Horror Movie Freak

Why We Love Horror Movies

Why do we love horror movies? This question has been posed many times over the decades by people from all walks of life.

Sometimes the query takes on an accusing tone, such as one coming from a date who wants a nice dinner and night at the symphony rather than catching the midnight showing of the new Zombie Carnage indie flick. Other times the tone is one of concern, as from parents confused about their child's disdain for Sesame Street in favor of the Sunday morning horror fest showing of The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Still others take a tone of disbelief — what is WRONG with you, anyway?

Although some of our friends and family don't understand our passion for terror, the craving just does not subside. Why is that?

Every Horror Movie Freak is unique, but there are certainly some common threads that run among horror lovers the world over. Where else can a worst-case scenario of carnage and terror be played out before our eyes, all within the safety and comfort of our living rooms or local theater multiplex? All entertainment has an element of escape, but Horror Freaks crave more — the RUSH! In fact, many horror aficionados are searching for a particular rush, one reminiscent of the utter fear felt when they watched their first horror movie.

Think of the first time, as a child, you rode that frightening-looking roller coaster at an amusement park. Mom didn't think you were ready yet, but you knew you were…or at least thought so. Never showing your inner apprehension, you climbed into the car and pulled down the harness. The car lurched forward and you gasped and wondered what you had gotten yourself into. Slowly the coaster moved up the initial grade and you realized how high in the air you were and wondered if it was too late to get off. As the car plunged over the crest and down the first big drop it hit you: No! You weren't ready!

What followed was the longest three minutes of your life, so terrifying that hardly a scream could escape your lips and your knuckles turned white from your death grip on the restraining bar as you were certain you were heading toward doom. Finally, after an eternity, the car screeched to a halt and the safety bar released. You made it! You just had the most terrifying experience ever, lived to tell about it, and felt a rush of excitement…and you wanted to ride it again!

The same thing applies to horror movies. The first time we disobeyed our protective parents and crept into the living room in the wee hours of the morning to watch a scary movie on cable, we paid the price. Nightmares followed. Weeks were spent peering around corners in search of the certain monster waiting to grab us. We slept with the light on and made sure the closet door was closed all the way so that creepy ghosts couldn't see us through the crack. But we lived! We got the heart-pounding terror without the consequence of death and dismemberment. We prevailed over the most frightening of scenarios, and now want that feeling again. And again…

The search for fright is the driving force for many Horror Freaks, but horror movies also have certain elements that make the experience unique to any other movie genre. The stars, the scares, and the concept of good vs. evil play an enormous role in a Horror Freak's satisfaction — and overcoming adversity is such an integral part of the experience that certain rules for surviving a horror movie have also emerged.

The Stars

There are many ingredients to an effective and enjoyable horror stew: storyline, special effects, script, and scenery, but one of the most important is the star. Not the actors and actresses in the film, but the real stars — the heroes, villains, ghosts, and monsters.

The best horror-movie monsters are those that capture the imagination, and nightmares, of Horror Freaks everywhere, and are the true stars of the show. How many serial killers do you know who have high schoolers sporting T-shirts with their likeness or tots scampering off to school with their images emblazoned across their lunch pails? What about serial killer action figures and scenes, so that kids can reenact the more grisly of their murderous rampages? I can name a few noted horror movie villains off the top of my head: Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, and Michael Myers. Maybe because these stars act out vengeance and retribution with bloody gusto, horror villains are simultaneously feared and revered.

So, if the monster is the star, the hero is the co-star. Heroes are the characters who represent us. They are just a little smarter than their sliced-up compadres, a little more level-headed, a bit tougher, and a lot luckier. Horror Freaks love to imagine that they, too, could be the individual to rise above the terror and emerge from the carnage alive and victorious. The house says get out, and we get out. A crazy guy says that anyone who stays the night in an abandoned summer camp is doomed, and so we get a hotel. If we are alone in a cabin in the woods and hear a noise outside, we lock the door and call for help…or at least get dressed beyond our panties before venturing outside crying, Is anyone out there? The more resourceful the hero, the more satisfying it is to join them on their surge for survival.

Of course, even a hero can do something stupid, and when they do, all bets are off. The Horror Freak can sit back smugly as the hero-turned-victim takes a machete to the skull and quip, Yep, she deserved that one.

The Scream Queens, of course, trump all as the stars of the show. Should any film feature one of these irresistible divas of dismemberment, that is reason enough to watch it. The most royal of the Queens of Scream have their own section.

The Scares

What is so scary about a horror movie? Ask that question a hundred times and you're likely to get a hundred different answers, which is why there are so many different sub-genres of horror.

Some Horror Freaks are fans of the jolt scares, those tense moments when an unsuspecting victim is creeping toward an ajar door investigating a strange noise, only to be given a heart attack by Fluffy the cat leaping unnaturally from the shelf that has the Malt-o-Meal. The Fluffy factor is a bit cheap, but accomplishes the goal of causing a yell out loud moment. Other, less cheesy jolt scares, like when a monster bursts forth from behind a tree or a hand emerges from an underground gravesite to grab an ankle, can be very satisfying and keep the energy rolling during the horror experience. Some Horror Freaks even gauge the success of a horror movie by the number of times a spontaneous shriek escapes their lips.

Suspense scares are more gut wrenching, and for a longer period of time. Alfred Hitchcock once said that his goal was to always make the audience suffer as much as possible, and suspense scares do just that. You just know that something terrible is about to happen…it is just a matter of time.

The longer the anticipation of a horrifying event is drawn out, the more we are compelled to hide our eyes or get up for a drink of water, but can't. Glued to the screen and unable to breathe, we await the inevitable horror unfolding before our eyes. Sometimes, when horror filmmakers are feeling particularly sadistic, they will combine the suspense scare with the jolt scare — suspense builds to an intolerable level only to immediately dissipate when the feared monster is not in the hall closet after all…he jumps out of the laundry hamper instead.

Unexpected scares can certainly cause a loud yell, but are different from jolt scares. These are the brief visions of something horrifying, presented without pomp or circumstance. Maybe a menacing face appears in the window for an instant, an alien passes across the alleyway in the background of a newscast, or a brief vision of ghostly feet standing on the bed while Mom is making it would all certainly qualify as an unexpected scare. These scares can be clever and extremely effective when used correctly.

Phobia scares are a cornerstone of horror movie concepts and play to the individual fears of Horror Freaks. Uncomfortable with the thought of toy clowns coming to life while you sleep and smothering you with a pillow? There are horror movies about that. How about childhood panic over a monster hiding under the bed? That's covered, too. The effectiveness of phobia scares depends on the deep-seated fears of the viewer. Because one Freak's phobia is another Freak's Shangri-La, horror movies with phobia themes must utilize other fear-inducing tactics in addition if they want to fill the theater.

English filmmaker, producer, and master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock once said his goal was to always make the audience suffer as much as possible. He accomplished just that in his masterpieces including Psycho and Rear Window. He also made us look at our feathered friends in a whole different way after watching The Birds. Universal

Three of the biggest, baddest, slashiest, and best-known superstars in horror movies: Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger. They have been slicing and dicing their way through randy camp counselors, baby-sitters, and dreaming teens for years in their respective movie franchises of Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy and Jason even battle each other in the 2003 movie, Freddy vs. Jason.

As a testament to his pop-culture status, Jason was awarded the MTV Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, the first of three fictional characters to get it (Godzilla got it 1996, and Chewbacca in 1997). The hockey mask-wearing maniac, who bloodies up Camp Crystal Lake with the help of his machete, has ripped through more hapless victims than Freddy and Michael combined and seems to be an unstoppable killing machine. But the other two villains are no slouches. Dr. Sam Loomis, the child psychiatrist who spent years trying to help Michael, doesn't say he has the devil's eyes for nothing: this mad slasher is pure evil. Freddy, with his horribly melted face, grimy red-and-green sweater, and razor-sharp glove, is a child murderer who slashes teens in their dreams.

Each of these iconic villains continues to terrorize a new generation, as each franchise has had new installments: encapsulations of Halloween in 2007, Friday the 13th in 2009, and Nightmare in 2010. It's probably a safe bet that we'll see plenty more bloodletting from these villains in the future.

Photo credits, from top left: Jason Voorhees-Paramount/The Kobal Collection; Michael Myers-Falcoln International/The Kobal Collection; and Freddy Krueger-New Line Cinema.

Long before Jason, Michael, and Freddy came on the scene, monsters were the shining start of horror movies. Monsters capture our fears in one grotesque physical form. These beasts have what it takes to bring societal angst to life so that they can hide under the bed and get us in our sleep. Some monsters have a personal tragedy to correspond with their murderous appetites. Werewolves, when in their human form, often live in torment from the atrocities they commit while under the influence of the full moon; others, however, don't: when lead character Ginger is transformed into a werewolf in Ginger Snaps (depicted on the publicity poster at top left), she relishes tearing things to pieces with no remorse. Other monsters are merely trying to survive and don't understand why their prey is so darned violent. Still others are just looking for love, as is the case with the creature in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (center photo), after he spots a lovely lady. At right, Christopher Lee is a monster created by human hands in The Curse of Frankenstein; his impassioned performance as the creature made him a star. Monsters continue to be a mainstay in Horror Freaks' movie collections, and with good reason: they scare the bejesus out of us.

Photo credits, from top: Lions Gate/TMN/Telefilm Canada; Universal/The Kobal Collection; Hammer Film Productions.

Some scares do not involve any specific fright-inducing techniques, but instead are completely wrapped up in atmosphere. Atmospheric scares are less of an immediate reaction and more of an overwhelming feeling of fear and dread that infiltrates the senses of the Horror Freak and sets the tone for fright and unease. A natural for atmospheric scares are ghost stories and evil from hell, but good scary atmosphere will heighten the fright factor of any horror movie, and should not be overlooked.

Good vs. Evil

The concept of good vs. evil is a required theme in any horror movie, and it shows itself in a variety of ways.

The most obvious conflict between light and dark is between the hero and the villain, with the hero representing good and the villain evil, but horror can be much more complex than that. Aside from the obvious evil of ripping someone into a million pieces with a hay hook, is the villain really the evil one? What if the victim is actually a shiftless scumbag who caused the mental breakdown of the villain by playing a vicious prank on them years ago in the frat house? The line between retribution and evil, in these cases, is blurred.

There are varying degrees of evil among an entire cast of potential victims: the smiling best friend may be secretly scheming on someone else's boyfriend, for example, and that football star just may have some backward and derogatory attitude toward women. Is the villain who sends these miscreants to their untimely demise an evildoer, then, or just a purveyor of justice?

Then there is the ultimate horror theme that guarantees that having sex or doing drugs equals certain death. Sinners will be punished, and horror movie villains are just the ticket to hand it out. Villains who deal the consequences for such behavior are little more than a puritanical force of penance, albeit an evil force themselves. Horror Freaks are drawn to cheer the villain on in their murderous quest, then, not out of a deranged desire to be harbingers of doom but rather a righteous longing to have no bad deed go unpunished.

When you look at it that way, Horror Freaks are downright civilized.

The obvious exception to all of this is found in films portraying pure biblical manifestations of good and evil, the power of God rising to crush Satanic apparitions. Unfortunately for Horror Freaks, years of Sunday school provided the ultimate horror movie spoiler…we all know how it's going to turn out.

Regardless of which character is the ultimate good and which the ultimate evil, there is an underlying hope that good shall prevail, and it usually does in horror movies. Sometimes it doesn't, but that's what sequels are for.

Rules of Survival in a Horror Movie

Countless lists, and even books, have been written on the rules for survival in a horror movie. Wes Craven's Scream is a horror movie about horror movie clichés, and outlines three basic rules:

1. Don't have sex. Sex = Death

2. Don't drink or do drugs. Drugs and alcohol = Death

3. Never say I'all be right back, because you won't be.

These rules are, indeed, the basic no-brainer's for horror movie survival. Countless other lists of survival rules exist and tend to detail specific dos and don'ts, often inspired by decisions made by victims in particular movies that led to their painful ends. However, without going into movie-specifics, there are a few additional rules that tend to always apply:

4. Don't wander around in your panties, and DEFINITELY do not go outside with them as your primary garment. When a Horror Freak sees a young coed venture into the woods investigating a strange noise in nothing but panties, we know what's going to happen next. It always does. Panties = Death.

5. Among your group of friends, be the most level headed and polite of the bunch, not the most sarcastic or witty. It helps if you also have personal problems that you're trying to work through. The troubled, polite person with a lacking wit is almost always the last one standing.

6. When you beat down and presumably kill the villain who has been chasing you for days, make sure you stab, beat, and shoot them at least a hundred times before relaxing, and even then do not turn your back. They ARE going to get up.

7. If you are in a horror movie with a young starlet known for crude behavior in her public life, steer clear. She's gonna get a fence post through her skull.

The rules for surviving a horror movie are not, unfortunately, hard and fast. Every once in a while a film will break the rules by killing off the good girl or letting the presumed hero be snatched through an open window by a hungry monster. Rules were made to be broken, it seems, and the best movies will break, or at least bend, these and other rules to keep Horror Freaks on their toes. That's how we like it.

Finally, there is one single bottom-line rule for surviving a horror movie that has not yet been mentioned: Do not be an idiot. Once the idiocy begins, so does the carnage. Guaranteed.

What Makes a Horror Movie Great: The Rating Methodology

What factors elevate one horror movie to your classic shelf, while hurling another to the bargain bin in a gas station mini-mart? The answer from some may be as simple as whether they like the film or not, but that's not easy to measure or duplicate.

Over the course of creating the 100 Best Horror Movies list for Best-Horror-Movies.com, a verifiable and semi-scientific rating methodology was created, partly to ensure that there were actual criteria other than personal preference behind inclusions in this list, and partly to have some way of defending those choices since getting any two Horror Freaks to agree on the top 100 films is an exercise in futility.

Horror Movie Freak is not a listing of best horror movies, but rather a collection of ones that fall into a variety of horror subgenres with the simple inclusion criteria that they don't suck.

To construct such a group of horror movies, and their appropriate categories, the Horror Freak Selection Panel of Experts was organized. The members of that panel were responsible for assisting in the generation of the Master Horror List, categorization of each film and to provide a stopgap against any individuals' favorite horror being included in spite of the fact that to most folks, other than the nominator, it sucks. They are:

Don Sumner (yours truly), Certified Horror Freak with an uncanny ability to watch a horror film for the 30th time and blank the mind of all coming scares to watch it anew each time like a child.

The favorites and must-haves of the selection panel were considered, along with four years of top 100 horror from Best-Horror-Movies.com, and the irrefutable best horror list from members of the BHM online community, The Ossuary.

The list was narrowed down via my emotional reaction, and then further thinned by a reality-check session with the panel. The resulting collection of horror favorites is included in Horror Movie Freak!

Everett Roberts, resident Zombie Master for BHM, first discovered his passion for the undead while studying at Miskatonic University, where he eventually majored in zombology and reanimation theory and minored in camp counselor. While preparing for the upcoming zombie apocalypse, he somehow found time for a wife and family. He currently resides in Memphis, Tenn., where he is studying the political effects of the dead voting.

James Lasome is a mad scientist by trade residing in the wilds of New Jersey. In his spare time, you can find him wandering the BHM forums, writing reviews from all corners of the genre and the world, and attending and blogging about horror conventions and related events around the Mid-Atlantic and New York City.

Bill Burda, child of the sixties, was raised on Famous Monsters of Filmland and EC comics. He was fortunate enough to see Night of the Living Dead at a drive-in, and also actually got to take a date to see John Carpenter's Halloween during its initial run. Long-time home haunter, he currently blogs for BHM on the merits of forgotten horror classics. Bill is a resident of Richmond, Va., home of Edgar Allen Poe, and knows where all the Yankees are buried. Bill likes doll mutilation and burying things that still have a little twitch left in them, and dislikes horror directors who don't know the difference between disgusting and scary.

Heather Ross is editor and feature film reviewer at Horror Freaks Media LLC. She grew up on the backdrop of a Stephen King novel — Tucson, Ariz. — so she was introduced to horror at a young age, as well as snakes, scorpions, and creepy desert stuff. Her first horror movie was the classic The Nanny with Bette Davis, which Heather watched on TV at the ripe old age of eight. It scared the bejesus out of her and after that, she was hooked on the adrenaline. To this day, Heather remains a horror junkie, hooked on it as only a horror queen could be.

A scientist conducts an experiment that has horrific results in the 1958 chiller-thriller, The Fly. 20th Century Fox

Essential Horror Movies: The Categories

The movie genre horror is broad, and means different things to people. For some, nothing less than flesh-feasting zombies will do, while for others, ghostly apparitions are what it takes to get the heart pumping and shrieks erupting.

Luckily for the Horror Movie Freak, there are many sub-genres under our beloved horror umbrella. Each sub pertains to a particular kind of horror movie theme and, therefore, a particular type of fright. Is the villain human, animal, alien, or apparition? There's a subgenre for each. Is the human meanie always a murderous freak, or do they appear normal in day-to-day life? There's a subgenre for that. Is that inhuman freak actually from hell or merely otherworldly? We've got that covered, too.

No matter what freaks out the Horror Movie Freak, subgenres likely have a slew of films just right for an evening of horrifying delight. Then again, there are some freaks who love every kind of horror film, and for those, the subgenres are nothing more than a basis for a horror