In Contention

Tag: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

  • Best scares in film

    Janet Leigh in PsychoIt’s only hitting me today that we haven’t offered up any Halloween-y content yet.  Strange.  This is my favorite time of year, though season-less Southern California certainly does it no favors.

    Last year we got the contributors together to name the top 20 horror films of all time, an installment of The Lists I’m quite proud of.  This year I’ve been settling in each night to a new perennial favorite.  Last night it was “Beetle Juice.” I took another look at Carpenter’s “Halloween” earlier in the week and I expect Ill be tossing in the “Coraline” Blu-ray once again, maybe a little Romero.  “White Zombie” with Bela Lugosi was a novel distraction the other night.

    I don’t worship at the altar of genre, but I do enjoy getting in the spirit, so to speak.  Rather than cook something up for the holiday, I figured I’d point you to a pair of UK stories spotlighting the best in horror.  The first, in the Daily Telegraph, announces Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho” theme as the scariest horror theme of all time.

    (more…)

  • ‘Paranormal’ experience and thoughts on horror

    Paranormal ActivityI finally got around to “Paranormal Activity” last night, which has been scaring audiences nationwide for about a week now.  The film sat on a shelf for two years, terrifying Steven Spielberg, awaiting a release of some sort, primed for a remake at one point, and finally made its way into the marketplace last week with an innovative, experimental distribution strategy.  All the inside baseball was covered well in this 9/20 John Horn piece in the Los Angeles Times.

    I wasn’t going to write about it.  It’s certainly not an awards film, of course, but I just kind of wanted to have a good time at a midnight screening and let it be that.  But I was still wide awake at 3:45am last night, demanding my girlfriend to stay awake with me on Skype (which actually made things creepier given the cinematographic composition of a Skype video chat).

    The film is repetitive on one hand, but that repetition lulls the viewer into a sense of foreboding that’s hard to measure.  I’m interested in seeing the alternate endings, especially the original, which seems more in keeping with the film’s insistence on a grounded scare.  But the Spielberg-suggested denouement (unfortunately featured in the trailer, leaving its truly jarring moment something to be anticipated rather than freshly experienced) is incredibly unsettling.

    I wouldn’t say filmmaker Oren Peli fully capitalized on the potential of his concept.  Like “The Blair Witch Project” (a film to which “Paranormal Activity” often finds itself compared), there are elements (specifically a moment involving a charred photograph) that feel forced and even betray a sense of anxiety on the part of the filmmakers (who do a remarkable job of letting practicality serve as visceral terrorist for the most part).  But for $20,000, it’s an impressive accomplishment all around.  And it got me thinking on the genre.

    (more…)

  • THE LISTS: In Contention’s top 20 horror films of all time

    228 Days LaterYes, how trite.  Another list of the “best” horror films of all time.  But this really is the most subjective of genres, is it not?  What is scary to us all has slipped out of the realm of the universal and become much more of a personal thing.

    Certain films are inarguable, as our list certainly reflects here and there.  But across the landscape of horror filmmaking, you find perhaps the broadest range of creativity in the medium.  So it goes without saying that a list such as this ought to be varied.

    Unlike the other lists we’ve featured here at In Contention, our rundown of the 20 best horror films of all time did not spring from the mind of this writer or that, but is instead representative of the collective.  We’ve polled each of our six contributors to ascertain their high marks in the genre and, through a complicated process of tabulation that involved thorough computation, lots of late nights and perhaps an abacus as well, the list was whittled down to the 20 films you see here.

    There are mainstays aplenty, but we think you’ll be surprised by a few of the entries.  Each of us hold very different opinions, as should be expected when you get a southerner L.A. transplant, an Arkansas law professor, two Toronto natives 20 years apart in age, a north easterner who recently made the trek out west and a humble Brit.

    We hope you enjoy the list.

    (more…)