Gonna get weird & talk about my giganto list of horror movies
A few Octobers back, when everyone and their mother was putting out their must-see scary movie lists, I decided to gather up as many as I could find and cobble them together into my own giant list. I was tired of trying to remember if I'd seen this lesser-known film or that quintessential film, the title of the film a friend was going on about a few weeks earlier, movies that had been recommended to me, etc., and figured it was just time to outsource that effort to a proper list.
And because I'm me and I like to overthink everything, I then made it weird by breaking it down into categories, subtypes and eras, and I'm going to tell you about it, because I need to think/talk some things out, and who's reading anyway? (Unless you are, in which case, hi, you!)
Category 1: Monsters - often a fear of nature and the in/unhuman
- Monster Mash: traditional, unnatural or supernatural monsters, including folklore, fakelore, werethings and fairy-tale stuff
- Creature Features: natural or realistic things as monsters, including animals, insects, plants and cryptids
Category 2: Dead Things - fear of death and dead things as a metaphor for whatever
- Ornery Dead: corporeal, i.e. vampires, mummies and zombies at any speed, including the not-actually-dead metaphorical variety
- Ghost Stories: incorporeal, i.e. spirits, ghostly encounters, hauntings, entities attached to a person, place or thing, including films where they say 'demon' to make it extra-spicy but story-wise treat like a bog-standard scary ghost
Category 3: Knowledge - secret knowledge, special knowledge, knowledge as power but in a scary way, etc.
- Bad Religion: generally folk horror - magic, religion and the occult, old/odd gods, witchiness and psychic powers
- Mad Science: generally bio/body horror - science run amok, messing with nature, misuse of technology, disease and disaster
- Extra/Terrestrial: generally cosmic horror - mind, space and existential fuckery, outer space and outer planes
Category 4: Society - fear of inclusion or exclusion, and social breakdown1
- Baleful Boonies: the threat is being apart from society, isolated, lost and alone in unfamiliar, hostile territory, but a rural setting isn't a prerequisite - it's not physical isolation alone (or at all) but being an outsider that puts a target on the protagonist's back
- Savage Society: the threat is being part of society, and a system that oppresses you by design, or that has turned against you - the military's rolled in to take over your town, aliens have infiltrated your community, there's a system putting a target on your back, because it's working exactly as intended
- Failed State: the threat is being in a broken society, where order has collapsed entirely and chaos reigns - there's no system to be inside or outside of, and that's the danger
Category 5: People - always the problem! Always!
- The Fucking Worst: terrible people! Madmen, serial killers, home invasions and random bastards
- Slasher-rama2: terrible people, but following a formula - in a setting that is familiar enough that characters are at ease, something stirs up memories of an old wrong, which sets off someone who lashes out in a vengeful killing spree which almost always involves improvised/bladed weapons (not guns) and quick but often creative deaths (not torture)3
- Home Sweet Hell: intimate threats - fatal families, sinister spouses, terrible tots, gruesome grannies, alliterative aunties and so forth
Category 6: Pretzels - where categorization itself is the horror
- Murky Stew: if categories are so vague or complicated due to meta commentary, metaphors, mixed/multi-trope stories, or gear shifts (where it's not a horror movie until it very suddenly is one), then into the stew it goes
- Mystery Meat: things that defy convenient categorization, because they're too niche, too art school, or they're part of a foreign (to me) subgenre that just doesn't quite fit
- Tofu of Terror: things that are horror-flavored, but not actually scary, like all-ages/kiddie horror, horror-comedy and spoofs
- Horror D'oeuvres: anthologies! Horror loves anthologies, and they're usually a buffet of types and tropes, so they get their own basket
Category 7: Meta - where the non-fic goes! Media about horror, and real fears
- Meta Musings: documentaries and docuseries about the genre in general, specific works and creators, and relevant adjacent/niche topics, like The Nightmare (2015), a documentary on night terrors that manages to also be terrifying its own right
- True Crime: works I find noteworthy, influential stuff, fictionalized retellings that could easily make the list themselves, like Citizen X (1995), a fascinating fictionalization of the hunt for Andrei Chikatilo and how it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and ideology
Eras are divvied up into 20-year sections after 1960, because nitpicking aside (when did 'American New Wave' start? Should the '00s be bookended between 9/11 and 1/6?), it just works easier...
Era 1 - up through 1960: 80-odd years from the invention of film and birth of cinema, through 'old Hollywood', the imposition (and subversion) of the Hays Code, the rise and fall of the studio sytem, set against world wars, the Cold War, the fall of empires (as we pretend new ones aren't taking their place).
This covers most of your Universal monsters, giant radioactive animals, and creatures from another planet.
Era 2 - 1961-80: 20 years around the 'new Hollywood' period, when the reins were loosened on directors and they could get a bit more morally ambiguous, while the national view of ourselves and our morality was challenged by the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, and young suburbanites scared themselves by imagining the city! the country! hippies! non-white people! In their defense, the '70s was the decade of the serial killer, so...
Here's your backwoods brutality, menacing hippies, hagsploitation, and the birth of the zombie film.
Era 3 - 1981-2000: the franchise era! 20 years during which the VCR took horror mainstream, made it almost respectable, then bogged it down with tired, uninspired sequels, and a million and one Hannibal Lecter wannabes. In the real world, there was AIDS, the Satanic Panic, Wall Street vs Main Street, the evangelicals vs everybody, and a lot of people pretending cynicism is a personality.
In here - well, this is the golden age, so all the stuff you think of as horror, basically. But also, so many smug serial killers. SO MANY.
Era 4 - 2001-2020: 20 weird years, in which real horror pushed us back to a version of backwoods brutality (no, torture porn wasn't new or an indictment of the genre), TV took center-stage and everything suddenly became 'a 10-hour movie', Hollywood tried very, very hard to ignore found footage and make CGI-driven action/horror/comedy hybrids a thing, and Netflix killed Blockbuster and then DVDs, while we were busy watching the real-time horror of our relatives becoming screaming bigots and conspiracy theorists.
Sure, you've got Saw and Hostel, which reflected some weird societal shit, but you've also got your Babadook and Hereditary, reflecting other weird societal shit. (Hint: horror always reflects weird societal shit. The whole genre's about pushing your buttons.)
This is also where you find the reboots, as Hollywood tried to figure out how to bring back the profitable franchise for an audience that was okay with a Friday the 13th marathon on TV but not with paying to see yet another dumb sequel in theaters.
Friday the 13th (2009) didn't quite make it, because they sidestepped the franchise too far, opting for a vague urban legend and a generic kidnapper in the woods, and Halloween (2007) decided to demystify a character literally known as The Shape with a white trash back story that thoroughly misunderstood the point of setting shit in the 'burbs in the first place, but Halloween (2018) poked at the trauma of surviving, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) remembered that before Freddy was funny, he was a child molester, and for all the many, MANY faults of Poltergeist (2015), it at least tried to vaguely wave at real world events in the form of the housing bubble and economy.
The Millennials might be killing all industry as we know it, but they at least got Hollywood to remember that beyond popcorn and cat scares, horror is about pushing buttons.
And that's how we get to Evil Dead (2013) and Hellraiser (2022) both upending the tired sin=death nonsense-that Boomer hypocrisy of titillating the audience with sex, drugs and rock & roll while pretending there's some kind of moral punishment implicit in it-by turning that 20th century party vibe upside down as 21st century social problems, making its protagonists unreliable addicts and its supporting characters supportive characters trying to help them, and the plot ends up actually meaning something, so of course the fanboys hate it - but when don't they?
Anyway.
Era 5! Currently upon us! The fragmentation of the streaming wars as mega-corps suck up distribution routes, killing even the idea of indies being able to get their shit out there, and drowning innovation in a sea of superhero IPs. Honestly, we could be off to a better start.
So...
Why do I do this to myself? Because I like seeing how things develop and evolve, nerding out at the sight of a category color-coded for a decade then dropping off suddenly, little clusters of weirdness.
NOW YOU KNOW.
1 "But mokie, how many horror movies do those actually fit?" Genre is a basket that catches similar things-sometimes defined by setting (fantasy), sometimes by mood (horror), sometimes by a fancy-pants attitude problem ('literature')-rather than a fence that divides things. A lot of stuff on my list wouldn't make other people's lists, because I'm not worried about whether it's horror or scifi, or horror or suspense - I see it as horror AND...
2 The slasher subgenre gets its own basket, outside of The Fucking Worst, because of just how much of it there is, since slashers were the dominant subgenre during horror's '80s heyday - so much so that most 'rules for horror' or definitions of it are just slasher tropes cited by people who conflate the subgenre with horror in general, and also insist that they hate horror but love True Crime, or usually hate horror, but love 'elevated horror'.
In case it's not obvious, this irritates the hell out of me.
3 The supernatural element usually crept in once it wanked off into franchise territory, because trying to swap in copycat killers wasn't cutting it, and it happened to dovetail nicely with the traditional Western ghost story's 'past wrongs = present consequences' formula.
Someone out there writing about slashers compared it to Asian ghosts as an unstoppable death curse on a particular location, and "the unshakeable presence of the past" as a pointed stab at America's relative lack of reckoning with our history, but Google is now useless for actually searching the internet for anything outside your algorithmically approved results, so good luck finding that essay. (Dammit.)
And because I'm me and I like to overthink everything, I then made it weird by breaking it down into categories, subtypes and eras, and I'm going to tell you about it, because I need to think/talk some things out, and who's reading anyway? (Unless you are, in which case, hi, you!)
Category 1: Monsters - often a fear of nature and the in/unhuman
- Monster Mash: traditional, unnatural or supernatural monsters, including folklore, fakelore, werethings and fairy-tale stuff
- Creature Features: natural or realistic things as monsters, including animals, insects, plants and cryptids
Category 2: Dead Things - fear of death and dead things as a metaphor for whatever
- Ornery Dead: corporeal, i.e. vampires, mummies and zombies at any speed, including the not-actually-dead metaphorical variety
- Ghost Stories: incorporeal, i.e. spirits, ghostly encounters, hauntings, entities attached to a person, place or thing, including films where they say 'demon' to make it extra-spicy but story-wise treat like a bog-standard scary ghost
Category 3: Knowledge - secret knowledge, special knowledge, knowledge as power but in a scary way, etc.
- Bad Religion: generally folk horror - magic, religion and the occult, old/odd gods, witchiness and psychic powers
- Mad Science: generally bio/body horror - science run amok, messing with nature, misuse of technology, disease and disaster
- Extra/Terrestrial: generally cosmic horror - mind, space and existential fuckery, outer space and outer planes
Category 4: Society - fear of inclusion or exclusion, and social breakdown1
- Baleful Boonies: the threat is being apart from society, isolated, lost and alone in unfamiliar, hostile territory, but a rural setting isn't a prerequisite - it's not physical isolation alone (or at all) but being an outsider that puts a target on the protagonist's back
- Savage Society: the threat is being part of society, and a system that oppresses you by design, or that has turned against you - the military's rolled in to take over your town, aliens have infiltrated your community, there's a system putting a target on your back, because it's working exactly as intended
- Failed State: the threat is being in a broken society, where order has collapsed entirely and chaos reigns - there's no system to be inside or outside of, and that's the danger
Category 5: People - always the problem! Always!
- The Fucking Worst: terrible people! Madmen, serial killers, home invasions and random bastards
- Slasher-rama2: terrible people, but following a formula - in a setting that is familiar enough that characters are at ease, something stirs up memories of an old wrong, which sets off someone who lashes out in a vengeful killing spree which almost always involves improvised/bladed weapons (not guns) and quick but often creative deaths (not torture)3
- Home Sweet Hell: intimate threats - fatal families, sinister spouses, terrible tots, gruesome grannies, alliterative aunties and so forth
Category 6: Pretzels - where categorization itself is the horror
- Murky Stew: if categories are so vague or complicated due to meta commentary, metaphors, mixed/multi-trope stories, or gear shifts (where it's not a horror movie until it very suddenly is one), then into the stew it goes
- Mystery Meat: things that defy convenient categorization, because they're too niche, too art school, or they're part of a foreign (to me) subgenre that just doesn't quite fit
- Tofu of Terror: things that are horror-flavored, but not actually scary, like all-ages/kiddie horror, horror-comedy and spoofs
- Horror D'oeuvres: anthologies! Horror loves anthologies, and they're usually a buffet of types and tropes, so they get their own basket
Category 7: Meta - where the non-fic goes! Media about horror, and real fears
- Meta Musings: documentaries and docuseries about the genre in general, specific works and creators, and relevant adjacent/niche topics, like The Nightmare (2015), a documentary on night terrors that manages to also be terrifying its own right
- True Crime: works I find noteworthy, influential stuff, fictionalized retellings that could easily make the list themselves, like Citizen X (1995), a fascinating fictionalization of the hunt for Andrei Chikatilo and how it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and ideology
Eras are divvied up into 20-year sections after 1960, because nitpicking aside (when did 'American New Wave' start? Should the '00s be bookended between 9/11 and 1/6?), it just works easier...
Era 1 - up through 1960: 80-odd years from the invention of film and birth of cinema, through 'old Hollywood', the imposition (and subversion) of the Hays Code, the rise and fall of the studio sytem, set against world wars, the Cold War, the fall of empires (as we pretend new ones aren't taking their place).
This covers most of your Universal monsters, giant radioactive animals, and creatures from another planet.
Era 2 - 1961-80: 20 years around the 'new Hollywood' period, when the reins were loosened on directors and they could get a bit more morally ambiguous, while the national view of ourselves and our morality was challenged by the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, and young suburbanites scared themselves by imagining the city! the country! hippies! non-white people! In their defense, the '70s was the decade of the serial killer, so...
Here's your backwoods brutality, menacing hippies, hagsploitation, and the birth of the zombie film.
Era 3 - 1981-2000: the franchise era! 20 years during which the VCR took horror mainstream, made it almost respectable, then bogged it down with tired, uninspired sequels, and a million and one Hannibal Lecter wannabes. In the real world, there was AIDS, the Satanic Panic, Wall Street vs Main Street, the evangelicals vs everybody, and a lot of people pretending cynicism is a personality.
In here - well, this is the golden age, so all the stuff you think of as horror, basically. But also, so many smug serial killers. SO MANY.
Era 4 - 2001-2020: 20 weird years, in which real horror pushed us back to a version of backwoods brutality (no, torture porn wasn't new or an indictment of the genre), TV took center-stage and everything suddenly became 'a 10-hour movie', Hollywood tried very, very hard to ignore found footage and make CGI-driven action/horror/comedy hybrids a thing, and Netflix killed Blockbuster and then DVDs, while we were busy watching the real-time horror of our relatives becoming screaming bigots and conspiracy theorists.
Sure, you've got Saw and Hostel, which reflected some weird societal shit, but you've also got your Babadook and Hereditary, reflecting other weird societal shit. (Hint: horror always reflects weird societal shit. The whole genre's about pushing your buttons.)
This is also where you find the reboots, as Hollywood tried to figure out how to bring back the profitable franchise for an audience that was okay with a Friday the 13th marathon on TV but not with paying to see yet another dumb sequel in theaters.
Friday the 13th (2009) didn't quite make it, because they sidestepped the franchise too far, opting for a vague urban legend and a generic kidnapper in the woods, and Halloween (2007) decided to demystify a character literally known as The Shape with a white trash back story that thoroughly misunderstood the point of setting shit in the 'burbs in the first place, but Halloween (2018) poked at the trauma of surviving, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) remembered that before Freddy was funny, he was a child molester, and for all the many, MANY faults of Poltergeist (2015), it at least tried to vaguely wave at real world events in the form of the housing bubble and economy.
The Millennials might be killing all industry as we know it, but they at least got Hollywood to remember that beyond popcorn and cat scares, horror is about pushing buttons.
And that's how we get to Evil Dead (2013) and Hellraiser (2022) both upending the tired sin=death nonsense-that Boomer hypocrisy of titillating the audience with sex, drugs and rock & roll while pretending there's some kind of moral punishment implicit in it-by turning that 20th century party vibe upside down as 21st century social problems, making its protagonists unreliable addicts and its supporting characters supportive characters trying to help them, and the plot ends up actually meaning something, so of course the fanboys hate it - but when don't they?
Anyway.
Era 5! Currently upon us! The fragmentation of the streaming wars as mega-corps suck up distribution routes, killing even the idea of indies being able to get their shit out there, and drowning innovation in a sea of superhero IPs. Honestly, we could be off to a better start.
So...
Why do I do this to myself? Because I like seeing how things develop and evolve, nerding out at the sight of a category color-coded for a decade then dropping off suddenly, little clusters of weirdness.
NOW YOU KNOW.
1 "But mokie, how many horror movies do those actually fit?" Genre is a basket that catches similar things-sometimes defined by setting (fantasy), sometimes by mood (horror), sometimes by a fancy-pants attitude problem ('literature')-rather than a fence that divides things. A lot of stuff on my list wouldn't make other people's lists, because I'm not worried about whether it's horror or scifi, or horror or suspense - I see it as horror AND...
2 The slasher subgenre gets its own basket, outside of The Fucking Worst, because of just how much of it there is, since slashers were the dominant subgenre during horror's '80s heyday - so much so that most 'rules for horror' or definitions of it are just slasher tropes cited by people who conflate the subgenre with horror in general, and also insist that they hate horror but love True Crime, or usually hate horror, but love 'elevated horror'.
In case it's not obvious, this irritates the hell out of me.
3 The supernatural element usually crept in once it wanked off into franchise territory, because trying to swap in copycat killers wasn't cutting it, and it happened to dovetail nicely with the traditional Western ghost story's 'past wrongs = present consequences' formula.
Someone out there writing about slashers compared it to Asian ghosts as an unstoppable death curse on a particular location, and "the unshakeable presence of the past" as a pointed stab at America's relative lack of reckoning with our history, but Google is now useless for actually searching the internet for anything outside your algorithmically approved results, so good luck finding that essay. (Dammit.)