Best Horror Film of 1979 (part 2 of a series)

Stalker is the best movie, but it's in the wrong poll

Voting Phantasm, even though I think Alien is pretty unimpeachable & obv. deserves to win this.
When I was a kid, I used to watch the first two Phantasm movies every year, right around Halloween. For whatever reason, they gave me the creeps in just such a way that coincided nicely with the late-October chill & decay (of course it didn't hurt that they were CONSTANTLY on television during that time of year, at least where I lived. To this day I can't take bike ride down a country road late Oct-Nov w/o at least once picturing the Tall Man singlehandedly hauling a casket over his shoulder across some nondescript cemetery, next to some nondescript church in the middle of NOWHERE. What great imagery & what a great villain - much about the films has not aged so well, but The Tall Man has got to be one of the great cinematic boogeymen OF ALL TIME.

Another thing about the movies that ruled was the alternate dimension/martian landscape/manufacturing zone for dwarf corpse-slaves.

Oddly enough I have thusfar not seen The Brood or The Thing, even tho I generally stan for Cronenberg. How this happened is anyone's guess. At this point, I'm almost sort of saving them for a special occasion.

Oh man you need to see both those movies!

I ended up voting for Alien. It's perfect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojhGdRSkiUw

wow i haven't seen the brood or the thing either iirc.

It's really demoralizing for me that the director of Alien now makes movies like Gladiator.

Is The Brood the film where everyone in a block of flats catches a virus that makes them sex each other until they die?

― kraudive, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 3:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think that was Rabid

― Darin, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 3:56 PM (Yesterday)

Brood: Oliver Reed and evil rage children in puffy ski jackets
Rabid: Marilyn Chambers and virus that makes them bite each other
Shivers: island luxury apartment tower and the sexing until death

Lots of the Herzog is oddly dreamy and lovely (a vibe that belatedly ports over to Coppola's "Dracula"). Plus, he released an army of rats! "Alien" is pretty much as perfect as "Jaws," save why Sigourney strips to her undies at the end. "The Brood" is a bit of a mess, but boldly transitional to his "body horror" peaks of "Scanners," "Videodrom" and "Dead Ringers."

"Salem's Lot" I haven't seen for ages, but it was a pretty good TV movie, if I recall! Hooper is a pretty talentless hack, though, who lucked out.

Alien: In space, no one can hear you snore.

Stalker?? horror?

The Brood v Nosferatu

Just curious, when was the last time you saw "Alien?" Cause it's always more efficient than I remember it. I mean, "Aliens" - an action movie! - waits, like, an hour before there's any action, then follows it up with another 45 minutes of "inaction" (akin in mood to "Alien") then goes all out at the end to the extent you forget there was such a loooooooong build-up. "Alien" is pretty linear in its suspense, and though I suspect time has robbed it of some surprise/shock, the rest of it (acting, set design, creature design, SOUND design) rules.

Nice deployment of smoke, strobes and sirens in the last 15 minutes of Alien but, yeah, I have to agree with the detractors that it takes a pretty long while to get there.

So many other films since then have bitten the basic structure of Alien that it's hard now to appreciate how well built the movie is. The long build-up is one of its strengths.

One thing that was really fun about Alien was that when it came out in the pre-Internet dawn time most people didn't have a clue it was a horror movie. "Oh, a new SF movie, we liked Star Wars and Close Encounters, let's go see that." My wife was so traumatized by her experience in the theater she still won't watch it.

i disagree p strongly w/ josh in chicago's assessment of tobe hooper as "a talentless hack" - aside from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which has a gd claim to being the greatest horror movie of all time (and incidentally features a terrific electronic score by Hooper), Salem's Lot, Tourist Trap, Texas Chainsaw Massa and Poltergeist are all gd to great and far from hacky.

also, scanners always struck me as a step back from The Brood, which is prob. my favourite cronenberg film - i love the wintry canadian texture/look, and its 'domestic horror' feel is still pretty unique.

by the time alien reached the uk, ppl were well aware that it was a horror film - the stomach bursting scene was the talk of my school playground

sorry, typing hurriedly at work here - shld be Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in my third sentence. Hooper's best films edge closer to black humour than just abt any other major horror director, and the first chainsaw sequel is a glorious, messy farce

Can a director be a hack if he made basically the best American horror movie ever?

One thing that was really fun about Alien was that when it came out in the pre-Internet dawn time most people didn't have a clue it was a horror movie.

We're getting a myth a day now, huh? Ridiculous. I went the first week and all the reviews mentione dthe disgusting John Hurt scene. The more perceptive ones noted it was an FX-polished haunted-house B-movie.

Sorry to spoil yr illusions about " pre-Internet" savages.

We're getting a myth a day now, huh? Ridiculous. I went the first week and all the reviews mentione dthe disgusting John Hurt scene. The more perceptive ones noted it was an FX-polished haunted-house B-movie.

Sorry to spoil yr illusions about " pre-Internet" savages.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 17 June 2010 13:59 (3 minutes ago)

Most people don't read movie reviews before seeing a movie.

Surely everyone must have known it was a horror movie. The reviews said so.

Can a director be a hack if he made basically the best American horror movie ever?

― rim this, fuck that (Eric H.), Thursday, June 17, 2010 1:41 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

He can certainly turn into a hack...

OK, if you didn't get my little joke above, this was the original, ubiquitous poster:

http://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/alien_poster.jpg

See, "scream" is a clue.

I don't know where that "here" version came from -- fucking Internet -- but you get the idea.

ie

http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures/tv.film/Alien/Alien-poster.jpg

Sure looks like an SW-styled sci-fi romp to me!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-yXZ7_G7ic

"Look, honey, it's just like that UFO movie we saw!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjLamj-b0I8

next you guys should post "Pete Rose didn't bet on baseball"

Sorry to spoil yr illusions about "pre-Internet" savages.

Compared to the kids on our lawns today, the target demographic in 1979 wasn't nearly as saturated in publicity and hype.

As a teenager in the late 70s, I did not read a whole lot of movie reviews. I didn't go to movies all the time, so I doubt I saw the trailer. The "scream" tagline in the newspaper ads led me to expect a run-of-the-mill creature feature. I was hardly alone in being surprised.

Sometimes it was fun being a pre-Internet savage.

If only it had been a run-of-the-mill creature feature.

alien's a highly stylized film, and if you don't dig the style then its pleasures are going to be lost on you

there are so many smart + innovative production decisions made in alien that leveling charges of "glossy b-movie" don't really wash w/ me, it's like saying barry lyndon is just another hoary costume drama with better cinematography (which iirc is what critics at the time thought)

alien actually makes a good double feature with blue collar, which according to your logic is just a heist movie with better acting and a smarter script, but who cares, it's just a heist movie

last temptation of christ, just another sandal epic yawn

not making much sense, Ed3. Alien is just not compelling.

oh it's a lovely movie with a beautifully orchestrated tone - clearly drawing on Kubrick imo for this sort of ongoing-stasis-interrupted-by-troubling-stuff vibe - c'mon man if you don't like horror that's cool but don't ask the movie about the alien parasite that explodes from your chest to be some 70s character study about the bourgeoisie or whatever

tobe hooper prob has a more consistently good track record than like 99% of the 70's horror dudes that are still semi-active, so calling him a hack is sorta o_O to me.

not a huge fan of the genre, but even grotty pre-Scanners Cronenberg does way more with the New Graphic Overexplicitness than a Ridley Scott sleekfest.

and let's not forget it's 'feminist' cuz Sigourney kills the beast in her underwear.

Even if Alien sucked, which it don't, it would need to be praised for giving birth to one of the best film scores of all time.

by...?

I dunno morbz, it seems like you want to beat up alien for being "an FX-polished haunted-house B-movie" and I'm saying there's more there than that. yeah it's not la commune but a lot of smart thinking went into the movie and it shows. stuff I find compelling/interesting about alien include:

remains one of the best envisioning of george lucas' "used future"

folds in paranoia and class consciousness, but then again I'm a sucker for that dystopian 70s stuff

unique + frightening creature

well-mined sexual + body horror themes, the whole film can be read as a metaphor for a sexually abusive family dynamic (why is the computer that runs the ship called mother? why doesn't she protect her children from the phallic monstrosity?)

strong female hero, in any other movie dallas would've saved the day w/ ripley clinging to his hip (and btw ripley doesn't kill the beast in her underwear, she's attacked by it - small point but it's in tune with the theme of the monster as sexual predator - but she puts on her protective gear and goes to do battle with the monster and saves her own damn self)

design design design - 30 years later and the sets, costumes, etc, don't look stupid, which is hard to pull off in sci-fi - logan's run was another glossy big budget sci-fi picture of the time and it looks like dung, like a space 1999 episode

btw I think there's place to find fault in alien but accusing it of being empty-headed gloss is misguided imo

Jerry Goldsmith did the score and yeah, it's fantastic.

x-posts

yes, the art direction was topnotch. But I have no idea what the source of the horror is ... pre-Reagan paranoia?

also pretty sure I haven't seen the whole thing since '79.

logan's run was another glossy big budget sci-fi picture of the time and it looks like dung

you take that back!

in the future we all live at the disco

http://api.ning.com/files/oc0OdnkCRWnInXU8YjVubFFkyjYivf2oPctdlo7ifD7cvkkbIKo5AYjXYg25FrmFNdPjmblIDvi7l0mehf7AzPzWgcOBdhSm/Logans_Run_560x330_MSDLORU_EC004_H.jpg

hell yes

the future looks like too much cocaine imo

see now i just want to start talking about "the apple" but this isnt the thread for that

I mourn the fact that there actually is an ILX thread for that.

yes, the art direction was topnotch. But I have no idea what the source of the horror is ... pre-Reagan paranoia?

it's all sex & body horror. which is what all horror is about I guess, but alien really amps up the force/penetration/gender role stuff. ian holm's character is a robot programmed by the corporation to help "mother" enable the "monster". when he's found out, he tries to kill ripley by jamming a rolled-up porno mag down her throat. there are some deliberately-placed signifiers to unpack there, it's more than just a william castle cheapie in space.

it is slow-moving, I'll give you that. but if you're digging the set design + aesthetics it gets kind of hypnotic.

ok I just figured out why you don't think alien is scary

The script for the 1979 film Alien was initially drafted by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.[10] Dan O'Bannon drafted an opening in which the crew of a mining ship are sent to investigate a mysterious message on an alien planetoid. He eventually settled on the threat being an alien creature; however, he could not conceive of an interesting way for it to get onto the ship. Inspired after waking from a dream, Shusett said, "I have an idea: the monster screws one of them";[10] planting its seed in his body, and then bursting out of his chest. Both realized the idea had never been done before, and it subsequently became the core of the film.[10] "This is a movie about alien interspecies rape," O'Bannon said on the documentary Alien Evolution, "That's scary because it hits all of our buttons."[11] O'Bannon felt that the symbolism of "homosexual oral rape" was an effective means of discomforting male viewers.[12]

i bet nobody here ever suspected this, but alien is my favorite movie

i refuse to talk about alien as slow-moving on a poll that contains stalker

lol

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol killer fish

I came really close to buying the Blue Underground 4k of "Zombie," but then I thought ... ehh, probably not. I wanted to hear the commentary tracks, but the movie itself, like everything of his I've seen, is kinda a snooze. The Fulci method is basically the feeling that Something Is Happening - the doom, the portent, the grime, the atmosphere - marred by terrible acting and general incoherence and long sequences of actually *nothing* happening punctuated by scenes of someone vomiting out their innards or fighting a shark or staring in terror as something very slowly approaches them. I like the *idea* of his stuff, because he does offer that hit of apocalyptic dread, but the bits of "Zombie" that stick in my mind probably amount to about five or ten minutes of screen time. The shark, the eyeball, the wormy zombie rising from the (very shallow) grave, the misty arrival of the zombie boat in NYC and the zombies on the Brooklyn Bridge. But the rest ... snooze.

Looks like I can just get it from the library, but I feel guilty, because the box cover is the gross wormy zombie, lol

have you tried the beyond or house by the cemetery? i do like zombie but your critiques are extremely accurate lol. but i do _love_ those two and feel like they’re way more effective at that apocalyptic dread thing you mentioned.

I've seen The Beyond (and City of the Living Dead), but not House by the Cemetery. I recall The Beyond being particularly incoherent. Is that the one where someone in a hospital is dissolved by slow dripping acid? I think City of the Living Dead is the one with the person (literally) barfing their guts out.

Similar films that capture that same sort of dread are Amando de Ossorio's "Blind Dead" movies, but iirc they are also pretty slow/shoddy.

the beyond is the dissolving acid one (set to a sick fabio frizzi score), love that shit

the tombs of the blind dead movies are some of my favorites too, particularly night of the seagulls

i’ll overlook a lot in horror if the atmosphere is on point, very much including coherence, haha. what can i say, the blind dead movies just work for me on that level. i can’t resist once you give me a ritual sacrifice, a european seaside village, some skeleton guys riding around on horses very slowly, sfx with lots of reverb, and so on…

I did end up getting it from the library. The transfer looks incredible, compared to how I've seen it in the past. I watched it with the academic commentary track, which made me appreciate certain aspects (like how well it was shot for a movie that was apparently filmed in March and released in theaters that August), even as he readily conceded that the acting (of everyone save Richard Johnson) and writing was pretty sub-par or thrown together, and the characterization totally non-existent. Intrigued, I watched a bit without the commentary on, and, no surprise, with the dubbing and dialog and bad acting et al. in effect, the flaws outweighed the successes (which are largely limited to the score, grime and gore, imo).

I watched another supplement with another author, and he at one point acknowledged its general incoherence and/or indifference to stuff like story and writing and pacing, but then scoffs and notes that there are plenty of movies with good stories and good writing and good pacing and good acting, and if you want one of those, they are there to be watched whenever you want.

I have Love at First Bite rated weirdly high among the 1979 films with the horror genre tag (it's a comedy, but it is about vampires) that I've seen on Letterboxd. I found it unexpectedly delightful. Alien would probably be my top pick for 1979, but I haven't seen it since starting LB ten years ago, and I don't rate things on memory. The Brood, Phantasm, Arrebato (missing from this poll), Nosferatu the Vampyre; all great (and Stalker of course, but it doesn't have the horror genre tag on LB). Thinking about 1979, I want to revisit Don't Go in the House again (which doesn't appear to be on this poll either). A pretty modest slasher film, but it has nice texture, maybe?

I'm pretty sure Pauline Kael liked Love at First Bite (or at least George Hamilton)! Played the theatre where I was an usher in '79...

I saw Love at First Bite on TV as a kid and loved it. Not sure I've seen it since, but I can imagine it still being funny. George Hamilton obviously had a lot of fun with it.