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Throwback Thursday: Ten Horror Movies You Should See Before You Die
Just in time for Halloween
Since the spooky season is almost upon us, I’m digging into the Halloween archives for a piece on my favorite scary movies. As I said in the original piece, I am not a huge fan of the horror movie genre, though it has grown on me over the past few years. I attribute this alarming development solely to the negative influence of Simon Dillon, for whom it’s Halloween 365 days a year (which makes decorating Castle Dillon a lot easier). He is as much an evangelist for the dark side as I am for Springsteen, and between his fiction and his film reviews, he has drawn me to that dark side like a moth to a flamethrower.
I should make clear that when I say horror, I do not mean slasher-porn. I can appreciate the early Halloween and Friday the 13th films but will happily go to my grave never having watched one minute of the Saw series. Overall, I prefer a more traditional haunted house film with none of the silly jump-scares. Jump-scares are just plain lazy writing; if the reaction a scene causes is the same you’d get from your cat landing on your head while you sleep, it’s not horror.
Simon’s influence has had a positive effect as well: I can now occasionally watch horror movies after dark even when the house is empty. With fiction, however, I…
