Your personal favorite horror movie?

Well, ff the genie ever grants me an extra wish, I'll arrange a dinner-date for you two.

Watching Repulsion right now and it's pretty effing brilliant. Not sure the music's always appropriate, as it gets unnecessarily jazzy at times, but that's my only complaint.

All well and good, but the movie and its FX are just too cheesy for all of that theological blather. It's a Saturday Night horror movie, where "authorities" are never right since dinosaurs, vampires and werewolves really exist, in spite of the authorities, be they cops, priests, scientists, etc. It was OK, but once we got to that head twisting sequence, all of a sudden it was The Giant Behemoth, all over again. As a long time indulger in cheesy horror, The Exorcist didn't budge my needle.

Fascinating stuff.

Sitting on the comfort of your couch a half-century after this thing hit its target audience like a freight train, I suppose it is easy to dismiss.

We should note that this film set the bar for all those cheesy horror films (of which you have been a long-time indulger) that followed. This and Chainsaw set the bar for horror in the same way that Star Wars and 2001 set the bar for scifi. It helped make the genre by which you're judging it, making your casual dismissal of the former by comparison to the latter suspect.

And how hard is it to criticize special effects made in 1973? The stargate sequence from 2001 now looks like an endless array of screensavers. Should we dismiss 2001 as cheesy because you've been spoiled by endless follow-up films that were challenged to build on the technical accomplishments of 2001?

Horror and comedy, in the extreme, are both audacious in their "unreality." Airplane is the comedic equivalent of The Exorcist. Airplane is unrelenting in its unreality. If the film does not capture you, it is a cringefest, because it is very very silly. This film is a high-risk / high-reward proposition. If the film does catch you in the right mood, it is funny AF.

Horror is similar. It just assaults rationality from the opposite angle. It tells us things we know aren't true are true. If it works, some part of our brain agrees. And the more you stimulate irrationality in the audience, the more you can stretch their suspension of disbelief.
https://thedailyjaws.com/blog/2022/1...ending-of-jaws

If you've pushed the audience far enough to believe in demonic possession, you can also push them to believe a head-twist. The unreality here wasn't "cheesy," but a heightening.

Outside of the throngs of passion in the right moment, a person's bedroom moans, utterances, and facial expressions are also quite cheesy. It's all in the mind, but it's also all in the moment. At the right moment, done by the right person, a surprise hand touching your thigh can be a welcome escalation that catapults a situation. What was a cheesy moment (a conceit) for you, was a triumphant escalation for millions of viewers. So, should The Exorcist have made itself just for you or for the people who were at the box-office in 1973? Because it worked for them.

Your casual dismissal of what was a cultural event with a drive-by "hot take" sounds more like freshman's answer to the question "What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?" than a mic-drop moment.

Even at the time the head turning effect was never terribly realistic. But that unreality is the key to its effectiveness. It does seem like a bit of a cheap parlor trick, and the seams are kinda showing even at a glance, but when something this uncanny and wrong-looking is dropped into the center of a film which has up until this point been so meticulous in building our trust in it, this unreality becomes all the more disorienting. Id argue if it had been rendered perfectly realistically, and as a result less distinguishable from the ordinary world that surrounds it, the whole point of the scene would be muted. It would soften the questions we inevitably start to ask because we have now been put into a state where we have to reconsider what is true and what is not. We have to decide if we now accept what does not seem like it could possibly be real as being real? Or do we instead begin to distrust the very reality of everything else, including our own instincts, the ground beneath our very feet? It puts us into a crisis of faith, no matter which divide in the theological line we may be standing on. You know, the whole point of the movie.

Fwiw, when I was a mid-teen, I recall watching The Omen, Rosemary's Baby, and The Exorcist, and thought:
The Omen - amazing! great!
Rosemary's Baby - that devil child situation is kind of scary, I guess
The Exorcist - I don't see what the big deal is about. It's okay; like above average.

Re-watching them decades later, my estimation of them kind of flipped:
The Exorcist - Okay, holy crap. If I was a mother who had a teen who had a progressively debilitating mental illness like that, and I'm taking her to a lot of doctors, and they're running tests, and they're coming up with nothing and are powerless to do anything about it, that is pretty scary. So, the realism of the first half struck me really well to the point where it did feel like, or close to, a masterpiece, even if I still wasn't that taken with the second half. But more on the second half at the end, since, which some of this is going to piggyback on what crumbsroom has been saying.

Rosemary's Baby - A lot of this is campy and silly (Ruth Gordon delivers), but the depiction of spousal psychological control, manipulation, isolation, and gaslighting feels spot on in a way that feels chilling.

The Omen - Is gothic horror the right term? IDK, it's solid, but there isn't really any deep human pyschological insight here, it's just lots of atmospheric, foreboding doom - which has it's place, but now feels lesser in comparison to the other two.

Returning to the second half of The Exorcist, some of this I got from the Poltergeist/Exorcist thread (still seems like a weird pairing to compare/contrast to me - I guess, little girl at the mercy of evil spirit(s)?), and a conversation I had with someone else online, elsewhere (much later than my rewatching of the movie), but in the latter, they stood up for the second half because, and pulling from Blatty's novel, apparently it's noticeably more ambiguous if she's Regan's actually possessed and what's happening in the latter half is actually just mass hysteria. Which, going to the movie, consider it is mass hysteria from a woman desperate because science can't answer what's wrong with her little kid, a secular priest who has been losing his religion and been desperately needing something missing in his inner soul, and an elderly priest claiming to have answers harkening back to older times. Now, this reading hadn't crossed my mind during the rewatch, because sometimes I'm a simple person, and what's on screen is how I interpret it, but as crumb's most recent post has been arguing, maybe those special effects are supposed to be destabilizing in a movie that until the manifestations were observed, had been very realistic. In which case, a woman turns towards science & medicine to save her child, as a priest turns towards modern theories to explain the mysteries of the world, not getting their answers, turn towards the false answers of traditional religion. Or, she is possessed, in which case, well, the exorcism also doesn't work, so those answers from religion also still didn't save them. Kind of lose-lose all around in this, Philip K Dick/Veerhoven/Total Recall sort of scenario of, "is this real or not." (citing the Veerhoven adaptation of Total Recall since that's another well known case of, the author is, I believe, known to play with their reader with a false sense of reality, but in the movie adaptation, when viewed as a teenager, it didn't really cross my mind that you should give the possibility that it was all a simulation, because dumb action movies don't really do that since it would undercut the ending of the movie on such subtle evidence, which, as an adult, appreciating Veerhoven's general style, he likes it to have the veneer of what it isn't).

Just a reading I'm tossing out there for consideration.

Having indulged in a lot of horror movies over the years, I sometimes think about writing a book about the Philosophy and Psychology of Horror. The basic question is why a movie like The Exorcist scared a lot of people and didn't even budge my meter. I recall some movies that hit my exposed nerves real hard and other people hardly noticed.

Sitting in my psychoanalytic easy chair, I assume that horror movies hit people who have barely-aware fears that get tweaked by the movie. For them it's horror, for me, it's a waste of two hours.

A movie that hit my numbers was an old sci-fi classic, The Forbidden Planet. The electronic music, the approach of the invisible Id Monster, its footprints and the screams of crew members being butchered by the monster stayed in my dreams for a while.

We all have our places in our minds where we just don't want to go and a lot of them are not quite what someone else would expect.

The Exorcist was a standout in terms of really scaring the crap out of a lot of people at the time of its release. For decades it was recognized a the standard by which other films were measured. We must conclude that it was well-engineered, right?

A conventional story only has to tell us a "true lie." A horror movie or a science fiction film, however, typically asks us to take it seriously while telling us the most outrageous of lies. It is, therefore, not surprising that horror movies and science fiction films often fail to work their magic decades after their release. We should, therefore, be a bit more charitable in judging these works (relative to our own subjectivity).

You appear to have more of the mindset of a materialist, so it makes sense that science horror would be a gateway to tickling your irrationality. If so, I wonder if Event Horizon gave you a scare when it was released. Did the hell-by-way-of-warp-drive premise tunnel into your irrationality? Or was it all a bit too conventional (Bosch goes high tech, Hell Raiser in space) in terms of the payoff to work? Or... ...something else entirely?

Yep. I guess, based on box office as well as studio blather, it was. I was disappointed.

I've seen that one, quite a while ago. My recollection is that it was a smart sci-fi movie, but nothing that moved me to my core. That's what I mean about how "scary" is an elusive commodity. I'd like to do a psychological study on that.

The idiosyncratic question (what scares me?) is an excavation of the self. There is, no doubt, value in the question, but the answers we will find will be subjective, non-transferable, one-time tickets.

The artistic question (what scares us?) is an excavation of the great collective unconsciousness, the zeitgeist, even the universal (the true classic tales stick around for a reason). We may not, personally, resonate with the answers, but this is why the answers challenge us from across the divide. They are a sort of window. Learn to peer through this window into the soul of your own time and place, and you can orchestrate the response of your own audience, time and again.

There is a contemporary chauvinism against classic history (e.g., Herodotus, Gibbon) for their chauvinism, nationalism, mysticism, their inaccuracies, their conceits, even their lies. I love them. If you want to know what people thought of themselves, read the stories they wrote about themselves. There is more to be leaned by listening to the sources (e.g., poetry, political speeches, songs), or as close to the sources as as we can get (ancient histories, classic stabilizations via retelling/translations) than to enter into the chronocentric navel-gazing of the modern expert. I don't care about how a typical modern critic sees a text, because I know how a typical modern critic sees everything.

I think there is more to be learned in embracing the irrationality of an age than there is in dismissing it. We probably couldn't make The Exorcist today and have the same effect (audiences, after all, have already seen it), but if we pay close attention, we might be able to re-individuate the form by re-contextualizing in a way that resonates with our own age. Sadly, those in the grips of theory, especially moralizing theories, think that this means gender-swapping or race-swapping characters or tacking on a critique of capitalism to some old artwork. A productive artist is more like a tuning-fork, popular because they've tuned in to the great hive-mind "out there." I think this is why most comedians tend to only be killer-funny for about a decade or so, at most. At the point that you're a millionaire making movies, you eventually slide out-of-phase with the collective sensibility that so reliably helped you hit the mark so many times in the past (saying what everyone else was feeling, but couldn't quite articulate).

All-time favorite is Halloween (1978), although The Lost Boys (1987) is a strong contender.

Alien

The Babadook (2014) is a masterclass in psychological horror, blending traditional scares with a deep exploration of grief and mental health. Director Jennifer Kent crafts a chilling tale centered on a mother and son haunted by a sinister presence. The film relies on atmosphere and tension rather than gore, delivering a slow-burn experience that lingers long after the credits roll. With stunning performances, especially from Essie Davis, and its eerie, minimalist visuals, The Babadook is a must-watch for fans of intelligent and emotionally resonant horror.