Alien
Psycho
Such a shame!!!
28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
Quite possibly, yet Jaws was even more influential to film making and it didn't even reach the semi-final.
IMHO under a contemporary viewing, Psycho has not aged well at all. Unfortunately I think it now looks badly dated and in parts, clichéd.
Yes, I too believe that the music in Psycho is extremely annoying and the blood in the shower scene looks like the chocolate sauce that it is...
Alien on the other hand reeks of claustrophobia and has a real sense of danger and foreboding attached to it. As far as pure horror goes, Alien is the winner here... 8)
Bring back life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded.
28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
This is the Best Horror Movie Tournament, not Most Influencial To Movie Making tournament. If you follow that thinking than whatever films influenced Hitchcock are thus greater than Hitchcock which I am sure is not the case in most cases.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChestBurster (Alien Dinner Scene influence on pop culture)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...erMurderParody (Psycho Shower Scene influence on pop culture)
The world of film would be vastly different had Alien never been made. Lest we forget Alien came from a rookie director, not a powerhouse with 35 years of prior filmmaking experience so you could argue Psycho not even being in Hitchcock's top 5 most influencial films. And as for Ridley Scott, director of Alien, a lot of people consider his Blade Runner to be one of if not THE greatest film of all time so between that and Alien I think Ridley Scott has had as much influence on the next generation of filmmakers as Hitchcock has, just in different ways.
A highly influencial horror film that to me is more effective as a horror film than Psycho? Halloween.
As for Hitchcock, I was more creeped out by his films Rebecca and Rear Window than Psycho which I find trite compared to the other Hitchock films I've seen. At the time I am sure it was amazing and terrifying much like how The Exorcist made people lose their minds but I still maintain The Exorcist is a far better horror film than Psycho. It's like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, very influencial and at the time there was nothing else like it but it still bores the hell out of me regardless of it's stamp in cinema history :/
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28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
That's my problem with every top 50 horror movie list I looked, almost all the best horror movies were usually out of the top ten because the top ten is reserved for the 'classics' (which is a word that got all mixed in with 'quality' somewhere along the line [even the worst movie from 1930 is a classic movie]) and while they may be important horror films, that doesn't make them the best. I'm afraid part of the quality of a movie is how well it stands the test of time and if the scares in a film just aren't there anymore 40 years later, regardless of how scary it was at the time, how much it influenced the genre, how important it was to cinema history...well, then how great of a horror film can one be if it's scares fade with time? These days it's HARDER to make a horror movie because so much has been done before. We have to re-invent tropes and re-imagine and sometimes people still say 'just another zombie movie' where as films like 28 Days Later and Pontypool are anything but 'just another zombie movie', they re-invented the tropes that inspired them which should be given more credit then it does.
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I, for one, give up!!!
28 in 23 (?)!!!!
63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!
My Collection: https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver...ion-Merlin1958
The Houston Astros cheated Major League Baseball from 2017-18!!!! Is that how we teach our kids to play the game now?????
A L I E N for the win!!!!!
You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
You admire it.
I admire its purity. A survivor … unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Someone brought up a great point in the Prometheus discussions on Roger Ebert's review...
I can't help but agree with this because Alien and Prometheus are almost the same movie yet are judged so vastly different BECAUSE of the legacy of Alien...can anything be better than a legacy? I can't help but think if Prometheus was just another Ridley Scott sci-fi film and not a prequel to Alien, it would have been better recieved. This is why no matter how good LeBron is we'll say 'he's not Jordan/Magic/Kareem/Chamberlain etc.Kudos to Mr. Ebert for being one of the few that really recognized this movies greatness!
The funny thing is this: If Prometheus had opened in 1979, it would be celebrated today as a science-fiction masterpiece, in the tradition of "2001" and others. Had Scott followed today with "Alien", people would have panned it for being a dumb slasher flick with lame characters, bad dialogue and so on. You get the point...
People should re-watch "Alien" and "2001" and pay attention, if the character development is any better (It's not, especially in "2001"). And for the originality debate: Promethius is basically the adaptation of "At the mountains of madness" from H.P. Lovecraft, which is even older than the novel for "2001".
I'm just saying...
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In this thread no one can hear you scream.
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I'm quite curious what everyone would consider as their top horror films. Should we discuss here, or maybe the horror thread? I just don't want it to disappear after the competition. I'll post my top 10 soon.
Only the gentle are ever really strong.
Haha, I'm 28 - but I guess I should of chosen my words better - it hasn't aged well is what I meant. But I also meant before my time as in perception - if I had been around earlier, I would most likely have a different opinion. I love old movies.. Sierra Madre, White Zombie, Snake Pit and a ton of 1950s Japanese movies are just some I enjoyed recently. Old books have a certain charm too, especially obscure ones which bring up thoughts most humans never bothered listened to..
I want to say Psycho is a poor man's Halloween, but that would probably be unfair considering I never saw the movie properly. It's not uncommon for the first thing in a field to not be as good as the second. Happens in the tech industry all the time.
Speaking for myself here - I went into Prometheus willing to meet it on its own terms. I knew of Scott's cryptic messages that the two films would "share strands of DNA", but I wasn't willing to let my appreciation for that film be contingent on how closely/loosely it stuck to the Alien mythos.
They're the same movie on paper, sure, but not in execution. While Alien is a masterclass of tension and horror and it knows what it wants to build up to and how to get there, Prometheus suffers from identity crisis. It doesn't know if it wants to be a horror film, an exploration of our origins, a sci-fi epic. It tries to juggle too many things and it ends dropping each ball. I mean sure, the film is gorgeous, but it's visuals and some scene chewing scenes from Fassbender are all it pretty much all it has going for it. Characters make some ruthlessly idiotic decisions, it has some truly cringe worthy clichesSpoiler:
And to top it all off, by the time we get to the answers portion of the film no one cares because 1) the film has essentially turned into a slasher at that point, and 2) the answers we're given are the film equivalent of "Sorry Mario, your Princess is in another castle!" You can bet your ass that Lindelof was brought in rework the ending so that Prometheus 2 & 3 line up better. That whole film was just one massive disappointment for me.
But at the same time I know you watched all those viral videos etc that built up the hype behind Prometheus. I've still never seen Prometheus's trailer. If anything I had months of negative hype before I sat down and watched it lol. I don't know if hype actually affects howsome one percieves a film but I stay away from it just in case lol. I guess either I just ignored the problems people had with it or I don't particularily agree with them. To me if anyone should be upset about Prometheus it would be that it used the same playbook from Alien: A science team is sent to a distant planet for one reason when the corporation that sent them has alterior motives and there they find themselves betrayed by the logic of an Android and face a deadly alien threat unlike anything they've ever seen in which a female crew member reaches down to depths she never knew existed to survive. The two characters that needed time (Noomi Rapace and Fassbender) got it and the others didn't which is fine since they are just there to die anyways, which is very similar to Ripley/Ash from Alien. Have you watched Prometheus/Alien back to back? I've considered doing it just to see if they are as similar as I find them, I found both movies so shockingly similar in structure that I've wondered if any problems I had with Prometheus were also in Alien.
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Prometheus and Alien have a number of similar elements but they are not the same plot and definitely not the same execution. For one, the characters in Alien are mostly unsuspecting, working-class guys/girls who are thrown into this situation and don't have the expertise to deal with it. In Prometheus, the people on the spacecraft are suppose to be experts in their fields who are specifically on a mission to discover alien life. The way Prometheus is written the characters seem to forget this and go straight into dumb-teenager-in-a-slasher-film mode once the they see the first sign of trouble. Prometheus also seems to be more about trying to give answers (most of which don't add up) while Alien's only goal was to scare its viewers in a new way (which i explained in an earlier post.) Prometheus borrows a few of the sexual image scares/gross-outs (squid on engineer, anyone) but they are not the point of the film. To sum up, I like Prometheus but I love Alien.
Jean and everyone that feels ripped off by the results of this poll, I feel for y'all. As much as I love Alien, I do not think it is the greatest horror movie. I do think it was better than Psycho but there were a number of films that were eliminated earlier that were better than both. I think that is going to be a problem with brackets like these every time. They are fun but you get some strange results because of upsets in earlier rounds. Only having a poll with all of the movies or a round-robin format would get better results but they would be less fun. The first would be too short and the other too long. I guess what I am saying is don't get too upset because this is just a poll for fun and far from an exact measure of these movies.
BESIDES WE KNOW
WAS THE REAL WINNER.
I agree. I don't love Prometheus like I do Alien but I do think it's the most overly criticised movie of our time.
I think have multiple choices will solve that problem or at least we'll see more competetive first rounds.Jean and everyone that feels ripped off by the results of this poll, I feel for y'all. As much as I love Alien, I do not think it is the greatest horror movie. I do think it was better than Psycho but there were a number of films that were eliminated earlier that were better than both. I think that is going to be a problem with brackets like these every time. They are fun but you get some strange results because of upsets in earlier rounds. Only having a poll with all of the movies or a round-robin format would get better results but they would be less fun. The first would be too short and the other too long. I guess what I am saying is don't get too upset because this is just a poll for fun and far from an exact measure of these movies.
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Problem is, from the outset this was meant to be the best movie tournament which happen to be horror, not the scariest movie tournament. See discussion prior to the beginning of the event. The better movie is clearly Psycho.