Fall prestige pics maybe. A Shane Carruth Sundance puzzler sure. Halloween It's not the holiday one immediately thinks of for movies that tickle the noggin.
That hasn t stopped members of Mensa from choosing their favorite movies themed to the holiday. A new survey from the organization asked members to choose their Halloween favorites. The results were compiled in a top 10 ranking released several days ago.
What do the highest achieving minds of the nation think of the crop of horror movies over the decades There is not surprisingly some Hitchcock on the list a couple of titles from the suspense maestro in fact including Psycho at the head of the list and The Birds closing out the grouping. ( The less is more approach to gore helped 'Psycho' land the top spot a release from the organization said.) Stephen King is well represented too Carrie and The Shining made the cut both in the top five. (You can see the full list here.)
lRelated TELEVISIONForget Halloween. TV shows have thrills and chills all year roundSee all relatedMore surprising is that the films are not quite recent. The James Whale Boris Karloff Frankenstein circa 1931 makes the grade at No. 7. So do three films from the '60s. Aliens was the newest of the crop and it came out smack in the middle of the second Reagan administration. Modern classics the first Saw the first Paranormal Activity the first Blair Witch Project all fail to make the cut. So does The Exorcist and that one's of an older vintage.
Perhaps even more unexpectedly A Nightmare on Elm Street (the 1984 version) thought of as a slasher touchstone but not necessarily a brain teaser came in all the way at No. 2. Mensa members like their Freddy Krueger or at least like to dream.
Still you have to admire a group that respects its history. Two classics from 1968 Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary s Baby land in the top 10.
In choosing those films the group may have unwittingly been making a comment about how our perception of genres particularly horror changes over time. For all the criticism of Saw and its ilk those older films could be just as controversial. In a mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its filmmakers the film industry as a whole and exhibitors who book it Variety wrote of Living Dead as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of filmgoers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism. Yesterday s orgy is today s brain teaser.
Copyright 2014 Los Angeles Times
No comments:
Post a Comment