Cutting Room: 13 Horror Films Slashed From Other Lists

13. Cabin Fever (2002)

Writer director Eli Roth has a well known bromance with Quentin Tarantino. I personally think that QT spends way too much of his time promoting and helping inferior filmmakers like Roth and Robert Rodriquez. Roth went on to kick off the torture porn genre in the U.S. with Hostel, but before that he wrote and directed this little campy horror movie about college students that fall victim to a flesh eating virus while partying at a cabin the woods.

It’s about exactly as it sounds, but here Roth shows flashes of early Peter Jackson instead of his later pantomiming of Asian directors that he doesn’t understand. The results are a glorious gore fest where the dork and diva sex scene alone may haunt one for years after viewing.

12. The Orphan (2009)

Improbably, 2009 has been a nice and tidy year for horror movies.  In a much needed departure from the torture porn of the ‘Saw’ and “Hostel’ franchises, the horror genre found rebirth in 2009 with titles like Drag Me to Hell, Pandorum, Paranormal Activity, and Trick r Treat.

‘The Orphan’ is a part of that rebirth as well.  Like each of the other movies listed, ‘The Orphan’ recycled from elements that had been long expired genre staples and breathed new life into them.  These movies did nothing to reinvent their particular sub-genre, but rather focused more on making a good piece of genre cinema with a solid story, scares, and acting.  There is nothing new under the sun, but sometimes old themes and familiar frights can yield a good yarn and a welcome influx of The Creeps. In this case the genre seed is, well, The Bad Seed.

11. Ils (2006)

This little French/Romanian film inspired the tepid US remake called The Strangers. If you have seen the latter, do not let that stop you from seeing the former.  Only the concept is similar as very little of the actual story crosses over.  ‘Ils’ is a brutal piece of tense film making as it hits us all where we are all vulnerable – home invasion. The antagonists in ‘Ils’ are not adult natural born killers, but rather teenagers. Indeed, almost children.  The violence of the movie unfortunately bares uncanny resemblance to the Dnepropetrovsk Killings in 2008. The movie claims to be inspired by real life events.  News of this sort of thing – gangs of murderous early teen and pre-teen kids – date back to the late 1950s in Europe and former Soviet countries (which for the record pre-dates ‘A Clockwork Orange’ as well).  An uncomfortable and “frightening” movie if not exactly of the typical horror ingredients.

10. Fright Night (1985)

A glorious and mostly forgotten entry from that very singular era of film making that took place in the 1980s. ‘Fright Night’ is a bit more than skin deep for it mixes camp, tribute, and fright in equal parts.  Roddy McDowell plays Peter Vincent, a once great horror movie actor of yesteryear in the vein of Vincent Price. Vincent’s career is winding down and he finds himself as the host of a Friday Night Chillers type television show where he is a kind of male Elvira.

Vincent is sought out by young Peter Danridge who believes he has the unfortunate honor of his new neighbor being a blood sucking, real life vampire. Vincent plays along at first, drawn by being needed and the deferment to his fictional specialty.  But what happens when Vincent discovers that young Peter is not as delusional as he once thought?

9. Zombie (1979)

George Romero may have pioneered the no budget home-made special effects zombie movie, but he is not the only one to create a gory and chilling mess in the genre with little or no budget and gore FX improvised and made extreme.  ‘Zombie’ (also called ‘Zombi 2′) was originally a X-Rated film and a “video nasty.”

8. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Yes, really.  So much guff was dished to the venerable horror franchises in the mid 1990s that nothing could save the reputation of any of the many sequels.  ‘New Nightmare’ got back the franchise creator, Wes Craven, and went a route that no running franchise tried before – meta. Not only is Wes Craven back at the helm, but he is also one of the stars.  As are original Elm Streeters Heather Langenkamp, Sarah Risher, and more.

See, it seems that the actors from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” are suffering from sleeping problems.  More concerning, much like their on-screen characters from a decade past, when they do sleep they are plagued with a visage that could only be one Freddy Kruger. But these are not dreams remembering Robert Englund as Freddy (indeed Englund the actor shares screen time with our red and green striped hero, if you get my drift), but rather of a duster wearing, mostly hat-less Kruger who not only wants to put the razor claws to good use, but also wants out into our reality.

‘New Nightmare’ was really a re-boot before the term was coined for use in the movie industry.  The meta theme would be repeated later with the ‘Friday the 13th’ franchise as well as, awkwardly, Craven’s own Scream 3.

7. Exorcist III (1990)

Real quick. The movie ‘Exorcist III’ is the actual follow-up to William Peter Blatty’s book ‘Exorcist’ by the author himself.  That book is titled ‘Legion’ and has nothing to do with the events in the movie ‘Exorcist II’ which was made only to cash in. Got it?

‘Exorcist III’ is a departure in style from the original.  This time it’s about a cop, played by George C Scott, hunting a serial killer dubbed ‘Gemini.’

Brad Douif is downright amazing (no surprise, he played Wormtongue in ‘LOTR‘ and Doc Cochran in Deadwood.) as Gemini.  Dourif is somehow able to personify evil creepiness in a way that causes shivers.

There’s some inconsistencies between part III and the original movie, but those are forgivable as the film ‘Exorcist III’ is a mature and scary movie whose atmospheric macabre nature seeps into one’s mind as he is watching.

6. Severance (2006)

Horror/comedy is a dangerous genre.  Very few movies get the mix right.  Shaun of the Dead, of course, hit the mark well as did recent blockbuster Zombieland.

‘Severance’ is a UK/German movie filmed in Hungary. Not that it matters.  The humor is along the lines of the previously mentioned films except there are no zombies.  Instead a sales team is introduced into a wilderness survival regime in order to hone their sales ability (I know, right?). What follows is scary, bloody, funny satire which is both fun and gross to watch.

5. Picnic at Hanging Rock

Possibly the least visceral of the movies on the list – and the hardest to staple to a genre – ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ taps a more surreal vein to surround the viewer with a hazy, trippy, intellectually terrifying experience. There is underlying eroticism with barely a hint of overt sexuality which comes off as somehow unknowable and eerie.

‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is such an atmospheric treat and deeply unsettling. Ostensibly the film is about a group of young ladies that  go on an all day excursion to picnic at hanging rock.  A group of the girls disappear. That’s it on the surface, but there is so much more.

4. Dead End (2003)

Look, I love Ray Wise.  I think he is one of the best character actors around and his range of type is amazing.  His portrayal of Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks was every bit as vital to the dogma of the show as that of Kyle Maclachlan’s Agent Cooper.

Obviously ‘Dead End’ stars Ray Wise.  Wise is Frank Harrington, a family man on his way to his in-laws on Christmas Eve with his wife, daughter, and son.  He takes a short cut that he’s never attempted in years of traveling the same route. Things go wrong. Then things go weird.

‘Dead End’ is a strange and frightening affair that ends up possessing layers of subtle allegory.  A top notch entry.

3. Rec (2007)

Ask me what’s the best zombie film of the last decade or so and my answer would not be a Romero movie, ‘Zombieland,’ or a Romero remake. Instead the Spanish film ‘Rec’ would top my list of recent zombie frights.

‘Rec’ was remade in the U.S. as Quarantine. The original is better, but ‘Quarantine’ is a passable remake and I feel that one should see both.

‘Rec’ is one of those footage movies where the perspective we are treated to is that of a camera man. In this case the camera man is working with a female reporter who is doing a community piece by traveling with an emergency crew to give an inside peek to their job.  Wow, that sounds realistic, right? The hook is easy to bite in to.

From there we get a first-person perspective of the reporter and the crew  as they answer a call to a building where the problem is something completely off the charts as an emergency!

2. Phantasm

I covered this movie as a Retro Crush.

Imagine a little chubby cherubic boy with brown hair and wide brown eyes peddling his yellow-over-painted-with-flat-white fixed gear bike down a sun glossed street in a suburb of Charleston, WV. It’s the summer of 1987 and the boy is dressed in a neon blue tank top, JAMS shorts, and is adorned with a bright red bandanna – rolled tight and circling his forehead.

The boy is aged 13, the JAMS are likely knock-offs, and he is me. It was on this summer day of 1987 on one of my daily trips to the rental shop to rent a movie that I discovered “Phantasm.” The building in which the rental place was housed was a lonely unattached structure in the heart of the suburbs. Weeds broke through the parking lot and the business was both a movie rental place and a tanning salon. The name was something like Suntastic Movies. It was as fitting place as any to find what would become one of my favorite films of all time.

My initial love for the movie came from the kinship I felt toward “Mike,” the resourceful kid that used his wits to stay alive, and the fear inducing The Tall Man played note perfect by Angus Scrimm. I believed that everyone feared The Tall Man in some way. I thought paranoid lyrics by David Bowie and screeching preachers under a tent that my parents dragged me out to see were all inspired in one form or another from fear of The Tall Man. The fear that these letters feel when they see that gaping emptiness at the bottom of the page waiting for them to slide down into its maw. That is the fear of The Tall Man.

1. The Changeling (1980)

The number one entry could have easily been any of the top five in the list.  In choosing ‘The Changeling’ I felt that I was going with the movie that had the biggest gap between greatness and popularity.  ‘The Changeling’ I believe is the best movie on the list of which the fewest people have seen. To top it off it is a traditional ghost story, and what’s better to top the list than the topical granddaddy of frightful story telling?

Atmospheric in the same was as Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, the ghostly ambiance of haunts in ‘The Changeling’ manifests in the viewers mind.  The bump and the glimpse and discoveries all slowly develop and build the  tension and scares.  ‘The Changeling,’ though filmed at the end of the decade, uses quintessential 1970s film-making style to crawl under the viewer’s skin to reside at the base of the neck and send chills down to the well of the stomach.

Youtube has the full movie available in multiple parts. It’s been up for a year and Youtube is a lackey for copyright nazis, so I am sure that it is posted legally. Link here.  I believe it is somewhat a famous quirk that there is no official trailer for this movie.

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