It's Halloween, y'all.

If I may preach to the choir for a moment, allow me to say: Halloween is the best. Of course it’s the scariest night of the year (besides election night, wakka wakka), but you nerds get it: Halloween is much more than a single night. As you may have realized by now, for me the holiday begins roughly...oh, the second week of September and ends…well, come the middle of November I’m still hangin’ on. I can’t help myself. It’s the best.

There are plenty of reasons why I love the holiday that have nothing to do with horror movies. By the end of October, summer has finally released everyone from its fiery death grip and autumn is in full swing. Roaring fireplaces, sweaters, leaves crunching underfoot, hot cocoa…honestly, I’m more than a bit dubious of anyone who claims that fall is not his or her favorite season.

However, the very best thing about Halloweentime- aside from the abundance of candy, which somehow has no calories during October (shut up, it’s true!)- is that the world turns into a magical place full of horror fans. We're no longer alone! Skeletons suddenly appear in the front yards of neighbors (err, fake ones…probably) as lawns are transformed into graveyards. The TV features scary movie after scary movie. Martha Stewart shows us how to make, you know, a corpse out of corncobs or something, and a trip to the grocery store can yield not only frozen pizza, but also a fake machete and some candles of doom. My local grocery store had those “Candles of Doom” for sale, and in case you’re wondering…they’re orange. Shudder!

The only reason why I'd ever want dogs.

Throughout the year, I often find that I’ve got to defend my love of horror movies to people who aren’t fans of the genre. This kind of conversation I can understand:

“Man, I really like scary movies.”
“Really? I don’t.”
“Oh. Well then, let’s talk about something else.”
“Okay. Do you believe the children are our future?”
“Why, yes I do. We should teach them well and let them lead the way.”

That's kill-yourself boring, yes, but it doesn’t put me on the defensive. See, this is how it usually goes:

“Man, I really like scary movies.”
“Really? How can you watch that kind of sick stuff? Horror is nothing but women getting butchered!”


You know, I think I’m going to print up some pamphlets to hand to people who make me feel like I’m a social deviant because of something I love. On the front it’ll say, “So, you want to know why I like horror movies…” Inside, I’ll cover such topics as “Horror Movies Are Not Inherently Misogynist”, “Watching Horror Movies Has Not Desensitized Me to Real-Life Violence”, “I Don’t Watch Scary Movies Because I Get Off On Watching Women Being Murdered”, and “You Know What? Movies Like Bride Wars and All About Steve Are Actually Much More Demeaning to Women Than Something Like The Descent, So Shove It”. While they’re reading the pamphlet, I can be off enjoying a fruit smoothie or watching Pieces, which is a much better way to spend my time than trying to convince someone that I’m not a psycho.

Don’t get me wrong- discussion is a wonderful thing. Learning about other peoples’ viewpoints, what makes them tick, what turns them on- let’s do it. I’m all for it- it's one of the reasons why I love getting comments here. Like any other genre of film, horror has its share of masterpieces and its share of crap, its share of offensive movies and its share of enlightening movies. For every Bloodsucking Freaks there’s a Martyrs; while they both do, in fact, show women suffering horrendous violence, they couldn’t be more night and day in their approaches to- and reasons for- that violence. If you want to talk about those movies or any others- which ones can be analyzed under the auspices of women’s studies or queer studies, or hell, which movies are simply a scary good time, I’m here for you, friendo. Anyone who’s got their minds completely made up about the genre, though- well, chances are they’ve never actually seen a horror movie all the way through, and chances are equally high that I’ll never change their minds about anything. For me, that’s when it’s fruit smoothie-n-Pieces time.

Someday, Martyrs...someday I'll write about you!

Mind you, I’m not solely waving my big foam finger emblazoned with “HORROR #1!” without question. After all, as someone said- I think it was J-Woww, maybe- an unexamined life is not worth living, and from time to time I do ask myself what it is I like so much about horror movies. I thought long and hard about that after I saw Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in which a family is terrorized in their vacation home by a couple of murderous psychos. The film is, at its core, an effective (if, at times, condescending) indictment of cinematic violence and it examines the audience’s relationship to on-screen atrocities. Love the movie or loathe it, at the least it should get you thinking.

By the way, I love J-Woww.

Don't throw shade, Naomi Watts. I'm not proud of my love for J-Woww. It just is and I've come to accept it.

The point of all this is that during Halloween season, I never feel as if I have to defend my love of horror movies because suddenly everyone loves them, even if for just one night. On the 31st, people who never watch ‘em will turn on Bride of Frankenstein or Night of the Living Dead and simply revel in the fun of being scared. It’s not so bad, huh? See, I’m not a freak because I love horror. Now if you’ll excuse me, I hear that oversized rubber rats and eyeballs are on sale at Target and I’m fresh out of both…

SHOCKtober: 10-1

Can you believe this? The last chunk of list. One month featuring 732 movies counted down to this one, glorious moment. Stupid November, ruining everything! October should just annex September and November and be three months long. That'd be fine with me.

This may be the end of the list of your favorites, but it doesn't signify the end of SHOCKtober, so quit blubberin! I've still got at least one Special Guest Top 20 on the way, and come tomorrow (stupid November) I'll be putting on my science glasses in order to analyze the data. That should prove scintillating. Without further ado, here are your ten favoritest faves!

Wait, shouldn't I have gone straight to the list after saying "ado"? Wouldn't any intro after that- no matter how wee- count as "further ado"? I mean, even simply "here are your ten favoritest faves" puts off the list itself, rendering "without further ado" totally false. Anyway. Bold number = numbers o' votes!

10. The Descent -- 2005, Neil Marshall -- 65

9. A Nightmare on Elm Street -- 1984, Wes Craven -- 72

8. Suspiria -- 1977, Dario Argento -- 76

7. Dawn of the Dead -- 1978, George Romero -- 81

6. Night of the Living Dead -- 1968, George Romero -- 82

5. The Shining -- 1980, Stanley Kubrick -- 85

4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre -- 1974, Tobe Hooper -- 89

3. The Exorcist -- 1973, William Friedkin -- 91

2. The Thing -- 1982, John Carpenter -- 95

1. Halloween -- 1978, John Carpenter -- 123

So there you go. I have to admit, The Thing at #2 surprised me, but it was evident early on in the voting that Halloween was going to leave everyone else in the dust. I almost feel like I take that film for granted sometimes- "Yeah, yeah...Halloween is great" comes out by rote when talking horror movies. Maybe I've seen it too many times and its marvelousness, its...well, perfection no longer hits me on an emotional level- it's become an appreciation. I think Halloween and I need a second honeymoon so we can get our groove back!

So. Now what do we do?

SHOCKtober: Richard Harland Smith's Top 20

If you've ever visited Movie Morlocks, the blog for Turner Classic Movies, then you've seen some of Richard Harland Smith's handiwork. He's one of those irritating writers- you know the kind, the ones who really know their shit and manage to write smart stuff that's infused with humor, personality, and style. He's as funny as he is erudite and...wait, why am I featuring his Top 20? I hate this guy!



Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between horror movies you respect for their historical significance and those you like to watch again and again. When I began to put together this list, I noticed a common throughline of social significance… movies that widen their scope to encompass a shared horror experience over an intensely personal one. That’s not to say The Evil Dead or Repulsion lack social significance – they both deal with the individual’s place in society – but the ones I really like ask a certain population – a town, a country, the world - to draw lines to deal with the situation, to divide and subdivide in a frenzied attempt to preserve the fabric of society.

Night of the Living Dead (1968, George Romero)

Night of the Living Dead seems to me the king of social horror movies, depicting the breakdown from within due to an onslaught from without. But instead of a wave of red Indians or alien invaders, the attackers are us, reanimated, repurposed, the shuffling, dead-eyed rapaciousness of the ghouls a mockery of mid-20th Century complacency. I love a whole host of horror movies based on George Romero’s classic, including…




Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974, Jorge Grau)

...Jorge Grau’s direct rip-off, in which class issues (masquerading as the Generation Gap) inform the horror. I’m also a big fan of…








The People Who Own the Dark (1976, Leon Klimovsky)

... from Leon Klimovsky, with Paul Naschy and a villa full of swells surviving a nuclear incident that has blinded the provinces but left the hoi polloi sightless and resentful. A more hopeful cousin to these movies is…







Island of Terror (1966, Terence Fisher)

...from Terence Fisher on a vacation from Hammer. There’s a nice Big City vs. Small Town tension throughout, as egghead scientists Peter Cushing and Edward Judd try to slow the inchmeal progress of monsters spawned by cancer research gone awry. On a less sociological level, this is just one of those movies where I love everybody’s clothes, particularly the anorak jackets a lot of the characters wear. It’s got a nice chilly, autumnal palette.




Horror Express (1972, Eugenio Martin)

Horror Express is another strangers-in-bad-company siege scenario, with the reanimated dead advancing upon the unbelieving living through the pinched confines of a moving train. To get the full yield of this movie, it’s best to know a little about world history at the time of the film’s setting and the situation in pre-revolution Russia but it’s still a lot of fun even if you don’t.





Attack of the Mushroom People (1963, Ishiro Honda)

It's another progenitor of Night of the Living Dead but there’s something seductive and sexy blended in with the horror as a group of modern Japanese swells succumb to hunger, paranoia and the undying urge to propagate. This movie changed my DNA!






The House on Haunted Hill (1959, William Castle)

William Castle's House on Haunted Hill is a well-oiled shock machine that runs on the petrol of class consciousness, though the movie never wears that distinction on its sleeve. You just have to know where those lines fall between the characters and what makes Frederick Loren different from, say, Lance Schroeder. A more explicit class contretemps occurs in…





The Hills Have Eyes (1977, Wes Craven)

The best scene in the movie, and some of the best dialogue ever written for fright films, occurs when Papa Jupiter browbeats the dead body of urbanite “Big Bob” Carter, whom he tells “I’m gonna watch your car rust out.” What a brilliant thing to say – it’s like something that Dracula might have told Van Helsing if he were born in West Virginia. Class issues also lie at the dark heart of…




The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971, Piers Haggard)

...which is another one of those great cinematic exercises in British self-loathing. The ostensible hero of the piece, the magistrate played by the great Patrick Wymark, is nobody’s idea of a good guy and the stranglehold he and his peers keep on the peasants is the reason why the Devil has such a successful run for 90 odd minutes. Even with the film’s arguably happy ending, the survivors are still left in a place of crushing servitude.




The Seventh Victim (1943, Mark Robson)

From producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson, this makes a lot of Top 10 lists but the reasons people seem to like this are different from why I do. I love stories about secret societies, which are microcosms of the general population that (as the story goes) invariably make the same mistakes of the larger demographic in their desire to break away from the norm. I actually sympathize with the Satanists in this movie, to a certain degree.




The Pyx (1973, Harvey Hart)

The Pyx is another secret society horror movie from Canada, with Christopher Plummer playing a middle class cop who investigates the death of provincial girl turned prostitute Karen Black, ultimately uncovering a nest of affluent Satanists in gleaming, modern Montreal. You tend to see Satanism associated these days with the aristocracy (as opposed to the hoi polloi in Hammer’s The Devils and Blood on Satan’s Claw) and that always reminds me of the line from Chinatown: “How much better can you eat?” The scary thing to my mind is that people who are always looking to be exalted somehow could go either way, to Heaven or to Hell, that it makes no difference and I think that’s where The Pyx is pointed.

The Brides of Dracula (1960, Terence Fisher)

Brides is a great, vivid horror movie, a superior sequel, and a cunningly crafted meditation on social ascendancy, with vampirism being the ultimate clique, the ultimate country club. The Technicolor photography is so gorgeous that you’re tempted to look more than listen but pay strict attention to what the characters say to one another, and what they say about themselves, and you’ll find a second movie hidden well inside the first.




Dracula's Daughter (1936, Lambert Hillyer)

Dracula's Daughter is another vampire story constructed around an absent title character that also has everything to do with class. The plot hangs between protagonist Marya Zaleska, an undead creature who hopes to attain humanity, and a cynical psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Garth, who is all through with society, with social codes, with titles and the superstition of status. And yet he is charged with the task of curing Marya. But he fails, of course. The patient dies but Garth (it seems) regains his humanity. It’s actually a pretty neat story and boasts one of the greatest codependent couples in movie history. I’d like to see a prequel about Marya Zaleksa and her goony manservant Sandor.

Kill, Baby...Kill (1966, Mario Bava)

This belongs to a subset of horror movies that deal with communal responsibility for a past misdeed. In this case, the death of young Melissa Grapps is a sin of omission (much like the drowning death of Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th backstory), for which the townsfolk must continue to pay until the debt is repaid. The same sort of vibe runs through…





Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974, Theodore Gershuny)

...from Ted Gershuny, in which the whole fabric of society is called into question by the revelation that the founding fathers were all escapees from a lunatic asylum. I think I’m the only person in the world who loves his movie.






Don't Torture a Duckling (1972, Lucio Fulci)

This film is Lucio Fulci’s inversion of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which provincial small-mindedness informs our understanding of why someone could smother the life out of defenseless children. Too often fobbed off as merely anti-cleric, the movie is much more agonized and anguished than that, and in the final analysis no one comes out free of guilt.





Carnival of Souls (1962, Herk Harvey)

Carnival of Souls is Repulsion-like in its focus on a single woman who cannot find a place for herself in society but I like Candice Hilligoss’ plucky Mary Henry a lot more than Catherine Deneuve’s Carole Ledoux. Why? Because Mary’s not a victim… well, until she just is. But that’s how it is for us all, isn’t it?





Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971, John D. Hancock)

Jessica belongs in this company, too, as a more personal take on societal horror. By dint of her unorthodox behavior (coded by society as damaged, sick), Jessica is always on the outside looking in, a subtheme director John Hancock reflects by having Jessica constantly looking through windows, through glass, through water. If you’ve ever watched a community of friends overtaken one by one by drug use or some other caustic thing, you’ll take a lot from this movie.



Blood Feast (1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Once you strip this movie of its Psychotronic baggage and everything everybody has said about it to date you’ll find a brilliant black comedy about an Egyptian jihad waged against complacent, antiseptic, empty middle America in the pre-Vietnam era. All the things that H. Gordon Lewis did to save money, like use motel rooms instead of sets for his characters’ homes, actually say something about the characters, all of whom look embalmed in life. This is a world so devoid of any intellectual or artistic depth that people need to belong to book clubs in order to read anything. Fuad Ramses cuts through this cultural inertia like a dose of salts, using the infidels as raw materials in the making of an offering to his god. He may be merciless, he may even be evil, but at least he’s about something. He’s really the hero of this movie.

Ringu (1998, Hideo Nakata)

As with Blood Feast, do yourself a favor and forget how Hideo Nakata’s visual tropes have been copied, both in Asia and America; if you can un-learn all that and focus on the story you’ll find a chilly cautionary tale of a modern society fooled into thinking it has broken with its superstitious past through the glory of technology… only to have ancient, undying evil delivered to them via microchip technology.




Other Special Guest Top 20(ish) lists:

• Amanda by Night
• Zane & Brea Grant
• Lena Headey
• Buzz
• Eric Spudic
• John Kenneth Muir
  

Holy crap, SHOCKtoberrata!

YOU GUYS. My brain farted big time and I made a boo-boo, which I just went back and corrected like crazy:#16, with 50 votes, is not Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, but Wes Craven's Scream. ME BIG DUMMY.


Look, I KNOW AND I'M SORRY.

Wait, those guys aren't the real Ghostface and Freddy!

Point taken.

SHOCKtober: 20-11

Here we go, y'all- we begin the reveal of your Top 20 Favorites as determined by your lists of Top 20 Favorites. WEIRD, huh? I know. You're excited to find out what's what, but it's also bittersweet. I get it and I'm right there with you. We must soldier on, however, and see this journey to its end- so dry your eyes, pull up your pants, and dive into the Top 20!

I'm sure you know this by now, but the bold number is the number of votes the film received.

20. Carrie -- 1976, Brian De Palma -- 44
19. Black Christmas -- 1974, Bob Clark -- 46
18. Return of the Living Dead -- 1985, Dan O'Bannon -- 46
17. An American Werewolf in London -- 1981, John Landis -- 47
16. Scream -- 1996, Wes Craven -- 50
15. Evil Dead 2 -- 1987, Sam Raimi -- 52
14. Jaws -- 1975, Steven Spielberg -- 52
13. The Evil Dead -- 1981, Sam Raimi -- 64
12. Alien -- 1979, Ridley Scott -- 64
11. Psycho -- 1960, Alfred Hitchcock -- 64

• When rattling off my favorite horror movies,I rarely, if ever, mention Carrie...but damn it's a good movie. Sissy Spacek is just absolute perfection. Gahh, I suddenly want to watch this movie so very much!
• Odd how The Evil Dead and its sequel landed so close to one another. ODD I SAY.

EDITED TO ADD: Earlier today I had A Nightmare on Elm Street listed at #16. That was just me being a jerk. #16, with 50 votes, is Scream. DON'T HURT ME!

SHOCKtober: John Kenneth Muir's Top 20

When I first started writing Final Girl- hell, maybe even a short time before I started this blog- I discovered and spent a lot of time with John Kenneth Muir's Horror Films of the 1970s. By "spent a lot of time with", I don't mean we frolicked through the fields together and did each other's hair...hmm, or maybe I do mean that. Just don't ask me how/where/why a book has hair.

Anyway, Muir's book and its successor Horror Films of the 1980s are terrific resources if, like me, you enjoy reading about horror movies as much as you enjoy watching them: his entries include plot summaries, production notes, and reviews. When he not writing one of his countless books or guides, you can catch Mr. Muir at his blog, Reflections on Film/TV. Surely there's some Ghost and Mrs. Muir joke he could have used somewhere in that title...


Return of the Living Dead (1985, Dan O'Bannon)

I love the irreverent humor and the underlying 1980s apocalypse mentality. For me, this movie is a perfect (and funny) storm of the punk rock aesthetic and political nihilism of the day (The Day After, etc). I particularly love the scene in which Frank and Freddy are diagnosed with rigor mortis. On retrospect, it seems obvious I suppose, but this was the first movie that derived so much humor out of the zombie life cycle.




Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland)

Okay, so 1985 was a big year for me. Fright Night was nostalgic and romantic, and Roddy McDowall gave a great, affectionate performance as washed-up horror movie host, Peter Vincent. Chris Sarandon was no slouch either as the vampire Dandridge, a perpetually-amused "modern" vamp who found it easy to hide in 1980s suburbia. And I really dug the brief, under-the-radar reference to the 1960s series The Invaders in one clever insert shot.



Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)

I still knows what scares me. This movie -- and that damned clown hiding under the bed -- terrorize me to this day, but I also love the "yuppie" dynamic of the "Freelings" in an American culture where nothing is really "free." You think you're getting a great real estate deal...but they just moved the goddamn head stones. Finally, the gonzo, balls-to-the-wall third act -- where all the narrative rules go out the window -- seems like characteristic Tobe Hooper to me...and I love it. Good Spielberg vibes are usurped by Hooper's more malevolent ones.


The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)

Tobe Hooper's finest effort, and every time I watch, I marvel at how unlikable Franklin is, and how indecorously Hooper treats this guy in the wheelchair (he gets rolled down a hill during a potty break, for goodness' sake). That kind of political incorrectness takes brass balls. But then the whole enterprise is a wondrous, artistically-realized slap in the face of established movie decorum, tradition and convention (not to mention a screed in favor of vegetarianism, I guess...) and I'm absolutely mesmerized every time I watch it.


Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)

91 minutes of pure horror perfection. I love this original Carpenter-ian incarnation of Michael Myers, wherein he is "The Shape" and not necessarily a long-lost brother to Laurie Strode. I appreciate how ambiguous the film is. Is Michael a developmentally-arrested kid playing trick or treat games? Laurie's unleashed Id? A supernatural force? Watching this film alone in the dark that white Shatner mask absorbs and then reflects all the viewers' fears right back at him or her, and the result is a classic horror movie, largely unsurpassed. This movie still scares me, and though I love it, I won't watch it when I'm alone in the house. I actually have nightmares about Michael Myers, all these years later.

The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise)

The best and still scariest haunted house movie ever made. I noted above that I appreciate ambiguity in horror, and Wise's film is an exercise in ambiguity. The film's characters are outcasts. The builder of the haunted house was an outcast. What's really going on inside? A legitimate haunting, or a paranoid, folie a famille? Wise's background in editing makes simple moments (like a door knob slowwwwwwly turning...) absolutely horrific.




Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma)

The late Pauline Kael described this disco-decade film as a teenager's dirty joke brilliantly stretched out to feature film length, and I certainly couldn't say it better. De Palma is at his devious, malicious, expressive best with this effort, and that final jolt with Amy Irving is still a kicker. Again, this is a movie that sucks me in every time, no matter how many times I see it.





Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)

I'm probably alone in this, but I find Phantasm strangely (and wonderfully...) whimsical and emotionally powerful. It plays to me like the sad, lonely subconscious fantasy of an adolescent kid who is trying to make sense of all the death around him, in his town and in his immediate family. The film is surreal and creepy, yet I'm always sort of unexpectely moved by the tender power of the thing. We all build mythology around mortality don't we? In some deeply unsettling way, Phantasm gets at that notion.



Kingdom of the Spiders (1977, John "Bud" Cardos)

Again a favorite that perhaps isn't the greatest horror movie ever, speaking strictly as an objective (*ahem*) movie critic. But the Shat is in it front and center, delivering his special brand of wonderful. And the last, merciless act is absolutely go-for-broke, with spiders on a relentless march And the audacity (if not the execution...) of that final shot (a matte painting of a webbed town in Arizona) always floors me. To my wife's chagrin, I am driven to watch this movie at least twice a year.



Dawn of the Dead (1978, George Romero)

Zombies + shopping malls + social commentary on conspicuous consumerism = horror gold. How can you not love it? The action set pieces are still harrowing, and Ken Foree's Peter remains a terrific horror bad ass. I love the interlude during which life in the mall gets boring...and the characters start arguing over the TV (displaying only static). This was before "They are us" and "we are them" was an over-utilized, exhausted cliche. You don't really need to see any other George Romero Dead picture made after this one...Dawn gets the point across...gorily.


Evil Dead 2 (1987, Sam Raimi)

A flying, severed eyeball lands in a screaming mouth and gets swallowed by a redneck named Bobbie Jo. Who's laughing now? Sam Raimi, I love you.








Lifeforce (1985, Tobe Hooper)

Another off-kilter, totally wacky Tobe Hooper movie, with Mathilda May inhabiting Patrick Stewart's body and trying to lay a smooch on wigged-out Steve Railsback. The movie starts out like Quatermass and ends like Night of the Living Dead. A movie of great ups and downs, no doubt, but also possessing a stellar imagination.





The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez)

...and cat-calls, complaints and recriminations begin...three, two, one...now. Despite the backlash, I still find this incredibly scary, especially that final set-piece in the isolated house. This is a movie about how we see and process media (including horror movies) and the artificial barriers we put up so we can believe we're okay, and that a malevolent witch isn't really going to swoop down, rip out our teeth and make us stand in the corner.




And Soon the Darkness (1970, Robert Fruest)

A great and underrated early slasher flick inventively set in broad daylight. Language, local customs and paranoia prove to be barriers to security and safety for a put-upon biker (Pamela Franklin) after her friend disappears. I still find this relentlessly involving, right up to the spectacular final overhead shot.





A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, Wes Craven)

One, two, Freddy's coming for you. Surreal, scary and endlessly entertaining, this Craven flick, like Halloween, is an hour-and-a-half of pure nirvana for me. I love the schoolroom scene with Nancy and Hamlet, and how it echoes the classroom scene with Laurie in Halloween. In Halloween, the topic in English class is inescapable fate. In Elm Street, the topic is probing and digging to learn the truth. For me, this is the moment when horror's Final Girl (Stacie?) went from skillfully surviving a trauma in her life on luck to willfully re-shaping her own destiny and assuring a positive outcome, fate be damned.

And, finally, on any given day:

The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)











The Ninth Gate (1999, Roman Polanski)











Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)











The Fog (1980, John Carpenter)











Night of the Living Dead (1968, George Romero)











The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)











Other Special Guest Top 20(ish) lists:

• Amanda by Night
• Zane & Brea Grant
• Lena Headey
• Buzz
• Eric Spudic