Classic Horror Movies
October is the perfect month to get stuck into horror films.
Horror fanatic, and Spin's movie expert, Gordon Hayden shared his top 3 horrors with Sarina, on Saturday's Plan B.
A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
The 80's were a decade when the slasher genre was at its height but it was short-lived with a conveyor belt of copy-and-paste killers all trying to carve out the same box office success. That all changed in 1984 when Wes Craven launched Freddy Kruger on cinema goers. The character was completely different to the movie monsters that came before him. The original film is still the best in the franchise with the sequels diluting Freddy's menace with each entry. Freddy Kruger was at his scariest in that first film (people forgot he was a child killer!) but he soon became a cartoon character as the character entered pop culture.
Scream (1996)
In the mid 90's Wes Craven would give the horror genre another shot-in-the-arm with Scream. In the early 90's horror was a dirty word, the genre had grown stale and horror movies were just not profitable like there once were in the 80's. That all changed when Craven took a post-modern approach to the slasher genre with an entertaining scary movie with plenty of twists and turns that pulled the rug from under audiences with its surprise ending - 2 killers! Again, like Elm Street, the sequels could never match the strength of the original.
The Exorcist (1973)
One of the few horror films to be nominated for multiple Oscars - 10 in total. It won two for best adapted screenplay and sound mixing. William Friedkin used questionable methods on set to get the most out of his actors, like shooting off a revolver so one of his actors looked terrified on camera!! The Exorcist came fully loaded with expectation - people were scared before they even took their seat in the cinema. It was a massive commercial and critical success as it showed the battle to save a young girl's soul from a demon who may just be the devil. A common thread with each of these films is that the sequels that followed were dreadful.
Scared Sh!tless Podcast
In time for Halloween, Gordon has released his own podcast dedicated to the world of horror movies where he delves deep into some of the scariest classics out there and even speaks with some of the stars of the films.
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