10 Favorite Horror Films from Gatsby the Non-Horror Fan

I'm insulted.

Don't be. We all know he's lying.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

That's because you're a horror!

In that case I'm confused. Halloween to me seems much more typical and much less influential. For one thing Halloween is a pretty cheesy movie with horrible acting, unrealistic implausibilities, and meaningless filler content. It may be popular and influence the general public, but a movie like that doesn't tend to influence the professional world very much. Alien on the other hand had great acting, was very realistic, and had a lot of depth, meaningful content, and attention to detail. It wasn't typical for a horror movie to be scary without showing gory deaths (I don't mean there wasn't gore, but the most frightening scenes imply the violence off camera).

Denying that Alien was a very influential horror film makes me think that you are just extremely prejudice.

Let me expose your prejudice just a little. You accuse Alien of being a slasher. I just typed slasher movies in google, guess what the first movie on the list at the top of the screen was, and guess which movie wasn't even on the list. Type it in and see for yourself. Halloween is the first on the list, and Alien is not on the list.

Then I typed in Slasher in wikipedia. The definition practically describes Halloween to the T, and Alien doesn't even qualify.

Anyway, good troll. Look how much work you just made me do for nothing, lol.

Someone here is either totally missing the point or has no idea what a slasher even is.

I'm still not sure what the point was... I took the completely wrong approach...

Halloween is a slasher, Alien can be described as such. Now stop arguing children

Well, I don't even know what I'm talking about since I had to do research just to even say anything...

So... how is Alien a slasher? I mean, since it doesn't have a human murderer with a knife...

When I think slasher, I think one murderer chasing a group of people. You'll have to ask the big fans of slashers here like Nostromo what they think. Still i've never had a problem with people calling Alien a slasher.

Well, what I read implied that the killer has to be human.

What did you read?

The first few paragraphs of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slasher_film

A blog about Alien, and random bits and pieces from various websites. I can't remember what I googled, and I'm on a different computer now so I can't look through my history.

It also states the word 'slasher' can be used for a film when it contains killing and has and established characteristics different from splatters and psychological thrillers.

Alien is certainly not gore porn like most splatters and while it does have elements of a psychological horror the main focus of the film is scaring people by showing the terrifying events right in front of your eyes.

Conclusion: Slasher, because it fits all the requirements,but not a 'typical' one that comes to mind such as Halloween.

That's starting to sound extremely vague though. Like basically you could call any horror movie where people get killed a slasher, which would be pretty much any horror movie.

Psycho was the first slasher right? And Halloween pretty much defined the term in the modern sense, right? I don't understand how Alien qualifies. Is it because everyone gets killed off one by one until one person survives in the end?

What about Argento's films? Are giallo horror films slashers too?

Why did we over-complicate this Halloween - Alien thing?

do you realize that Halloween (1978) is in the Top 10, all-time, for rate of multiplying its budget at the box office? LINK

Think that didn't influence the professional world (movie-wise)?

Movie history says different

Swan must be conflicted in this discussion, Alien and Halloween are his two favorite movies. And actually, my username comes from Alien while my avatar comes from Halloween

Don't have to rip one to praise the other

Halloween came first, i'd say Alien was influenced by Halloween. Ash, the scientist onboard the Nostromo, speaks of the Alien killer,
'I admire its purity, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.'
That's pretty similar to how Dr Loomis speaks of Michael Myers, as inhuman and without emotion

I wouldn't call Alien a pure slasher, it's a hybrid sci-fi-horror that definitely has slasher structure. A killer confined to a space killing victims one-by-one, up to the point where slashers tend to have a 'final girl'- Ripley, for Alien

If you're confused, read the slash vault

I think most of what I could say about this has already been explained. As I said, I don't really think of Alien as a horror film, but I can see that it works as one and, for many people, it is one. Seeing Alien as a slasher wasn't something which really occurred to me until a few years ago when discussing slashers. Again, while I didn't think of it as a slasher film, there's no doubt that it follows slashers very closely, upto and including the strong female heroine/final girl as she's become known. If you think about slashers needing blades of some kind (be they knives, axes or chainsaws) then teeth and claws aren't that much different. Especially when used like that..

I feel the main reason I don't think of Alien as a slasher is because there isn't the sexual/evil/crazy side to the film. The alien is doing what it's doing. It takes no pleasure in hunting/scaring its victims. It does it to feed/reproduce. Like a scary butterfly or something.

Alien doesn't have the psychological edge of many slasher films. If anything, it's probably closer to a werewolf film. Or a sci-fi creature feature, which is pretty much where I've always had it.

I don't know how many times you've seen Halloween, but I'd recommend taking another look at it, if only to notice the framing. I don't really care about stuff like that, but I know you do, so you might be able to appreciate it more or, at least, find something you like about it. It really is that good.

Giallo films can be slashers. Depends on the film. When you say giallo horrors, are you meaning those specifically or that all giallos are horrors? It seems an obvious question I know, but it doesn't seem to be that obvious to a lot of people these days.

I've said this recently elsewhere, but personally I don't think of Psycho as the first slasher. I think Peeping Tom is a far better candidate, both in terms of release date and tone/style.

I think Halloween really popularised it, because of its box office, and it's the one that set off all the imitators, but Black Christmas is often/usually considered the first modern slasher, though Texas Chainsaw Massacre is another that people would put first.

Alien is sci-fi....there I settled it for ya all

I haven't really been following much but with Alien, I always felt like it was simply a horror film set in space, but it blends a lot of different types of horror. Yes there are qualities of slasher films, but like HK said you can also see a certain "werewolf" quality to it. I kind of laugh when people say it's not a horror film (no offense Gatsby or HK), because it so clearly is to me. Do these people mean to tell me any movie set in space can't be a horror film? I don't buy it.

I think both Zotis and HK bring up interesting points. I've long thought about what exactly a slasher is and still haven't really come to a conclusion. You see traces of similar type of stuff in giallo, older horrors like Peeping Tom and Psycho, and other places. There were certainly similar type of films previous to Halloween. All Halloween did was popularize something that already existed. Sure, maybe not all the slasher tropes existed in one single film until Halloween, I'd have to really think about that to be sure (I'm just kind of rambling here), but they existed in one form or another. Halloween is one of the most beautiful examples of pulling stuff from your influences to make something absolutely bold and unique that feels original.

If you really want to get into a disscussion of what slasher cinema is, I guess you have to define the term and look and its history first. What exactly is a slasher film? First of all, does it require that a the "slasher" is human? If so, you can throw out Alien, but you'd have to throw out a lot of movies that are considered slashers too. You'd even, maybe, have to throw out Halloween, because we're not exactly sure what Myers is in the end. But if you say no, then Alien could be a slasher, but then so could many werewolf films where there is a body count. But no one would ever call An American Werewolf in London a slasher film, would they? See what I mean? It's really hard to pinpoint what exactly a slasher film is.

What you can do though, is look at the history of the term. To my knowledge, it's a term popularized after Halloween came out and a plethora of similar movies were made to capitalize on the popularity of it. It's a term made specifically for those films, it seems, and has since become more abstract in its meaning. So, to be definitive, you could say anything post-Halloween that was made in that spirit is a slasher. That would mean giallo, Peeping Tom, Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and so on - anything prior to Halloween - would not be slashers at all. Technically, Alien came out after, but I don't think it was really made with Halloween in mind - I could be wrong. It may have pulled from influences that were similar to those of Halloween, but I'm not sure it was influenced by Halloween directly. Would be awesome if it was, though.

Now that I'm rambling, and thinking it would a bit more, I guess that's where I land. Slasher was originally definitive to films released post-Halloween to bank on it but have since become something more abstract. It describes tropes and moments in films that can be found in things that don't subscribe strictly to that definition. Peeping Tom, Psycho, giallo, Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien. These all could be mistaken - or rightly defined, depending on how you look at it - as slashers. I'd even argue some of them CAN be rightly defined as slashers. I always thought it was amazing that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which feels so much like a slasher to me, came out BEFORE Halloween, which has long been described as the first slasher by some, because it's so similar.

But ultimately -

This. This is all just semantics. It doesn't matter if a film is a slasher or not, both are great films and that's all that matters.