THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
My dad wouldn't let me watch THE GODFATHER or PULP FICTION when I was younger, but a movie where Tim Curry is in drag and sings about being a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania? Oh that is just a-okay...
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THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
A 70's cult rock n' roll musical like THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE. This film was an update of the classic PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Directed by Brian De Palma (one of my favorite filmmakers), THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is cool, funny, sad and utterly demented. I remember being both frightened and fascinated by this film as a kid.
DEAD HEAT
This bizarre buddy-cop-zombie comedy from 1988 seriously freaked me out as a kid. The scene where a woman rapidly decomposes was some serious nightmare fuel...
THE TOXIC AVENGER
I rented this classic TROMA movie on VHS when I was 11 years old. All alone! I can't believe the guy in the store would let me rent it! The cover made the film look like some sort superhero comedy. I watched the movie with a bowl of popcorn, and when the movie was over I went to the bathroom and puked. Thanks Lloyd Kaufman...
ROBOCOP
That damn toxic waste scene...
THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT
Older sister: "So, what have you been doing while I was gone?"
Me: "Well, I just watched a cartoon movie where a cat fucks another cat."
JAWS
I did not wanna go swimming in the ocean after I saw this movie. I still feel uneasy about swimming...
POLTERGEIST
"This house is clean" says the creepy midget woman. Their daughter is back and everything is fine... could the movie be over? Nope. We get an extra climax where skeletons comes out of the ground, and THAT was just too much for me...
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
Shot in black-and-white on a low budget, this seminal 1968 horror film about the dead coming back to life and attacking the living still packs a punch. Bleak, eerie, unrelenting, claustrophobic and dripping with dread and mood. Watching this film, late at night, I was terrified. From the very first frame, it feels like the world has ended...
PINOCCHIO
Saw it once as a kid, and I have not seen it since...
SLEEPY HOLLOW
Headless Christopher Walken decapitating people left and right in this overly Gothic, gloomy, moody and gruesome horror movie by Tim Burton really scared the shit out of me. Another Tim Burton film that freaked me out was MARS ATTACKS! "Ack-ack-ack ACK-ACK!"
PLANET OF THE APES
As a kid I saw the seminal 1968 science-fiction film PLANET OF THE APES and its sequels on television. I found them riveting and terrifying at the same time. The bleak and dark post-apocalyptic world ruled by talking apes as presented in the first two films was particularly unnerving. In the sequel BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES we find out that there is an under-dwelling society of mutated humans with psychic powers that worship a nuclear warhead, called the "doomsday bomb". This bomb is activated at the end by a dying Charlton Heston, destroying the whole planet! The screen then fades to white, and the film ends with a voice-over saying, "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." The twist ending of the first film left me flabbergasted as a kid. The nihilistic ending of the sequel left me stunned and dispirited. Although the original film may look outlandish and dated now, the ideas still ring true... the concept of mankind destroying itself is no fantasy...
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
Yeah, that's right... Ed Wood's infamously bad film PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE actually scared me. But, y'know as a kid you don't criticize movies... you don't 'see' the bad film-making... so when I watched this 50's black-and-white (which made it all the more nightmarish looking) horror film about aliens robbing cemeteries and resurrecting dead humans as zombies at an early age, late at night, I was just horrified.Tor Johnson and Vampira freaked me out. I couldn't sleep that night!
ANY STEPHEN KING ADAPTATION
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| Fuck you. |
