Sunday, October 23, 2011

I Don't Want Freddy and Jason; Give Me Vincent

I love horror movies. Love love LOVE them! But here's the thing; I'm not very good with gore. Sometimes I even have to turn away from episodes of House and Private Practice when they're cutting into people's heads or organs or...excuse me a minute.

Okay, better now. Back to the love of horror movies. I watch the classics. I don't mean the newer '70/'80s classics: Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween or Friday the 13th; I mean House on Haunted Hill and Invisible Ghost. I mean Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi. These are the killers that will kill you quiet and then go after your friends who don't even know you're dead because you were dissolved in an acid bath in the laboratory. I mean the killers who kill one person and then have to keep killing so that first murder isn't discovered. You know the guy who lives in the secluded castle on a hill? He scares me a good deal more than the guy wearing the hockey mask. Unless the guy in the castle is Dr. Frank-n-Furter, then I just wanna party with him.

I love and fear the men like Vincent Price who's very voice suggests he will have a nice tea after a long day's killing people and forming them into wax sculptures of historical figures. By the by, may I suggest you rent House of Wax? Not the newer Paris Hilton-version which I only watched for Jared Padalecki and his abs, but the Vincent Price one. You'll be able to sleep with the lights out, but you'll flinch at everyone in an artist smock for a month. You want a real scare that may not startle a scream out of you, but will haunt your dreams for weeks? Find a Bela Lugosi flick or a Lon Chaney Jr. movie. Did you know Little Shop of Horrors was originally an actual horror movie made in 1960 that was only later made a musical?

The best modern horror movies I can think of are the Paramornal Activity flicks. No buckets of gore, but see if you don't flinch at shadows afterwards. They freak you out in the theatre, sure all horror movies worth their salt do that, but then they stick with you. They get into your head and make your quiet house or apartment seem like it could be harboring angry spirits. You can run from a masked man wielding a chainsaw- and really, those things are very heavy, how fast can those guys really run?. But when your lights flicker and your heart starts beating a little faster or when a man's voice or smile is enough to send shivers down your spine, that's really being horrified.

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