100 Top Horror Movies 2009

Just in time for Halloween, the 2009 edition of the 100 Top Horror Movies of all time is out. See it here.

Great art can only truly be enjoyed by the old, because artistic sensibility is not innate, but learned, through a lifetime of study. The one exception is that genre of great art, the Horror Movie. Here, the artist depends upon the primal - and primeval - state of fear, and it is the young (and the young at heart) who are closest to this most basic ground of the human.

If you disagree, try getting a 6 year old to sit through Mozart's Don Giovanni. About five minutes into the performance, wake him up, and then take him to the greatest Horror Movie of all, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (but only a matinee; not if it's dark, never if it's dark). He will get it; boy, will he get it! As you exit the theatre, of course, a Social Services Swat Team will be waiting to take him away from you, proving that anyone working for Social Services is old, very old, to the point of senility.

A comment, however, on the list: Psycho #8? Come, come. There is no more influential horror film than Psycho, as even the website's own reviewer notes. He also states that "Psycho belongs on the classic shelf of not just the horror movie fan, but any fan of great film making (emphasis in original)." A grear horror film that is also a great film? This should have been a slam dunk, as they apparently say in the sports world.

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Most important, however, is what everyone misses watching this film after its original release. Psycho was a post-modern work before post-modernism was a gleam in Derrida's eye. Hitchcock brilliantly structured Psycho to defeat the movie-goers expectations at every turn, movie-goers who knew and loved Hitchcock's penchant for suspense, danger, and deft surprise endings. To surprise an audience educated as to his tricks, Hitchcock made a movie that was bigger than just the 1 hour, 49 minute run-time, that also included the advertising campaign, the leaked Hollywood rumors, and the unconscious buzz in the culture. All of this was carefully crafted to prepare the audience for a movie, a movie that would then be something completely different from what the movie-goer thought he was promised.

The kernel of Hitchcock's vision for Psycho was Janet Leigh. In the run-up to the premiere, the movie was promoted as Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock, together for the first time! The proffered story was to be classic Hitchcock: Janet Leigh will play an ordinary law-abiding person, thrust by fate and accident into the role of a criminal and a fugitive.

But then, just 48 minutes into the movie, as the audience easily settles into the tension of Marion Crane, embezzler of $40,000.00, running from justice, Marion Crane is incomprehensibly murdered in the Bates Motel. And with her dies Janet Leigh, the great star, and the audience is left with .... what? What does all this mean? In Hollywood, the central star never dies at the beginning; they are the reason everybody has shown up in the first place!

And in the very next scene, it gets even worse for Ms. Leigh, and the audience. Norman Bates sinks not only Marion Crane's car into the swamps, but also the stolen $40,000.00. The entire set-up of the first 40 minutes of the movie, the sum and substance of Janet Leigh's entire role in the film, is gone, submerged forever in the fetid waters. From there, the audience knows exactly nothing about what will happen next, and that bewildered ignorance lasts right up to the final, ironic, comic monologue of Mrs. Bates, "....they'll see, and they'll know; I wouldn't even hurt a fly."

Brilliance, wrapped in Genius. That's what Psycho was, cinematic art rendered at its best.

So, Psycho is #1, that is clear, and I am glad we have settled that. The current #1, The Exorcist, then moves to a very solid #2, a position it ought to be very happy with. Wretching and vomiting don't usually carry a work of art to greatness.