1 POLTERGEIST (1982)

Director: Tobe Hooper (produced by Steven Spielberg)

Set in a suburban Californian town, Poltergeist tells the story of the Freelings, a typical middle class family haunted by a host of malevolent beings that plague havoc in their home and abduct their youngest daughter Carol Anne.
Bizarre events begin to occur soon after Carol Anne starts sleepwalking and having what appears to be a one-sided conversation with a television that is switched on but has no reception. At first the spirits play seemingly harmless tricks on the family, who witness glasses breaking, forks bending and chairs moving by themselves. However, the activity soon becomes more sinister and escalates out of control when the Freelings realise that they‘re actually up against a vengeful demon known as ‘the beast’ who has taken Carol Anne into another dimension!

The realistic portrayal of your average family plagued by an array of ghosts, shot in trademark Spielberg style, means Poltergeist has to be awarded pole position as the scariest haunted house film of all time!

2 THE RING (2002)

Director: Gore Verbinski

The Ring is a Hollywood remake of the 1998 cult Japanese horror film Ring and is centred on Rachel, a young journalist played by Naomi Watts who is investigating a cursed videotape that may have caused the deaths of four teenagers including her niece.
Rachel watches the tape herself and soon after begins to experience disturbing nightmares and receives a phone call in which a child’s voice says ‘seven days’. Presuming she now has only seven days to live Rachel is left distraught when she finds out that her young son Aiden has accidentally watched the tape too.
Rachel then goes to great lengths to investigate its origins and attempt to break the deadly cycle.

The Ring is a slick, modern horror and the scary visuals of the ghost girl Samara really make your skin crawl! This film will definitely give you nightmares for weeks!

3 THE SHINING (1980)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, The Shining is a psychological horror set in an old isolated hotel where writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has taken a job as out of season caretaker. His young son Danny possesses a psychic gift known as ‘the shining’, allowing him to experience terrifying premonitions about the hotel, as well as see the numerous ghosts that inhabit it.
The family become trapped in the hotel following a snowstorm and under the influence of an array of evil spirits Jack goes on a murderous rampage, attempting to kill his wife and son.

The Shining has to go down in history as being one of the scariest horror films of all time, as well as
having had a huge influence on the development of the horror genre and popular culture.

4 THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Director: Daniel Myrick / Eduardo Sanchez

The Blair Witch Project is pieced together from amateur footage and tells the story of three student filmmakers who disappear whilst on a hike in the depths of the supposedly haunted Maryland woods, where they are filming a documentary about the local legend of the Blair Witch.
The three students become hopelessly lost in the woods and are left petrified by crackling sounds at night and waking to see ritualistic headstones built around their tents.

The Blair Witch Project crossed boundaries in independent filmmaking and the studio’s clever use of internet marketing to suggest the film was based on real events helped boost box office sales to an estimated $140,539,099 – a true nail biting classic!

5 THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)

Director: M Night Shyamalan

The Sixth Sense tells the story of a troubled nine year old boy named Cole Sear (Haley Jole Osment) who can see and communicate with ghosts and spirits who don’t realise they’re dead – and equally afflicted child psychologist, Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), who tries to help him.
Crowe suggests Cole should try to use his ability to help the ghosts he sees with their unfinished business on Earth, but Cole is absolutely terrified of them! It’s safe to say that the film is best known for its surprise ending – if you’ve seen it then you’ll know what I mean!

The film opened to rave reviews from critics and the tagline: ‘I see dead people’ soon became a popular catchphrase!

The Woman in Black is released in the UK on February 10th

http://www.facebook.com/TheWomanInBlackUK

Soon after the film’s original release in 1980 the decision was made by Warner Brothers to change the ending of the film based on the fact that the ending didn’t work.
The scene that was deleted shows Danny in hospital with his mother, being attended by Mr Ullman. He explains that Jack’s frozen body was never found and that there is definitely nothing weird about the hotel, especially no ghosts or naked hags in the bath.
This ending left a lot of questions unanswered and the audience during the first week or so of the release departed confused. As a result 4 minutes were trimmed off the end and we were left with the version that we know today.

Now, thanks to the Dryden Theatre in Rochester (NY) you’ll be able to watch the original cut and re-live the confusion that was experienced all those years ago. But, you’ll have to really want it. Tickets can’t be bought in advance, so if you’re in town you’ll need to queue from around 7pm on the night to stand a chance of getting in.

If you fancy your chances, the curtain rises for The Shining uncut at 8pm on October 22nd.

Choose a good location or setting and the tension is trebled in the first few seconds choose a bad one and we waste half an hour explaining how the characters all ended up on this strange island of mutated creatures in the first place (yes Arachnid I’m talking about you!)

Haunted houses, spooky woods, abandoned hospitals, desolate spaceships and many other more original areas and abodes are the places where fear lives and terror hides. Pound shops, jumble fairs, telephone call centres and butterfly houses are not locations for horror movies (although killer butterflies is a good idea for a film.)

Oh and if you ever have the misfortune of watching Wreckage you can now add junk yards to the list as well.

Wreckage as you can probably guess is a slasher movie set in a junk yard. One of the many annoying things about the film is there is seemingly no reason to set the film in a junk yard other than perhaps the film company had a junk yard set they weren’t using that week, the director was thinking of setting up a car wrecking business and wanted to do some research on the sly or the writer had a massive fear of scrap metal he felt the need to share with the world.

The film opens with a badly filmed, badly acted and badly scripted flashback scene where two kids shoot there druggie mother’s boyfriend and turn the gun on her and it deteriorates from then on.

Skip forward years later and a killer has escaped prison and is on the run in a small town in the middle of nowhere where four good looking teens also live. These teens form two couples Jared an ex-military car obsessive and the love of his life Kate both being the very antithesis of annoying idiot Rick and his knocked up lady Jessica.

With nothing to do the foursome go out drag racing, well its just Rick in the car but the others somehow magically appear from nowhere after the race ends abruptly perhaps transported by a worm hole or something. This worm hole is one way sadly and with Ricks car broken the foursome must walk all the way home.

But wait says one bright spark, why not head to the abandoned scarp yard and get some parts so we don’t have to walk. Not the junk yard the audience screams God no please don’t go to the junk yard! Before they know it friends get shot and disappear, cops show up, a mad hick gives desperate comedic support and a killer is on the lose, the one who escaped at the start of the film remember. And it all happens on a scary, frightening junk yard at night of course.

You probably wont remember or care about anyone in Wreckage because it is a terrible horror film. Director John Mallory Asher a man better known for directing episodes of the dire One Tree Hill and acting in such classics as Double Dragon where he was Smartass Mohawk (if only Wreckage was about that character!) fails to create not only any tension but any sense of a real story. This is not helped along by the terrible soap opera-esque music and the extremely low budget quality of the sound and lighting.

The junk yard provides us with imaginative, innovative and never before seen deaths such as car falling on person death, crushed in car death and hung by hook off the back of a tow truck death all of which are as badly realised and shot as they are scripted.

Talking of the script the actors all appear to be making there lines up as they go along which would have been okay if they had known anymore about the point or plot of the film. Made up of TV teens and bit part nobodies they all try their best but sadly they all fail including Cameron Richardson who was amazing in Harpers Island and here barely gets to act at all.

The only actor worth mentioning is Scoot McNairy who blew audiences away in Monsters and is here given the challenging and career developing role of Junk Yard Hick Idiot which he plays with all his heart and soul instilling a small amount of pity from the audience by crafting what little comedic value and character he can from what is fundamentally an offensive stereotype.

Wreckage is not a good film, Wreckage is not a so bad its good film, Wreckage is just a bad film. A car crash of a movie that at 86 minutes (most of which seem to be the opening and closing credits) is still 86 minutes too long. Wreckage is so bad in fact that even if it wasn’t set in a junk yard it would still be awful.

Movie Rating: ½☆☆☆☆ 

Trailer:

MadWomanInTheAttic:

This is the real deal. From the opening sequence of the car driving further and further into remote landscape The Shining exerts its power over you.
On the surface is a fairly simple narrative: man takes job as winter caretaker at a huge and isolated country hotel in order to get some writing done, brings wife and son, and guess what, there’s something nasty in the woodshed/ballroom/kitchen/room 237/the lifts etc.

However, this doesn’t begin to explain what the film actually consists of. As much as the performances, particularly Jack Nicolson and Shelley Duvall as Jack and Wendy Torrance, are superb, the film seems to be all mood, atmosphere and texture: Waves of blood, huge drifts of snow, endless carpet.
In fact, the most powerful aspect, the thing that gives me shivers up my spine when I think of it, is the different noises Danny’s trike wheels make on the carpet and wooden floors as he endlessly cycles round the Overlook hotel.

Zombie1:

It’s hard to put your finger on – why this film stays with you so much. I guess it’s the fact that everything is so subtle.
When you watch the film  for the first time, it’s hard to tell what sort of direction it’s going to take. It doesn’t seem immediately horrible, but there is an element of spookiness (the little boy’s telepathy etc).
But as Jack decends into madness, surrounded by ghosts/imaginary people you’re trapped in the film’s grasp until the bitter end.
The feeling of bleak isolation and tension are unrivalled. An excellent example of horror without the need for excessive gore/visuals.

Zombie2:

Superb performances, beautiful direction and cinematography and its one of the most frightening films ever committed to celluloid.
Atmospheric and deeply disturbing, no one does mad quite like Jack Nicolson. And no one does horror like Stanley Kubrick.

Movie Rating: ★★★★½ 

Additional film information: The Shining (1980)