My Top 5 Horror Movies by Penny Dreadful (SFX Magazine Horror Columnist)

I've been reading SFX Magazine since issue #1 and was delighted when they added a column devoted to all things horror.  The only thing wrong with Penny Dreadful's monthly contribution is that there's not enough of it. That being the case I figured she would be a perfect choice to contribute a My Top 5 Horror Movies piece to Afraid of the Dark; partly it was because I thought it would be cool to have a respected horror columnist do a piece for us but mostly it was just because I was interested in finding out what horror movies float her boat above all others.  So without (much) further ado I will leave you in the hands of Penny Dreadful but not before I thank her. Her's is a damn cool list that contains a fistful of horror classics that are close to my heart also.  So cheers.

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Like most horror fans I’m often asked what I love about the genre, with a mixture of fascination and disgust. My answer varies from day to day: the survivalist mentality; the possibilities of the unfettered imagination; a safe place to explore the dark side; a love of stories, myths, legends. For today though, my answer is diversity. The sheer range of tropes, themes, styles, tones and subgenres that exist under the horror umbrella (the horror umbrella is like a normal umbrella only it’s made of, err, human skin. Keeps you dry but kind of stinky and disgusting…). I’ve tried to pick a range.  The choice is endless.

1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - The best horror film ever made – whether Tobe Hooper knew it at the time or not. Opening shots into direct sunlight, the last half hour scored with relentless screaming, it's an ordeal to watch. Not fun, not frivolous, not glib, but horrible and important. This is true horror, a reaction to Vietnam that presents real characters and strips them of their humanity – a slasher, perhaps, an exploitation movie in more than one sense, but miles from modern torture porn. Leatherface isn't interested in ritual humiliation – that would be to see the Hardestys and their friends as individuals. A slaughterhouse reject – Leatherface kills people as he would cattle. Mallet to the head, door slams, the end. I came to this film late – age 19 or 20. It disturbed me and fascinated me. The production design alone is incredible and it's the detail that makes this movie so perfect for me. The dead armadillo, the drunk screaming 'I've seen things!', the teeming spiders web. Hideous. Brilliant.

2. The Omen - The Exorcist is perhaps technically a better film – something of a horror masterpiece and a film I adore – but The Omen, which arrived on the coat tails of The Exorcist, is part of me. When I was furious about being too young to watch Batman and Beetlejuice at the cinema, The Omen Trilogy was shown on terrestrial TV and my brother recorded them into VHS tapes which I watched over and over and over again. It's a brilliant story – full of twists and shocks. It's got an emotional core – even after the evidence is incontrovertible and his wife and friends are dead, Gregory Peck's tortured American diplomat still turns adopted son Damien's head away before attempting to stab him: he can't resolve that this sweet looking kid could be the devil. The cast, not least Peck, is impeccable – fragile, brittle Lee Remick, terrifying, snarling Billy Whitelaw, sort of weirdly sexy David Warner. The music is nothing less than iconic (riffing on, but not, in fact from Latin Opera Carmina Burana, which of course, I am now also mildly obsessed with). And then there's the kills. Inventive, gruesome, expertly foreshadowed, and playing on our fears of the accidental, the incidental – 'the luck of the devil’, if you like, the Final Destination franchise absolutely owes The Omen a living. I never get tired of watching this film (I also love The Omen 2 – The Omen 3 not so much), it was part of my initiation as a horror fan and I'm pretty sure it's the reason I was frightened of dogs till my early 20s.

3. Ringu - Without exception the film that scared me more than any other. It was on telly. I'd never seen an Asian horror movie before, (that whole wave hadn't yet hit the UK). I knew nothing about it other than it was horror. I thought I was going to die for a week after. The genius of Ringu (not true of the remake) is its incredible sense of the uncanny. Take the haunted videotape itself, which of course it forces the audience to watch start to finish before we even know what it really is thus making us complicit. Flies. A woman with a cloth on her head. Some writing. An eye. Who knows what it is we're looking at – there's no true explanation it's just wrong, wrong in a primal, instinctive way. Same with the now oft-ripped-off way Sadako moves, in the final, unbearable shock scene that I still can't watch without feeling uncomfortable. It's weird. It's wrong. It's uncanny. The other thing that of course makes Ringu a work of bloody genius is that it breaks the glass screen. There's a piece of learned wisdom first world viewers accept without thinking about it – the glass screen of the TV or the cinema separates real from not real. We don't think about it, but it's there. It's why we scream at horror houses, but rarely out loud in movies. But Ringu, the scary little bastard, not only forces you to watch the haunted tape, uses TV as it's means of 'getting you' (and who doesn't have a TV somewhere in the house?) but also subconsciously makes it very clear: the glass screen does not protect you. Sadako is coming through that glass screen, and she's going to literally scare you to death. It was my obsession with this movie and the need to 'normalise' it – prove to myself it was just a film – that is directly responsible for my career.

4. Carrie - The great thing about half-arsed remakes is sometimes they really help you to put a finger on exactly what it is you love about the original film. So it was with Kimberly Peirce's stultifyingly average take on Stephen King's first novel, which painted over all the things I love most about De Palma's movie. For a start Sissy Spacek – while Chloe Grace Moretz is a fine actress she's too self possessed for this part. Spacek is perfect. Paper-thin. Translucent skinned. Probably smells weird. Carrie is the victim's victim, fucked up so monumentally by her mother you know she's not going to be ok. Lost, confused, overwhelmed by the late onset of puberty and her burgeoning power, bullied by the other kids, unable to just be normal, she's so unbearably tragic. Most heartbreaking scene: the spinning dance sequence before a bucket of pig’s blood ruins everything. For once, for perhaps the only time ever, she's beautiful, happy and Tommy's dancing with her because he genuinely wants to. I also love this movie because of its very strong female focus – mothers and daughters, the horrors of adolescence and the particular kinds of cruelty young women are capable of, topped off with the wonderful/terrible finale, showcasing the uncontrollable vengeful power of a female, without, crucially, make it anything to do with rape.

5. Dead Ringers - There needed to be a Cronenberg. This is my favourite Cronenberg. It's not as strongly identified as horror as, say, The Fly, Shivers, Rabid, Scanners etc, which are all excellent movies, but this is the one I love the most. Another 'taped off the telly' special from my teenage years, there's something about Ringers I find weirdly seductive – which I know sounds a bit messed up, but I stand by it. I think it's fitting that Cronenberg's psycho-sexual nightmare should break taboos and cross lines, inside and outside the narrative. Without the gynaecological instruments for mutant women, drug addiction and psychosis, there's a romance, a melodrama and a family tragedy somewhere in Dead Ringers. It's a bravura performance – or rather TWO bravura performances - from Jeremy Irons as co-dependent twin gynaecologists Beverley and Elliot Mantel, and while Dead Ringers isn't scary in the way other entries on this list are, it's certainly disturbing and unsettling, and ultimately just really sad. I love this kind of heavily character- and narrative-driven horror, where you're dying to know how the film will end. Darkly fascinating. 

My Top 6 Horror Movies by John Connolly

John Connolly has been responsible for some of the most terrifying novels I've read in the last ten years.  His series of novels featuring private detective Charlie Parker are some of the most chilling explorations of evil, both supernatural and human, I've ever had the pleasure of reading. But for my money his dark fairytale The Book of Lost Things is his finest achievement as a writer.  A truly remarkable and incredibly powerful book that moved me to tears at the end.  When I approached John with the idea of him doing a piece on his top five horror movies I anticipated that he would be far too busy writing another masterpiece to take the time to do something for a wee horror blog.  I was wrong and he actually gave us his Top 6.  I'd just like to finish up by thanking John for taking the time to do this.

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The notion of what constitutes “horror” is pretty fluid, I think.  I speak as someone whose mystery novels include more than a dash of the supernatural – which, of course, doesn’t necessarily equate to horror.  Like beauty, horror is generally in the eye of the beholder: what horrifies one viewer may elicit barely a flicker of reaction in another.  I’ve often thought, though, that “horror” is an unfortunate label to apply to the genre.  It’s the only genre named after a visceral reaction, and a reaction that most of us have no great desire to experience in a real, profound sense.  For me, horror is often linked to the body, and degrees of suffering.  It is the recognition, as John Donne put it, that “The concavities of my body are like another Hell for their capacity”. 

Nevertheless, in compiling this list I’ve taken a wider view as, curiously enough, I have no particular fondness for body horror. I accept, therefore, that not every film listed below will necessarily conform to everyone else’s precise definition of horror, if only because – as I said above - that definition is so personal to each of us.  I should also add that this is just today’s list.  Ask me next week and, depending on my mood, it might be entirely different.

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THE THING (John Carpenter, 1982)

I’m not a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, whose imaginative reach always seemed to exceed his literary grasp, although I remain sorry that Guillermo del Toro has not yet realized his ambition to film Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”, if only because I’m curious to see what he might make of it.  Still, it’s always seemed to me that “At the Moutnains…” was a very significant influence on “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, which was adapted for both 1951’s The Thing from Another World and Carpenter’s superior remake. 

Actually, I wasn’t very keen on “Who Goes There?” when I eventually read it.  Like Lovecraft, Campbell was more interesting for his ideas and scenarios than his actual prose and storytelling, and “Who Goes There?” hasn’t weathered the years well.  (Campbell also strikes me as an unpleasant piece of work, a natural controversialist who didn’t understand that irony, and arguing against prevailing doctrines, do not excuse one from being a bigot or an idiot.)

Carpenter’s film takes the best ideas from Campbell’s story – the Antarctic setting, the all-male research theme (diluted by a single damsel-in-distress in the 1951 version), the blood test with the heated wire and, most importantly of all, the creature’s shape-shifting capacities – and runs with them to the point of absolute bleakness, aided by Rob Bottin’s brilliant creature effects, perhaps the last great gasp of model-making and stop-motion animation in the genre.  It’s science fiction in concept, but horror in its Donne-like understanding of the body’s capacity for suffering.

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PAN’S LABYRINTH (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

I saw this film shortly after delivering my seventh novel, The Book of Lost Things, and realized that del Toro was approaching similar subject matter – grief, loss, fairy tales, war - but in a different medium.  The director’s English-language films have always disappointed me slightly, for they seem to be less than the sum of their parts.  With Pan’s Labyrinth, he achieved a perfect mix of storytelling and imagery, and there is little about the film that I would change.  And, in the sequence concerning Ofelia’s encounter with the Pale Man, he created one of the finest five minutes of any film in this century.  Ivana Baquero, who played Ofelia, went on to star in the film of one of my short stories, The New Daughter, for which I’m very grateful to her. Incidentally, I also love The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro’s 2001 Spanish Civil War-era ghost story which can be seen as dry run for Pan’s Labyrinth. 

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THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (James Whale, 1935)

There’s little that one can say about this that hasn’t already been said.  So much of what we conceive about the Frankenstein mythos is due to Whale and Karloff, and this film is one of the rare instances when a sequel improves upon an original.  Elsa Lanchester’s “bride” is by now almost as iconic as Karloff’s Monster, and the film’s influence continues to reverberate down the years, most recently in a lovely moment in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie when the poodle next door is transformed into a Lanchester lookalike. 

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DON’T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Permeated by grief and loss, and filmed in a Venice that manages to look both beautiful and haunted, this remains, for me, Roeg’s finest moment.  It’s an adult horror film in the sense that it explores a particularly adult fear – the death of a child – and attempts to find a visual corollary for it.  It also manages the difficult feat of including a shock ending that doesn’t overwhelm what came before it.

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ALIEN (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Another film that explores the body’s capacity for suffering, but with a sexual component that makes it quite unlike anything seen on screen before.  Watching it again, what strikes the viewer is just how slow it is, how painstakingly it works to convey monotony without being monotonous while also giving us time to care about the crew.  And, in Ripley, it throws aside the screaming female sci-fi victims of the past, as well as any Barbarella-esque sex totty, and gives us a third way: a science fiction heroine who just happens to be a woman, which is a lot more revolutionary than it sounds.  James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens (1986), played interesting games with ideas of motherhood, but it’s overlong and too much in love with macho weaponry.  Alien is the real deal.

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JAWS (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Okay, so I could have included Audition, or Psycho, or The Birds, or Rosemary’s Baby, or The Innocents, or Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary, The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case, or An American Werewolf in London, or either great version (1956, 1978) of Invasion of the Body Snatchers – and even by writing out their titles I’m kind of cheating a bit - but I’ll go with Jaws because it’s one of those films – along with, say, Zulu or The Magificent Seven for me – in front of which I can sit down if I catch it on TV, telling myself that I’ll only watch a few minutes of it, and I will still be watching at the end.  Cast, director, story, music – all come together in near-perfect harmony.  Okay, so Bruce the Shark remains a bit clunky, but who really cares?  Think of the fear of being consumed, the blackness of the shark’s eyes, Quint’s tale of survival and predation, “We’re going to need a bigger boat”, the floating head…

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My Top 5 Horror Movies by Mark Morris

This is the first in what I hope will be a monthly series where we ask someone to pull together a list of their Top 5 Horror Movies and write a few words on each.  First up is rightfully respected horror novelist Mark Morris who has been responsible for some of the finest genre novels I've ever read.  If you're a fan of written horror and are unfamiliar with his work I highly recommend you track down Toady (1989), Stitch (1991) and The Immaculate (1993) which, in terms of quality, represent one of the finest opening salvos from any author I've ever read regardless of genre.  More recently his career took an interesting and wholly unexpected detour when he was tasked with writing the novelization of Darren Aronofsky's Noah which found this writer, best known for his work in the field of horror, with a book in the Top 10 Religious Fiction Classics chart over at Amazon.  He has a busy 2014 ahead of him with a number of new novels including Zombie Apocalypse! Horror Hospital and Wolves of London which is the first installment in his new paranormal Obsidian Heart Trilogy.  I'd just like to finish by saying thanks to Mark for agreeing to do this.  It's an exceptionally interesting selection.  Without further ado...I'll hand you over to Mark:

MY TOP 5 HORROR MOVIES by MARK MORRIS

I really love horror movies. I have a vast collection on VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray, and the thought of choosing only five out of the hundreds that I adore is almost mind-bogglingly impossible. For me, choosing a horror film to watch for the evening is all about what kind of mood I'm in at the time. Sometimes I might go with an old black and white Universal; sometimes I'll fancy something made by Hammer or Amicus; sometimes it'll be a J-horror; or a slasher flick; or a monster movie; or a giallo; or a ghost story; or something more cerebral and disturbing. To be honest, I'd find it much easier to choose my Top 100 horror films than to choose my Top 5. At least then I'd be able to include a bit of everything that I like. However I've been instructed to choose 5, and so that's what I'm going to do. Please be aware, though, that the 5 I choose today may not necessarily be the 5 I would choose tomorrow.

PSYCHO (1960)

I had to include a Hitchcock film, and although I could have chosen THE BIRDS, FRENZY or even REAR WINDOW, all of which I adore, PSYCHO, for me, is in many ways both the perfect horror movie and the perfect slasher film (other favourites in this particular sub genre being both HALLOWEEN and BLACK CHRISTMAS - the originals, of course). PSYCHO is brilliantly paced and structured, brilliantly directed and brilliantly played by an exemplary cast. The script, by Joseph Stefano, based on the novel by Robert Bloch, is slick and lean, but also intelligent and multi-layered. Of course we're all now familiar with the shower scene (probably the most famous scene in horror cinema) but at the time the gruesome murder of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) halfway through the movie - who, despite stealing money from her boss and going on the run, was ostensibly portrayed as the film's heroine - was seen as incredibly shocking and audacious. And, of course, in Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates we have one of the greatest screen monsters of all time - on the one hand, timid, uncertain and sympathetic, and on the other ferocious and utterly, terrifyingly deranged.

THE REPTILE (1966)

I grew up largely on Hammer and Amicus movies, and have incredibly fond Friday night memories of being genuinely terrified as a pre-teen by the likes of THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. However my favourite Hammer film of all is THE REPTILE, which as a 12 or 13 year old I found particularly terrifying due to its isolated Cornish location, which made the hero and heroine seem incredibly vulnerable, and its eerie, almost mystical atmosphere of ancient curses from exotic, unknowable climes. The eponymous reptile - a kind of were-snake, played by the sensuous and mesmerising Jacqueline Pearce, who later went on to find greater fame as the villanous Servalan in BLAKE'S 7 - may look slightly comical by today's standards, but as an adolescent I found her *terrifying*, with her long-taloned hands, her mad boggle-eyes and her hissing, fanged mouth. Another detail that I found particularly horrifying as a youngster was the fact that the faces of the reptile's victims, when bitten, turned black, and that thick, white froth poured from their mouths. To my fevered, adolescent imagination I couldn't conceive of what appalling changes must be taking place in a human body to make a person look like that!

THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1969)

Another slasher movie, and I'll admit not a particularly notable one. However the reason for its inclusion here is quite simply because it was the first proper horror movie I ever saw, and as such is probably the film that has scared me more than any other. At the age of eleven or twelve, I wasn't even remotely prepared for its intensity and its brutality, and as such it not only scared me, it *traumatised* me. I still vividly remember lying on the settee after it had finished, literally shaking with shock. Until that moment I had absolutely no idea that such graphic and gruesome depictions of violence existed onscreen. Even today, the film exerts a strange and powerful grip on me, though nowadays I'm more likely to experience a thrilling frisson of nostalgia than a sense of shock or discomfort. Having said that, the sequence leading up to the first murder, in which a bunch of swinging London twenty-somethings creep around a spooky, abandoned house is genuinely eerie, and the killings are savage and surprisingly bloody. THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR will never appear on anyone's list of classic horror movies, but for me it opened a door to a world of thrills and wonders that I previously had no idea existed.

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)

I *adore* Amicus portmanteau movies, and I sometimes think that if the only films I was allowed to watch for the rest of my life were DR TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, ASYLUM, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, TALES FROM THE CRYPT and the rest I could be perfectly happy. FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE is the best of Amicus's output, and a truly brilliant and thoroughly entertaining horror film. It features my favourite actor of all time Peter Cushing in one of his finest, most mischievous roles as the proprietor of the antique shop Temptations Ltd, from which are purchased - or under-handedly appropriated - the various items which lead to the individual customers' stories. Each story is strong and varied, the stand-out being the genuinely unnerving tale of a seedy, hen-pecked husband who is drawn into the peculiar home-life of an ex-serviceman match-seller and his eerily watchful daughter. Led by Peter Cushing, the cast is a role call of wonderful British character actors, including David Warner, Donald and Angela Pleasance, Diana Dors, Ian Bannen, Ian Carmichael, Ian Ogilvy and Nyree Dawn Porter, all of whom are an absolute joy to watch.

DOGTOOTH (2009)

I'm gutted that I haven't had room to include the likes of THE HAUNTING, THE WICKER MAN or THE INNOCENTS in this list, all of which number among my favourite horror movies of all time, and all of which had a huge influence on me while growing up. However I'm also acutely aware that my choices so far contain a) no modern movies, and b) no European/Asian movies. For my final choice, therefore, I've decided to redress the balance by selecting one of my favourite non-English speaking films of recent years. This final slot could just as easily have been filled by my favourite Dario Argento movie DEEP RED, or by Mario Bava's wonderful portmanteau film BLACK SABBATH, or indeed by any one of several more recent 'foreign' horror films such as PAN'S LABYRINTH, RINGU, THE ORPHANAGE, ANTI-CHRIST or MARTYRS, all of which are superb in their many and varying ways. However the film I've decided to go for, partly because I want more people to hear about it, and partly because it is simply brilliant, is DOGTOOTH. a bizarre, darkly comic, deeply disturbing, wholly original and unsettlingly erotic Greek movie about parents who keep their three teenage children contained within their house and grounds in order to protect them from the outside world. The home that the parents create for the children is like an eerie fairytale environment of weird beliefs and skewed morals. By turns shocking, sad, funny and repulsive, it's a film that both defies categorisation and brims with outlandish, original ideas.