POP VOX – WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE FRIGHT FILM, FUCKFACE?

We asked a lot of spooky people we’re into to tell us about their favorite horror movie/movie moment. People like Elvira, Richard Lewis, Steve Little, Kane Hodder, Ti West, Christy Karacas, Paul Scheer, etc.

RICHARD LEWIS (actor: Curb Your Enthusiasm; comedian; recovering alcoholic; coined the phrase, “The [blank] from hell.”)
“My vote for favorite horror film is Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. From the moment it ended in the cinema, I sat in horror–even after all the laughs–as I realized for the first time as an adolescent that humanity is doomed.”
 

STEVE LITTLE (actor: Stevie Janowski on Eastbound & Down)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – 1974 
“As a kid, I would see this movie sitting on the video store shelf. And I always thought it was going to be a jokey movie because the title is so silly, the title reminds me of Debbie Does Dallas or Kentucky Fried Movie. But there is nothing silly about meat hooks, chickens, and guys licking razor blades. One day I rented it, and it made me shit my pants (figuratively).”

ELVIRA (“Mistress of the Dark”; hostess of Movie Macabre; Jack White’s annual Devil’s Night party in Nashville)
“Unfortunately, all of the films I like are really crappy. But they do appeal to some people. Like me. I went out and handpicked the movies for my show because they are the ones I love. And they’re, like, from the 50s and 60s: Attack of the Killer Shrews, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, and Night of the Living Dead, which is one of my all time faves. And that, of course, is actually a really great movie. It started the zombie trend. Another of my all time favorites is The Wild Women of Wongo. I’m not kidding. Oh, and Werewolf of Washington! Little known films, you know, but ones you can definitely check out. I think these films can have more appeal to younger people. They haven’t been exposed to this type of junk. I grew up with these films, and even though younger people are like, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna see a black-and-white film!” when they see them, they’re cracking up. I forced my 16-year-old daughter to watch ’em, but at first I had to tie her to a chair. You know, I find these movies in a big trash dumpster behind my house. Not really. A lot of these films are in the public domain but they’re in such a horrible mess, so I have to get them remastered. There’s very little gore. You know? They leave something to the imagination. Horror movies now, every single knife plunge and splatter of blood is shown. Leave us something, for crying out loud.”  

GABRIEL ALCALA (musician: Jacuzzi Boys) 
“As a kid, three or so of my friends from the neighborhood would sleep over at my house once a week. My mom would cook us some delicious meals, and I had the Playboy Channel. We’d wait for my parents to fall asleep and then we’d watch all night. Incredibly hot babes would have sex and ride horses. On one of these nights, at around 2 a.m. we flipped to the channel only to find ourselves staring at nothing but static…Surfing around for other options, we landed on Halloween. We watched in amazement and terror until a few of us couldn’t take it anymore. One of my friends wet his pants, the others were completely paranoid. And me? I was totally spooked and freaking out about the idea of my dad waking up. I think that was one of the last times my house was used for a sleep over for a long time.” 

DANNY GONZALES (musician: Jacuzzi Boys)
“1978’s Faces of Death is hands down the scariest shit I ever saw growing up. I must have been like six or seven when I first saw it. My neighbor, who was probably 15 at the time, brought it over on VHS one night…I remember wanting to get up and not watch it anymore. Then I realized my neighbor would probably think I was a sissy or something. So, I just sat there. Tried to act cool. I obviously thought it was entirely real, and living near the Everglades, the gator scene had me in complete panic mode for months afterward. I wish I could still get that scared…”

JOHNNY RYAN (artist; Vice comics) 
“When I was a kid I watched The Howling on HBO and it scared the fuck out of me so bad that I made a promise to Jesus Christ that I would read the Bible every night for the rest of my life. Watching that movie now, it’s kind of silly but at the time I was convinced I was going to be killed. Horribly. And there was that other werewolf movie An American Werewolf In London that had the home invasion by Nazi monsters. Holy shit. The fact that the kids are watching the Muppets on TV when it happens made it all too real. Even the Muppets can’t save you. And Street Trash, that may be one of my all time favorite horror movies. I’m not sure if it’s technically a ‘horror movie,’ but it does have elements. It probably qualifies more as a What The Fuck movie. I have fond memories of it: walking into a filthy movie theater in Boston at midnight in ’88, having absolutely no idea what this fucking Street Trash movie was about. And boy did it deliver. People exploding into rainbows of slime, dicks getting ripped off, hobo sex, necrophilia, fat people, garbage…This movie pretty much has it all. I walked out of the theater feeling that I had been a part of film history.”

MATT FURIE (artist) 
“It’s been a long time since I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. It’s my favorite because it’s a solid mix of fantastic violence, campy ’80s humor and subtle homosexuality. Two scenes that deserve a mention are a pool party where Freddy attacks and burns everyone… and a hilarious scene where the dancing main kid–dressed only in his underwear–gets some shades out of a drawer, shuts the drawer with his butt, grabs a toy pop-gun, and bounces around dancing on his bed, all the while pretending that the gun is his penis. Then, suddenly, the toy-gun boner pops right as his mom walks in the door. I remember watching that scene over and over and over.”

MICHAEL TULLY (director: Silver Jew; writer/editor: Hammer to Nail) 
“Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. This movie is by no means perfect. But I saw it at such a fragile young age that, to this day, I hold it in very high regard. It has all the elements that I prefer in a horror movie: psychological, atmospheric, the 1970s. The title alone gets me revved up. Watching it in the bland daylight of 2010–this creepy portrait of a mentally fragile woman relocating to a country house that may or may not be haunted–casts an eerie, almost trippy spell.” 

KANE HODDER (actor: widely regarded as the best Jason Voorhees; Hatchet 2)
“The only movie that ever really scared me was The Exorcist. For people like me who are old enough to have seen it in the theaters, it was damned creepy. What, with all the hype and the stories surrounding it at the time. Who knows, maybe that movie made me a cinematic killer? It’s no secret that I like killing people in movies. OK. OK. I fucking love it. Maybe too much. My top five favorite kills in my movies goes like this: 5.) When I punched a guy’s head off in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan; 4.) The frozen head scene in Jason X; 3.) The sleeping bag kill in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood; 2.) The curb stomp in Hatchet 2; 1.) The scene where I rip a head apart by the jaw in Hatchet. Damn! Maybe I am as fucking crazy as they say…”

RICHARD KERN (director: Fingered; Vice photographer; VBS’s Shot By Kern)
“In The Ring–Gore Verbinski’s version from 2002–watching a particular videotape triggers an unstoppable chain that results in the viewer’s death. The film is a detective story, in which Naomi Watts is trying to investigate a young girl that is somehow connected to the tape. To essentially “see” who she is. When the young girl is finally on screen we still can’t really see her. Stringy, tangled hair is always hanging down in her face. The obscuring hair is a signal that we can’t know her; that something is wrong with her. When we do finally get a good look at her crawling out of the TV set, it’s a major jolt. I get actually shivers writing about it. Watching The Ring a few times rewarded me in an unexpected way–it gave me an idea for my own work. I began shooting a series of women, looking creepy with hair over their faces. Maybe I’m trying to express that itchy, scared feeling I get when I try to figure out what’s going on in a woman’s head.” 

PAUL SCHEER (actor/comedian: The League; Piranha 3D) 
Chairman of the Board – 1998
“Never has a film struck such fear in the hearts of moviegoers worldwide. An evil clown inherits his father’s company and proceeds to terrorize the uptight board members with tricks and shenanigans. Granted, no one dies in the film. But everyone involved was forever changed into mindless zombies. Be warned, most viewers can’t finish this film. It’s so intense.” 

CARL BENNETT (nothing)
“Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series might be my only memory left from smoking pot, drinking beer and eating party mix in fully furnished basements. One of the things I enjoyed most about pot was Phantasm’s disjointed dream logic. One minute you’re humping a lady in a lavender dress. The next she’s a tall Irish man with a receding page boy haircut, holding a dagger, ready to stab you mid pre-cum. Because of this movie I now have a checklist that so far no other movie has been able to match. 1.) Flying metal balls that drill into flesh and pump out blood. 2.) Yellow blood. 3.) Panties in mouth shot. 4.) Evil dwarves in brown robes. 5.) Blaming Timmy who lives up the street. 6.) 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda 340 hardtop. 7.) Finger in a box. 8.) Giant fly. 9.) Bowler hat jam session. 10.) Black kegs. 11.) Laughing fortune teller. 12.) Homemade weapons. 13.) Kid who drinks beer, shoots guns, drives and cusses. 14.) Renegade hardass ice cream vendor. 15.) Interdimensional gateway-slash-tuning fork. 16.) No parents. 17.) Angus Scrimm. 18.) Fake tits.”

COREY ADAMS (director: Machotaildrop) 
“One of the greatest horror films of all time is Suspiria. The film offers: Girls in tights living in a ballet academy inhabited by witches. An oversized German wench who treats the girls like Hitler’s own youth. Blind piano players maimed by their own guide dogs. Of course, the score by Goblin. And a young Udo Kier. But the most horrific scene has to be when the poor, young lady in her negligee is trying to escape from a mysterious killer. The girl thinks she’s escaped only to fall into a room of razor wire with no foreseeable way out. And on top of that, a shiny leather glove reaches in with a straight razor and slits her throat with glee.”  

ALEX GODFREY (Vice contributor) 
“The opening sequence in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula tells you everything you need to know about his adaptation. It’s insane. After the love of his life commits suicide, Gary Oldman’s howling, grieving, vengeful Prince Vlad renounces God, pledges to rise from his own death, stabs a stone crucifix with his sword and drinks the blood that gushes out of it. These scenes fit nicely with composer Wojciech Kilar’s accompanying score, the musical equivalent of someone repeatedly screaming in your face. The whole film is nuts. Oldman’s at his most frenzied, Tom Waits gets to play the sort of deranged bug-eating lunatic he sings about, and Anthony Hopkins, as a singing, dancing vampire hunter, seems intent on out-crazying the lot of them. 

In practically every scene you can picture Coppola off-screen shouting ‘MORE INSANE! MORE INSANE!’ And essentially, it’s a love story. We know it’s supposed to be a horror film because it’s called Dracula and it has monsters and decapitations. But it’s really about primal, unstoppable, all-consuming desire, and it’s wildly intense; even the bit where Sadie Frost gets raped in a graveyard by the Dracula werewolf is erotic. Yes, it’s flawed: Keanu almost brings the whole thing down every time he shows up (which is a lot). But his horrendous performance–not unlike a frustrated six-year old attempting Shakespeare–only adds another layer of surrealism. I watched it again a few weeks ago at 3am with a friend who’d never seen it. We turned the lights off, the sound up and submitted to the cinematic assault. ‘Christ,’ he said to me after the opening sequence. ‘Bit dramatic.’ Yeah. A bit.”

AMY KELLNER (Vice Managing Editor) 
The Shining – 1980 
“Pretty obvious, I know, but it’s the first one that comes to my mind. Whenever I’m flipping through the channels and I see it–which is pretty often around this time of year–I become instantly mesmerized and have to drop everything and watch. I’m a total scaredy cat with horror movies so it’s weird how much I like this one. I think it’s really pretty, all that symmetry. It’s like a horror movie about shapes. Also, the infamous bear-costume-blowjob scene freaked me the fuck out the first time I saw it. The experience is second only to what I call ‘The Large Marge Summer Camp Trauma of ’87.’ Blowjob Bear and Large Marge are both seared into my memory forever. Yikes, can you imagine the two of them doing it? Someone should make a GIF of that.”

TI WEST (writer/director: The House of the Devil; next year’s The Innkeepers)
“The Shining traumatized me as a child and inspired me as an adult.  Some of the finest filmmaking of all time. And by far the scariest movie I have ever seen. Stanley Kubrick was a one-of-a-kind filmmaker whose sensibilities worked perfectly in the horror genre. To this day, I won’t go into a room numbered 237. And don’t even get me started on those two little girls…” 

JUSTIN RICE (actor: Harmony & Me; Dead & Lonely; musician: Bishop Allen) 
“When I was a kid, maybe seven or eight, I visited my grandfather, who lived on a golf course in Mississippi.  He rented The Shining and left me in front of the TV while he went to “work on his taxes,” which seemed to have something to do with a bottle of Wild Turkey. The twins and the wave of blood, the corpse lady in the bathtub, the weird sex scene with the plushy bear: they all still show up in my dreams. Halfway through, I ran into my grandfather’s study, crying, where he asked me, slurring, if I wanted to grow up to be a pussy. Since I did not, I sat my ass back down and finished the fucking movie. The Shining still really freaks me out. Redrum.” 

RONNIE GIERHART (musician: Neon Indian; various projects) 
“I’m going to choose Opera, a movie I just watched by Dario Argento. The way the actors interact with the camera and the length of various scenes really impressed me. For instance, at the beginning there is a long moving shot that depicts what an actress is seeing right before being struck by a car. The sound effects did some really traumatic things to my ears. There was a specific sound effect that made me uncomfortable, when one of the opera house’s stagehand has his head driven into a coat rack multiple times. And there seems to be a consistent musical theme for each mood in the movie. Eventually, you can listen and know the sort of situation the main actress is about to encounter. Also, there are these loud black crows that you hear in every scene. It’s disturbing. At some point, the crows are the one who—through vindictive motives—discover the killer and gauge his left eye out!  I’ve never been to an opera before but I imagine that the dramatic ones are very abrasive and engaging in a powerful way. In regard to the killings in the film, the murderer often ties the main actress up, placing sewing needles by her eyelids that prevent her from blinking. The killer doesn’t want Betty to miss out on watching the mutilations take place. During those scenes, I didn’t want to blink either. That’s how captivated I was!”

NICK MELON (co-host, “Nick and Nick” on East Village Radio)
I Drink Your Blood – 1970
“It’s this super low-budget hippie slasher about a group of weird, Satanist free-loving-types who terrorize a small town. There’s a kid who makes meat pies using the infected rabies blood of a dog. Then he feeds it to the hippies turning ’em into even bigger freaks than they already were. I watched it for the first time stoned as shit. I remember wondering if I was more stoned than the actors in the movie. Oh yeah, and the craziest part: the hippies rape this girl and then they get confronted by her grandfather. So they dose him with acid. Genius.”

NICK MAYA (co-host, “Nick and Nick” on East Village Radio) 
Dead Snow – 2009
“There are four words to describe Dead Snow: Norwegians, zombie Nazis, and guts. [Ed. note: That’s five words.] I like the movie for its underlying biological theme, which essentially boils down to “fight or flight.”  For the Norwegians, unfortunately, there is no right choice, since the Nazis end up ripping their heads off and intestines no matter what. I saw the film during my first real New York summer. Afterward, I would have rather have been in Norway fighting off zombie Nazis, because they do not have shit on humidity.”

MICHAEL STEPHENSON (director: Best Worst Movie; former child actor: Troll 2) 
“On the surface, C.H.U.D. aka Cannabalistic Hummanoid Underground Dwellers, is a 1984 horror movie about mutated flesheating creatures that, well, dwell in NYC’s subway system and feed on homeless people. When the transient population begins to decline, these radioactive creatures rise up from the sewer to stalk man, woman, and dog. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find a lightly subversive story about government conspiracy and toxic waste. C.H.U.D. isn’t a great horror film but it’s one of my favorites; I was only six when I saw it, the first R-rated horror movie I had seen. The film opens with a woman and her dog being dragged into the city’s sewer system. Something about the dog being dragged down with this woman into a dark manhole was oddly unsettling. But it wasn’t until later that I truly freaked out. Much of this movie’s paranoia is hidden in the shadows up until Kim Griest shines her light, to slowly reveal the dog, now glass-eyed, bloody-mouthed, and hanging by his leash. Thanks to that dead dog, I was afraid of the dark (and manholes) for years.”

ADAM BHALA LOUGH (director: the Lil’ Wayne doc The Carter; next year’s Splatter Sisters) 
“I selected some horror, but I find that really disturbing films are usually outside the genre. My first choice is Tenebrae. It has an incredible synth score, tons of T&A, lipstick lesbian make-out scenes, a reoccurring yet random transvestite dream sequence and a completely gratuitous two-minute crane shot, a single take. This make it the best Dario Argento film and one of my all time faves. Next is Hole in My Heart. I consider this Lukas Moodysson film to be horror since it dramatizes–no holds barred–the horrors of family, modern society and the way people abuse each other physically and mentally. There’s one scene that I have never been able to watch, it disturbed me so. My third choice is Irreversible, which is the best horror film of the past 10 years. I remember going to the Angelika to see David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls but it was sold out, so I slipped into this instead, not knowing anything about it. It rocked my world. I walked out trembling, hands shaking. When I got home I called my girlfriend just to tell her how much I loved her. This needs to be seen in a theater to be appreciated. OK, next is Midnight Express. One snow-day, my dad rented this film for me and my brother. I was 13 and he proceeded to leave us at home alone. I think he was trying to scare us into not smuggling drugs when we grew up. Well it worked. I had nightmares for weeks. A movie about how low one man can be debased, how a man can be turned into a slobbering, violent monster. The moment when he bites the tongue out of the dude’s mouth still disturbs me. Beautiful, haunting score by Giorgio Moroder. Another film that most wouldn’t consider to be horror but I do is Frownland. It’s a very disturbing, accurate portrayal of a fucked up individual. A cry for help, and it gets under your skin. My second to last choice is Bergman’s Virgin Spring. Legend has it that the original Last House on the Left was inspired by this film. So, if you’re a kid reading this, check it out. It’s a masterpiece classic rape/revenge film based on a Swedish epic poem. And I can’t leave out Groupie. This is Marilyn Manson’s directorial debut. You’ll find some information online if you really go hunting. I can’t say anymore about it.” 

CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS (Vice Records) 
“My choice is The Thing–the 1982 remake by John Carpenter–because he used all those nutso animatronics. I can’t stand CGI animated crap. I much prefer robots covered in latex and slime, and guts coming out of them. And I’m pretty sure it was based on a true story which makes it way scarier.” 

DURGA CHEW-BOSE (film writer: Interview) 
“Catalog of a ’90s 6th grade slumber party: girls keyed-up on soda, cake, and pizza, miscellaneous bedding, readings from an issue of Seventeen with Amy Smart on the cover—the one where she’s got her hands in her back pockets in that distinctly “T-shirt and jeans” mien—idle talk about boys, somebody farts, a few Oujia questions before everyone grows jaded, and around midnight, the much anticipated tradition; a half-circle huddle around the bathroom mirror where in chorus, everyone whispers ‘Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Caaan-dy-maaan… Candyman!’ 

My memory of the movie isn’t great but here are several things will never dull. Virginia Madsen as the pre-Scully skeptic. That fish-gutting sound whenever anyone was killed. The late night library microfilm headlines. The bathtub scene—no bubbles in slasher films! The trophy cleaver knife. An especially nipply ‘other woman.’ That syrupy shade of Sangria-red blood that splattered and soaked and pooled in circles. The thousands of bees. The buzzing. The hideous bee kiss. And that iridescent pink glow that assumed the screen whenever Madsen fell under Candyman’s opiate.”

TOM FITZGERALD (film programmer: Los Angeles’ Cinefamily) 
“Sledgehammer from 1983. The only film in years that has left this jaded film monger a tad unnerved. One of the first flicks from the SOV (shot-on-video) horror film phenomenon, a by-product of the 1980s’ straight-to-home video revolution. Unlike most of its “be kind, rewind” kin, Sledgehammer is a weirdly compelling, down-right creepy treat. Amongst a claustrophobic white-walled, windowless condo-like vision of hell that seems as bare and spare as a Beckett play, there’s a humongous masked killer weilding the big fuckin’ titular weapon as he preys upon a six pack of party hardy bozos. The viewing experience feels like an early ’80s soap opera dream sequence that slowly curdles into a slo-mo homicidal hallucination. Seek it out and crank up the bass to get maximum impact from the incessant dime store synth score. Sledgehammer!”

CAPTAIN BEYONCE (musician: Wizzard Sleeve) 
“I may not score many points for “originality,” but if you don’t dig Suspiria then you don’t like horror: the strange plot, the brilliant colors and lighting, the bizarre character interaction, the elaborate murders and by far the creepiest soundtrack I’ve ever heard (all hail GOBLIN!). The first time I saw it I was in my late teens, sick as fuck. I had ingested too many cold remedies. Needless to say, it scared me shitless and left me rocking back and forth on the couch all alone and sweaty. I still prefer to watch the movie to this day with a slight fever and a bottle of cough syrup.” 

ANDY CAPPER (Vice UK Editor) 
“My three favorite scary films are Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and Suspiria. In Rosemary’s Baby a mother is abused and raped by the devil. In The Omen a mother is killed by the devil who is her step-son, while in Suspiria a whole load of women are killed in horrific ways by witches who worship the devil. I know not what these choices say about my relationship with my mother and women in general, but I do know that a quite strict religious upbringing did affect the voracity in which I devoured subject matter like this. At least, once I was old enough to sneak out the house and watch them on VHS at my friend Julien’s house; he would drink Southern Comfort and smoke weed then put on porno after the horror films had run out. It’s against the rules to pick three films [That’s what we thought – Ed.] and so I’ve whittled it down thus: Rosemary’s Baby is an “arty psycho thriller,’ Suspiria is a “Italian Gothic nightmare” but The Omen came from Hollywood and has lots of special FX and is therefore my favorite “horror” movie. The scene where the nanny hangs herself at the kid’s party still gives me the shivers. Plus it’s set in facking Britain. God save the dear old Queen.” 

JUSTIN ISHMAEL (creative director: Mondo Tees) 
“If you count up how many bad movies Ridley Scott has made since 1979 and multiply that by ten, then that will equal the number of times Alien has been ripped off. So, a few Alien rip offs are really good, like Galaxy of Terror, and some are really bad (Alien 3) but none had more dedication, craftmanship or heart than The Deadly Spawn. Not shitting you: three guys made this movie in their garage over the span of two years for roughly the price it would cost to buy a top of the line Hyundai. (Note: That’s not a lot.) Sure, there was some bad acting, but for every “less than Olivier-esque” line reading, there were aliens eating vegetarian grandmas or girlfriends getting their heads bitten off. Not only are the effects in this movie STELLAR, but the hero of the film is a horror geek that uses the stuff he bought out of Famous Monsters of Filmland to save the day. In an effort to show my love for this movie, I decided that it’d be a good idea to get these alien beasts tattooed on my arm forever. Not getting laid has never been so sweet.” 

SHAWN HARWELL (writer: Eastbound & Down; Danny McBride’s planned Hench) 
“Children of the Corn: it was the first horror movie I ever saw and it scared the living crap out of me. I don’t think I’ve watched it since and I don’t intend to. I just now looked it up on IMDB and learned that the actor who played Malachai is named Courtney Gains. This fact alone makes the movie at least fifty percent less scary. To be completely honest, the making of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video also scared me at a young age. I guess I’m just not much of a horror guy.” 

JUICEBOX (Vice office bear) 
Roar. Heimo’s Arctic Refuge. Roar. You fucking bastards. 

BRET BERG (film programmer: Los Angeles’ Cinefamily) 
“It’s near-impossible for an serious film freak (read: loser) to narrow down a genre to a single favorite, but if I must, then it must be David Cronenberg’s The Fly. This is the most revolting, enticing and brain-boiling creation I was exposed to as a gradeschooler. I was babysat by cable TV, a more comforting zone than the local dingy video store crammed full of lurid ‘big box’ old-school VHS covers (which deeply scarred me emotionally). As much as my parents thought they could monitor the nightmare fodder stuff, they weren’t aware that I knew how to program the VCR. Jeff Goldblum’s transformation from his usual tall, jittery dude self into an oozing pile of flesh-goo burrowed its way so deep into my freaked-out brain that I couldn’t eat pudding for years afterwards.” 

CHRISTY KARACAS (creator: Superjail; musician: Cheeseburger) 
“My favorite is, well, I’ll have to recommend The Tingler with Vincent Price. This is an old film that’s best seen live, complete with shocking chairs, skeletons, and ‘the Tingler’ itself. But it’s worth a rental too. It’s contains some of the most amazingly awkward over-the-top dialogue and acting I’ve ever seen. You will laugh, er, ‘scream’ your head off.”  

BABY BALLS (Vice editor) 
“I couldn’t even deal with the box art in Blockbuster’s horror section until I was like 14, so most of my formative horror-movie experience comes from whatever snippets snuck through on TV before I was able to change the channel. Aside from blacking out in terror at Large Marge’s claymated eyeballs, one scene in particular looms large at the back of my brain. Just starting to think about it is making my asshole tighten. A group of kids are horsing around by an open window in an old New England house. It is a pleasant summer day. One of them has his hand across the sill when suddenly the window crashes shut and an exposed nail punches into his little fleshy mitt like Dracula’s fang. Blood, I swear to god, sprays directly into his screeching five-year-old face. I didn’t stick around long enough to figure out the movie’s name or what the rest of it was about. I’m not even sure it was actually a horror movie–given the visual style there’s a good chance it was on the Lifetime Channel–but it’s shaped the way I think about windows to this day.”

DOUGLAS HADDOW (writer)
“Jacob’s Ladder isn’t technically a horror film but it sure is horrifying, especially when you’re 14-years-old and high on mushrooms for the first time. The plan was near-perfect: a friend’s parents had left to go camping for the weekend, so we got a Ziploc bag full of the awful little things and rented Baraka so we could properly “trip-out” and experience the universe at its most radical. But when we arrived at my friend’s house his jerk older brother was splayed across the couch. He was eating Cheetos and playing Super Metroid. Ten minutes into Baraka he said, “This shit is gay,” hit eject, and popped in a newly minted copy of Jacob’s Ladder. Halfway through the film I got the feeling that all the characters had it in for me. And my stomach was beginning to churn so I dragged my pancake eyes into the bathroom for a cool drink of water. I spent the rest of the night on the floor, wrapped around the toilet, convinced that I was doomed to die a slow and painful death for all the evil things I had done (read: masturbation and shoplifting). To this day I cannot look at Tim Robbins without remembering the smell of 7-11 cheeseburger puke.”

HUNTER STEPHENSON (Vice)
“Ten years ago, I would have said The Shining, but honestly zipping by jpegs and memes on Tumblr every week has dimmed its dreadful power and mystery for the time being. If you—meaning me I guess, which reminds me, how much did Secret Window lick asshole—had asked a few months ago, I would have said Enter the Void was a mean contender. And then I would have excused myself to suck air from a mask and climb up a vagina or into a huge wetnap. Enter the Void is probably the only film that has made me physically ill, and if Gaspar Noe ever directs a “traditional” horror film or skins daschunds in his spare time, the genre’s crown is his. Paul Thomas Anderson could also claim it in the years ahead, if Scientologists don’t blow up his fucking car first. I have never liked The Exorcist. I think Pet Sematary is still underrated, and occasionally I think its sequel is exactly what a cash-grab horror sequel should be. I associate Gremlins with Christmas, so my favorite horror comedy–as opposed to comedy horror, the cool ruler being Young Frankenstein–is An American Werewolf in London. With its irreverent friction of smart and lowbrow humor, sex (hetero and homo), death, and a young idealist’s hatred of advertising and classy nod to his inner psychopath, John Landis’s film is nearly untouchable. It’s timelessly funny and male, like eating great bush with beer in your beard. Not to mention, it’s the only film to masterfully depict a lycanthrope transformation, a sad, rather inexplicable fact that ranks with the genre’s lack of a notable Sasquatch feature. There’s the three amigos: Jason, Freddy, and …Michael—who’s the most evil based on his origins, but loses the rock-paper-scissors contest over weaponary every goddamn time. I would say John Carpenter’s Halloween and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street are tied on the top shelf, the former being a better, more influential horror film with a classic soundtrack theme, the latter being scarier, more conceptually daring and original. But I don’t consider either film a genuine work of art. And while Carpenter’s greatness was enabled by his bold fuck-the-snobs mentality, I can think of no greater fuck-the-snobs accomplishment than creating a work of art within the bounds of horror, the least respected and studied of genres. The last shots of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and many shots before it, are the Mona Lisa of nightmares. Leatherface pirouetting, gas machine sputtering, against the hot rock that gave humans life, on a long road that doesn’t need a name and never will. I think, in his way, Kubrick was searching for that road in The Shining, and in a few other of his masterworks, but he never found it.”

LEO FITZPATRICK (actor: Kids, The Wire; regular: Max Fish)
“I don’t really have a favorite horror movie, but the one that stands out most is the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. At the time, I was too young to be watching it, but my older siblings–loving as they were–forced me. I had nightmares of Freddy chasing me every night for about two weeks. Until my mom finally sat me down, explaining that Freddy was just an actor, that it was all fake, and thus ruining any movie-going experience I would ever have in the future. Thanks a lot mom.” 

CHRISSIE MILLER (owner/fashion designer: Sophomore) 
“The scariest movie I have ever seen stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston and is called He’s Just Not That Into You. It scared the shit out of me. Before that movie I thought every guy I had ever dated was secretly obsessed with me, but was too “emotionally unavailable.” Boy was I wrong! If only I had seen this movie at age 12. It would have saved me a lot of pain and heartache.”

COMPILED BY HUNTER STEPHENSON