From Fear.net: Making a horror movie can be a surreal experience. You spend long hours performing terrifying atrocities in front of the camera. Then the director yells “Cut!” and suddenly you’re headed over to the snack table to have a cup of coffee with the person you just disemboweled.
But sometimes, the line between making a realistic horror film and finding yourself knee-deep inside one gets a little too blurry and bloody for comfort. Here are ten of our favorite examples:
PEEPING TOM (1960). Here’s the good news: you get to star in your own movie. Here’s the bad news: the director likes to film his stars as he kills them, so he can capture their true expressions of fear. Talk about method acting. But hey, a gig’s a gig
DEMONS (1985). This Lamberto Bava/Dario Argento production is an example of how even watching a horror movie can get you in trouble. A late night crowd enters a cavernous Berlin movie theater to enjoy a special midnight screening of a new horror film. However, thanks to the presence of a cursed mask from the set of the movie, the monsters of the film come alive inside the theater itself, where they bypass the popcorn and start gnawing their way through the audience.
WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994). ”One, two, Freddy’s really coming for you!” While filming the next installment of the lucrative “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, the actual actors and crew members (Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, director Wes Craven, etc. all playing themselves) discover they’re being stalked and killed by what appears to be a real life Freddy Krueger in Craven’s mind-bending twist on the creative process.
Sequels get a bad rap, and rightfully so – most of the time. The horror genre is especially rife with sequels, with many franchises so heavily spun-off that they have stopped being numbered. Not all sequels suck, and to prove it we found ten that are at least as good as the original – if not better.
Dawn of the Dead
The second of George Romero’s original zombie trilogy, Dawn of the Dead is inarguably the best of the three. A group of survivors take refuge in a shopping mall, but eventually decide to make a break for it. While not a sequel in the strictest sense, it is a damn fine movie.
Hostel II
A surprisingly good follow-up to the unimaginative original (which, in turn, was a rip-off of Saw), Hostel II focuses less on the slaughter of nubile coeds, and more on the men who buy the opportunity to do the slaughtering. While no less violent or gruesome, it offers a different perspective than most slasher flix.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
The seventh installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street series is a case study in twisted post-modernism. Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and Wes Craven play themselves in the real world. Heather gets threats that echo Freddy Krueger’s M.O., and she needs to reprise her role as Nancy to defeat Freddy. Again. One of the most imaginative horror movies, sequel or otherwise.
One of the foremost arguments against horror movies is that they desensitize people to real-life violence. There may be some truth to that, but not for me.
While man’s inhumanity to man depresses me, I find the aberrant human mind fascinating. I’ve spent years watching Jason Voorhees go nuts with his machete, but I don’t want to be “entertained” by footage of real-life murder. I watch some crime shows, I read some true crime books and I talk with people who like the remake of April Fool’s Day better than the original. It’s sociological: What makes these wackadoos tick? That may be an unanswerable question, but filmmakers have tried for years to open a window into the serial-murdering mind. While the accuracy and inspiration may vary from movie to movie, there’s no denying that these reel killers are more frightening than Freddy Krueger could ever be, because they’re all real.
Ed Gein
“The Butcher of Plainfield” may have inspired more cinematic psycho killers than any other murderer, and with good reason: When police searched his property in connection with the disappearance of a local woman named Bernice Worden, the first thing they found was her body strung up in his barn, gutted like a deer carcass. More horrors waited inside Gein’s farmhouse: He’d been stealing corpses from a local cemetery and… well, literally decorating with viscera. Lampshades, masks and shade pulls made from human skin, skulls used as soup bowls… Gein was judged insane (you think?) and committed to a Wisconsin psychiatric hospital. He died of cancer-related heart failure in 1984.
Films: Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Deranged (1974), Ed Gein (2000), Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007).
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