Thread is missing Cabin in the Woods and Shaun of the Dead, because they played with the horror genre and managed to be both funny and downright scary at times. Plus Shaun of the Dead still has the greatest fart joke ever captured on film.
At a couple points in the Hellraiser franchise the producers openly admit the films had zero to do with the franchise and only had the brand thrown on it to generate interest. A few them are complete stand alone movies, then at the end Pinhead shows up for 5 min and babbles about "exquisite pain" and you find out everything in the last 90 min had to do with the Lament box. Child's Play, Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm St. all had barrages of shitty sequels, but for the most part still kinda related back the main villain. Jason Goes to Hell begin one notable exception.
I went and saw Jason X (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211443/) in the theatre, and as much as I hate the Jason series, I absolutely loved that movie. Jason goes to space. It was so bad it was funny.
Anything with fucking zombies in it. Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, will people just forget about zombies? What's the big deal? They're dead bodies, meaning that if you just wait long enough, they'll rot away! Maddox agrees with me: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=horror_moviezzz With that said, I thought of a couple of movies that Crown skipped: - Near Dark (1987), and - Daybreakers (2009) Near Dark is ostensibly a vampire movie, but at no point are they actually called vampires. I guess vampire mythology doesn't exist in that universe. Daybreakers is about a dystopian future where vampires have become the dominant species on earth, and humans are farmed for their blood; there's a good social commentary about how that relates to the modern pharmaceutical industry, but I won't spoil anything. Also, it has Willem Dafoe (as a vampire mechanic), and anything with him in it has GOT to be good. This is also the best place to mention the queen of B-list horror movies, Adrienne Barbeau: Spoiler: Epic boobage Big boobs, big ass, big hair, and she wasn't afraid to take it off for a role.
As I've watched them all, which Halloween movie was the best in the opinions of people here? I would say the original. A big thing you notice is werewolves in horror movies are rarely treated as seriously as vampires are. Note this: Yeah... soak that in.
If I had to choose some "so-fucking-bad-it-nearly-becomes-good" movies: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans This film nearly does everything wrong, but it manages to keep a horror/action plot going on a thin grasp of what makes werewolves or vampires cool; a big fucking human-eating predator that either berserks and tears people apart like wolf tearing apart sheep or a scary, suave, powerful blood-sucker. Instead, the werewolves are divided into the feral type that live in the woods and apparently a bitten human follows zombie rules [coming back to life as another werewolf of this type]. Apparently our pal Lucian, the first of the more civilized 'wolves was born to a feral 'wolf and taken from her because he was able to shift even as a child to a human form. So, that's how you know it's going to suck. Oh, the vampires? Expies of basically every Vlad the Impaler trope you could have. Seriously, just suave and debonair assholes who are always bitching like rich seventeen year old girls but about vampire shit, or slightly-rough-and-tumble vampires tasked with killing werewolves. So again, awesome ideas, ridiculous execution. The Blair Witch Project Now this film has a legitimate creepy build-up, a pretty convincing and very well-realized plot, but the explanations given to us for why all this is happening just seems so silly. That's all. It doesn't ruin the film, it just makes you have to stop thinking about "Wait, so a ghost? A lich? Wait, the fuck is out there?" Devil's Pass Devil's Pass is just great, but when you add the plot together, much like Blair Witch, you end up going, "What the fuck?" Chernobyl Diaries Chernobyl Diaries basically is a movie that manages to have I think a CGI'd bear, fish and live-action dogs manage to be scarier than the revealed monsters. [Think The Dark Tower's Slow Mutants, but designed by an idiot]
Speaking of Aussie scary movies try watching something called Wolf Creek. It's sinister as fuck. Insidious isn't too bad either. Some of my favourites over the years though have been Jeepers Creepers, 13 Ghosts, Let Me In and The Conjuring. Also any scary movie that is so shit it's funny.
I just saw an old classic last night: The Silver Bullet It's the film adaptation of Stephen King's graphic novel, Cycle of the Werewolf, and I found it legitimately scary when I was 10 years old (approximately the last time I saw it). It features a pre-insanity Gary Busey, and has some decent special effects.
The original House of Wax is a really good one. The joy of this movie relies almost entirely on the acting ability of Vincent Price. I personally enjoyed the remake as well, although I know a lot of people don't give it a chance because Paris Hilton.
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/happy-halloween-the-best-horror-movie-monsters/ Thought this was a good read. Had some fun debating some of the choices with friends...
For pre-Halloween on Friday my daughter and I watched the Blair Witch Project, because it was free on Amazon (I had planned for us to see the Ring, but never got a chance to hit the library and get it). She was underwhelmed because it wasn't really scary till the end. It was my second viewing of it and I thought it was interesting how most of the tension build-up isn't even related to supernatural stuff, but rather the increasing anger and fear and despair over getting lost. So then she suggested Oculus, and since it was on Netflix I thought why not. It was actually good.