It’s one of the ironclad rules of media journalism that all “100 best” lists are bad. Certainly, some are worse than others; some are merely skewed, while others cause the knowledgeable reader to wish they could reach through the screen or page to repeatedly slap the compilers while shouting “WHAT! THE! HELL! WERE! YOU! THINKING?!?!!” Nearly all of them are biased toward the last 40 years prior to their compilation (for obvious reasons) and most of them seem to be compiled by committees which include at least one, and sometimes as many as a majority, of individuals who absolutely should not have been included due to such factors as A) conformism; B) contrarianism; C) inexperience; D) ignorance; E) lack of taste; F) stupidity; G) crippling bias; or H) any 2-6 of the preceding. Today’s example of the genre is Variety‘s new list of the “100 Best Horror Movies of All Time“, whose chief flaw is summed up by the title of this column: it seems to have been composed by a group composed of 1 serious horror fan, 1 casual fan, 2 fans of adjacent genres, 3 non-fans, and 1 person who does not actually like horror movies, for the consumption of Variety readers who are not actually horror fans per se. Now, before any of y’all accuse me of bias, let me get this out of the way: de gustibus non est disputandum. There can be considerable disagreement between aficionados of any genre about which examples are best, much less the specific order they should be arranged in. I’ve already written about my own favorites, and about my philosophy of the genre, the most important principle of which is that slashers are not horror:
Slashers are actually more closely related to porn than horror; both genres grew out of the exploitation films of the 1950s, which featured both gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence. Those in turn were essentially cinematic Grand Guignol, whereas true horror began as filmed “ghost stories”; the former are theatrical, while the latter are literary. Expressed another way, slasher films are designed to shock the body via intense imagery, whereas horror intends to shock the mind via terrifying ideas.
So right off the bat, the Variety list fails by putting a slasher in the top slot; the top ten are further puffed out with a satirical black comedy, a couple of suspense thrillers, and a literary exploitation flick. And the rest of the 100 are similarly heterogeneous; there are lots of horror and slasher movies in the list, but also lots of suspense, psychological drama, tense sci-fi, monster movies, dark satire, black comedy, and other types of flicks which may indeed be entertaining and exciting and even thrilling, but are not horror. 34% are from the past 40 years (not bad as “top 100” lists go), but 14% are from the 21st century (not exactly a notable period in genre history). So, go take a look at it if you feel so inclined; you may find a few things there you’ll want to see, even if they aren’t “the 100 best horror movies” as advertised. And try not to get too annoyed if they ranked your favorites much too low.
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