This is one silent film you won’t want on with children in the room. The grainy silence of black and white only makes Häxan more otherworldly to watch today-it feels like some kind of bleak Satanic relic that humankind was never supposed to witness. Scenes of torture straight out of Albrecht Dürer woodcuts or Divine Comedy illustrations. Naked men and women crawling and cavorting in circles of demons, lining up to literally kiss demonic asses. Puffy-cheeked devils with long tongues lolling lazily out of their mouths. But put simply: There’s iconography in Häxan that grabs hold of you.
The dreamlike-make that nightmarish-dramatization of these torture sequences were almost unthinkably extreme for the time, leading to the film being banned in the U.S. Director Christensen based his depictions of witch trials on the real-life horrors codified in the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th century “hammer of witches” used by clergy and inquisitors to persecute women and people with mental illness. Häxan, or Witchcraft Through the Ages, 1922Ī truly unique silent film, Häxan is presented as a historical documentary and warning against hysteria, but in function it plays much more like a true horror film, especially considering the timeframe when it arrived in Danish and Swedish cinemas. So in that sense, The Blair Witch Project reinvented two different genres at the same time. It was also proof positive that a well-executed micro-budget indie film could become a massive box office success.
#Highschool of the dead blonde girl movie
Otherwise reasonable human beings seriously went into The Blair Witch Project believing that what they were seeing might be real, and the grainy, home movie aesthetic captured an innate terror of reality and “real people” that had not been seen in the horror genre before. But this was the first to get a wide, theatrical release, and distributor Artisan Entertainment masterfully capitalized on the lack of information available on the film to execute a mysterious online advertising campaign in the blossoming days of the Internet age. Sure, people had already been doing found footage movies just look at The Last Broadcast a year earlier. Where Scream reinvented a genre by pulling the shades back to reveal the inner workings of horror, The Blair Witch Project went the opposite route by crafting a new style of presentation and especially promotion. So let’s get started: The 100 best horror films of all time.ĭirectors: Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick In the oddest of ways, horror movies help us overcome our own fears. Horror cinema speaks toward the dark side in all of us, allowing us to confront the most frightening, primal forces we struggle with every day-death, and human malevolence-in a way that is actually constructive in strengthening the psyche. One thing is for certain: With all the films that were nominated, we could easily have made this list 200 entries long. In others, you’ll find yourself surprised to see us going to bat for films that don’t deserve the derision they’ve received. In some cases, you will likely be shocked by films that are missing. There are foreign films from around the globe, entries that range from 1922 to 2021.
There are also likely a handful of independent features that will be unknown to all but the most dedicated horror hounds.
There are classic films on this list, of course. And so, we give you the following: A practical, must-see guide through the history of the horror genre. We’ve even given you the likes of the 50 best zombie movies of all time, the 50 best slasher movies of all time, and the 100 best vampire movies of all time, if you can believe that.īut we also clearly need a true “master list,” one that can include entries from any and all subgenres. Case in point: We have so many writers focused on horror that we’ve produced huge lists of the best horror films on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu that are all updated on a monthly basis. Several Paste staff writers and editors are lifelong horror geeks, and there’s also a strong sentiment toward the macabre among several of our more prolific contributing writers. We are fortunate-some would say “cool enough”-to have quite a lot of genre expertise to call upon when it comes to horror in particular. This list has been a long time coming for Paste.
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