. It's actually a film that's obsessed with the ideas of life and death and finds dark humour in it. Plus it has Boris Karlof as The Monster, and Elsa Lanchester as his bride and also Mary Shelley who wrote the original "Frankenstein" story. She's shows up at the beginning, and tells the story. Plus it's a great looking film in black and white, some films just belong in black and white and this is one of them.
I have to say I've become more of a fan of horror movies as time goes by. Maybe as a kid, I was usually not aloud to watch anything gory, but it's grown on me. I especially love Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", and John Carpenter's "Halloween". Plus Hitchcock's "The Birds" which I do find frightening, plus "Psycho" is just a classic.
Halloween is also the time when my absolute favorite show of all time "The Simpsons" comes out with their latest "Treehouse of Horror" anthology. "The Simpsons" are still very funny, maybe not as funny as they once were, but they are still able to make me laugh more than most shows.
But let's get back to scary movies, after all that's what I really love it for. Along with "Bride of Frankenstein", there's all the Universal horror monsters like "Dracula" with Bela Lugosi, and "The Wolf Man" with Lon Chaney Jr. Okay so here's a shock, I find those movies vastly overrated. Yes, looking at "Dracula", I find it to be dull despite Lugosi's great performance, it's underwhelming, in fact the only vampire movie I find actually good are the original "Nosferatu" and its remake by Werner Herzog in 1979, check those out if you want to see something horrifying. I also saw the film "Let Me In" just recently which I thought was another great vampire movie, but that was based on a Sweedish film I have not seen.
"The Wolf Man" is very atmospheric and has a lot of good performances (Hooray for Ralph Bellamy), but the monster itself doesn't do much but snarl at the camera a few times. He also isn't that mysterious once you see him, his reveal isn't as epic as the first time you see Frankenstein or Dracula in those old movies.
There's lots of old movies I love in the horror genre, you should check out the Val Lewton films like "Cat People" and "The 7th Victim" plus there's Peter Lorre in "Mad Love", and for pure camp and fun there's Humphrey Bogart playing a living dead person in "The Return of Doctor X", one of his pre-star days.
One horror movie monster I have mixed feelings about is the zombie. Probably because they are over-exposed, I'm starting to have this problem with the vampire too, they aren't scary anymore and there isn't much of a point to them anymore. Plus I wasn't much of a fan of the original zombie films like "Night of the Living Dead" or "Dawn of the Dead", the whole idea of them isn't frightening, yet so many people make zombie movies.
So here's my top ten favorite horror movies of all time some of them aren't scary by today's standards, but I still like them.
1. Bride of Frankenstein
2. Psycho
3. The Shining
4. Repulsion
5. The Birds
6. Cat People
7. Rosemary's Baby
8. The 7th Victim
9. Frankenstein
10.Halloween
Tomorrow I'll talk about more Halloween related material.
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