Last Updated on July 27, 2021
One of the things I truly love about AITH is the fiery opinions of our readers and how tenaciously ya’ll fight to defend the genre and those projects you think are great. And just like you guys, the writers here have varying opinions about what rocks the Kasbah and what blows ropey goat chunks, but we all share an unshakable love of everything horror.
So this week I’ll give you a little bit of a window into where I came from. I’m gonna throw out, for good or for bad, the movies that have had the biggest impact on shaping the horror fan I am today.
It’s not a list of fav’s (though some certainly are), and it’s not even a list of movies I recommend (although you could do worse in most cases). It’s just the pics that when I look back I realize that I wouldn’t think about horror the way I do if I hadn’t seen them. So strap in and check out some of the dark corners of my closet.
Then spit bullets on the flicks that made you all into the fine upstanding psychopaths you are today.
When it comes to genre flicks, never EVER, trust the box. Back before I learned this important lesson my dad and I took a chance on this promising (we thought) looking little nugget and were treated to the worst movie either of us had ever seen. In fact to this day it remains the benchmark for me. No matter how bad some crappy piece of shite might be, I can always take solace in the fact that it wasn’t as bad as Laserblast.
This is the type of movie you either love or hate, there’s not much middle ground. But I spent three years after I saw it refusing to sit down without looking to see if there was a blob in my chair, because of one of the early deaths. I still consider it to be good cheesy fun with some surprisingly good effects, but it marked me forever with the lesson that horror can give you some weird real life phobias.
I love the wet red stuff as much as the next crazy person, in fact probably more so. But good horror doesn’t have to rely on it and no movie has shown that to more startling effect in my estimation than this masterwork of terrifying sound design. A lot of the movie plays on strong build up followed by an anticlimax, and the effect is that you spend the whole ride feeling kind of ill and very unsettled. That said, there is one boo scare towards the end (I won’t spoil it) that is the one and only time I have ever dumped an entire drink on the floor as a result of a movie.
Monster fighting monster = awesome! I’d seen a few monster mashes before I saw this pic, and I’ve suffered through more bad than good ones since, but anytime you throw two battling terrors together on screen I will be there. Why? Because like a heroin junkie I want to recapture that first epic grin, and it came watching Godzilla get his azz handed to him by Mechagodzilla, before of course ripping the f*ckers head off.
I’m not sure why it took me so long to finally see this movie, but when I did catch it my thought afterwards was, well I didn’t really like it very much. I thought the characters were all annoying, the set up took waaaaaay too long, and overall I wasn’t particularly impressed with the intensity. I have found that my opinion about TCM being a mostly boring pic with one outstanding kill (hammer anyone?) is the one stance that leads to more anger from genre fans than any other. Which is fine, ’cause what I quickly realized was this – if you can’t stick to your guns just because the majority thinks you’re wrong then you’re not much of a genre fan at all.
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