My Top 10 Horror Movies (PART ONE)

Burnt Out on Politics Post

Dear Friend/Subscriber

I am burnt out on politics, so, until our next SheeLilly on Sunday, I thought I’d try some frivolous content, but, also content that interests me.

My mother was a horror movie buff and we spent many hours in front of our black and white TV watching black and white horror movies: Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, the Invisible Man, etc. While I have fond nostalgia for those old films, none of them made it onto my list because they didn’t even frighten me when I was a child. As the child of a horror fan, I became one too and it persists to today. I love reading horror, watching horror and escaping from a sometimes horrible world through supernatural fantasy.

Full-disclosure, I hate slasher movies and I don’t consider the franchises of Texas Chainsaw, Halloween, Friday the 13th etc as horror films, even though there is horror in them: just more of a psychotic kind. For decades, I was Stephen King’s Number One Fan, but, two things have turned me off of his work: the fact that he is King of the Sh!tl!bs and that I overlooked one terrible aspect of his books because I loved them so much: the profound child abuse and cartoonish bullying that are in most of his books. So, even though I have enjoyed some of the film adaptations of his books (I hated Kubrick’s The Shining when it first came out, but, since then, have grown to appreciate it) none of them will appear on this list.

Even though the monster films of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s didn’t frighten me, my first memory of a film that really did was 1963’s The Haunting, adapted from the Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House. It stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn. Our parents took me, (at 6), my five-year old sister and our three-year old brother to the Rosecrans Drive-in in neighboring Paramount to see it. Little did I even suspect that about 15-years later I would be taking my own children there to see movies until it was demolished in 1993 to make way for, yet another, shopping center.

To this day, that adaptation of Jackson’s work still gives me the creeps and I remember my sister Dede and I used to re-enact some of the scenes giving each other delicious scares. I have read the original book, and every other thing written by Shirley (my mom’s name, as well) several times. Another film on my list is a more recent adaptation of this work. many horror writers and film makers have credited Shirley Jackson with inspiring them—including Stephen King.

The Haunting became the benchmark for how I have measured other horror movies for the rest of my life. I will use that as a way to judge the rest of the films on my list.

Another seminal film in my horstory is, of course, Night of the Living Dead. Some of our older cousins from Oklahoma were visiting when George Romero’s groundbreaking zombie film came out in 1968 at the NuBell theater on Bellflower Blvd. I spent many Saturdays at the NuBell (later Crest) when I was growing up. We watched a cartoon and two movies for 50 cents, but back to my first zombie film. I was eleven, and a tall one at that, but I spent most of the movie on my cousin Gale’s lap with my head buried in her shoulder. “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” On a scale of from one to The Haunting, it was the experience of my first zombie film that is the most prominent feature of NOTLD.

I used to be a terrible sleeper, so there were many nights I would sneak out to our living-room and watch TV. I think the most frightening film I saw on one of my sojourns into insomnia theater was Fail Safe, but that was a real-life, Cold War horror in the era when we were still diving under our desks in “A-bomb drills.” But, the supernatural horror film that I remember most from that time was a 1961 movie starring the elegant Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave based upon the Henry James novella, The Turn of the Screw, called The Innocents. What a creepy movie! Deborah Kerr’s character, Miss Giddens is hired by an absentee uncle/guardian for two orphans, Miles and Flora to replace their former nanny Miss Jessel who mysteriously died a year previous. It seems Miss Jessel is haunting the children and Miss Giddens along with her also dead lover the uncle’s valet Peter Quint. Are they also possessing the children to continue their physical relationship? It’s never blatantly revealed, but there are a lot of illusions to this.

There have been many adaptations of the James’s novella, including a Netflix mini-series called The Haunting of Bly Manor by Mike Flanagan, but this 1961 version is still my favorite. A fun fact about 1961’s version that I just found out today: Truman Capote reworked the screenplay. The Innocents was right up there with The Haunting for style points, creepiness, and a general feeling of dread, spooky ghosts and jump scares. Watching movie late at night all by myself didn’t do anything to cure my insomnia. I was the kind of kid who spent more than a little time under the covers.

Speaking of Mike Flanagan, two of his other Netflix offerings appear on my list, even though they are both mini-series: The Haunting of Hill House (2018), which was horrorific and a very clever spinning of Jackson’s tale AND Midnight Mass (2023) which is an original story by Flanagan that weaves together generational trauma, a lonely fishing island, a vampire, and the Catholic Mass. Mike Flanagan is a gifted horror-tician and has written/directed some of my favorites like the sequel to The Shining, Dr. Sleep—which was a good film, but not on my list because it’s based off of a Stephen King book.

Mike Flanagan’s works (like Oculus and Quja) are right up there with my top horror films, and he gained a prominent place in my Horror Hall of Fame for scaring the crap out of me with his version of The Haunting of Hill House and I look forward to his next work, as long as it’s not based on a Stephen King book (which it will be, unfortunately).

Most of the films on my list would compare favorably to my first and all time favorite horror film, you know what.

It’s been hard to narrow my years of devouring horror movies down to ten. I am sure that some of your favorites are also my favorites and didn’t make this Top Ten list, but would probably be on a Top Twenty list?

I have my next five ready to go for tomorrow, but, due to length, I will cut this off, for now. I am curious what you think of this list, so far, and what are some of your favorite horror films—if you have any. I am also curious if any of yours are some here, or will be the five revealed tomorrow?

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