500 GREATEST HORROR FILMS: INTRODUCTION

500 GREATEST HORROR FILMS

 

Though I began the research for this list in earnest nearly three years ago, in actuality, it has been a lifelong process to put together.  Hello folks, welcome to my 500 Greatest Horror Films.  Yes, 500.  As El Guapo's right hand man Jefe would say, that is a "plethora" of movies.

What gives me - some asshole blogger - the gall to present a definitive chronicle and ranking of such films?  Well as of this writing, I have published roughly 3,700 horror and horror-adjacent reviews here, as well as having roughly 400 more in the can.  Also, it never ends.

 

In the past, any time that I would get caught up on things, such a reprieve would be short-lived at best before I would come across another whole batch of stuff to watch.  A new director, a new franchise, a new subset of movies that spiderweb into other movies once one starts investigating the personnel involved and seeing what else they have done that qualifies as being "horror enough".  Nowadays though, I never even get close to being caught up.  According to this useful document on Letterbox, there are upwards of 36,000 horror movies in existence somewhere.  So if I were to be a completest, (which thankfully I am not), my job here would never be complete.

 

This guy and his exhaustive filmography alone will keep me busy for several lifetimes.

I launched this blog in September of 2012 in order to post my 100 Favorite Horror Films list.  At the time, I did not have any plans for this site further than that; it was just a place to post a nerdy undertaking of mine for a few of my friends to check out if they were bored enough.  "Nerdy" = hence the blog title.

Before too long though, I decided to have this serve as my online film log, sort of like what movie fans do on the aforementioned Letterbox.  I always planned on updating my 100 list once the initial 100 list hit the ten year-old mark.  Yet like the fool that I apparently am, I assumed that starting in January of 2022 would give me enough time to slam in all of the re-watches necessary in order to have the list ready by that September.  Oh, and at this point I had decided to bump it up to 500 since I had already done such a thing with my 500 Favorite Albums list.  I should not have to point out though that listening to 500 albums compared to watching 500 movies took considerably less time.  Occasionally, one has to realize the obvious the hard way.

 

Also, because I have seen so much, a measly 100 was not going to cut it.  Too much would be left out.  So I set my rule that every entry had to have been watched at least twice by me and thus, that original goal to have all of this done by September of 2022 became absurd and tackled on an additional two years to the project.  As nice as it would have been to have posted this two years ago in fitting anniversary form, I done hugely miscalculated how much time such a project would actually take.  Again, we learn the hard way.

 

I mean, it took a year alone just to get through all of these goddamn movies.

In any event, sigh, at last it is accomplished.  Now of course, the term "horror" is defined broadly depending on the person.  There are several movies of quality that bare certain hallmarks of the genre yet by my idiosyncratic definitions, do not fit enough into said genre for inclusion.  There is no Silence of the Lambs, no Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, no The Devil's Rejects, no The Shape of Water, etc.  There are a good number of horror comedies though that lean heavier towards the latter genre and those shall be compiled in a future list, so stay tuned.  On that note, do not get upset that Ghostbusters, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and What We Do in the Shadows are nowhere to be found here.  They shall get their due.

What IS here is a personal ranking of what I feel are the crème de la crèm of what horror cinema has to offer thus far.  Movies that have enough "horror" in them to qualify as such and/or have contributed something to the genre that future filmmakers have utilized.  These entries go all the way back over a century to the silent era, up until this year.  They cover everything from German Expressionism, to the Universal Gothic monster movies, to the Hammer remakes of those movies, to the 1950s sci-fi alien/big monster stuff, to the New Hollywood era, to the 1980s boom, to found footage, to 21st century stuff.  Many countries that have produced a horror film, (or an entire movement of them), are represented.  Naturally since there are several hundred more entries here than the last time that I did this, it is a more expansive collection of titles.  My preferences are still my preferences, (sorry-not-sorry slasher movies and torture porn fans), but I still found room to touch upon many variants.

Besides just being a passion project of mine and something to commemorate and catalog the best of what I have viewed over the years, this can also serve as a project for other cinema fans to tackle.  If you hate horror movies, most of what is here will not be for you anyway.  If you love horror movies, you may take issue with what has been excluded, propped up, or hanging at the bottom as far as placement goes.  Any ranking like this bares the same issues, but art is not a competition after all.  These are all excellent pieces of celluloid in differentiating ways and not just ones that are "good for a horror movie".  They fall into the genre, according to me, and deserve to be celebrated.  So on that note, read on, agree, get flustered, get curious, and hopefully this is a comprehensive and informative read that inspires one to check out or revisit these films themselves, as I have done.

Now then, let us immerse ourselves shall we?