You know I have a low tolerance for publicized lists that are badly researched, careless, lazy, and reflect cultural illiteracy. Many are the product of unresolved biases The latter was the obvious crime of the last list that set my brain oozing out of my ears: CNBC’s “Worst States to Live In,” which, I’m sure you can guess since the list emanated from CNBC, meant “States That Haven’t Been Overrun By Democrats.” Recent non-political lists that exploded my poor head with the compilers’ total lack of qualifications to create included The Guardian’s “Greatest Novels” list (that included “The Handmaiden’s Tale” but no Mark Twain) and the “The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time” compiled by “experts” whose average age was about 25 and who apparently never heard of Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews or Linda Ronstadt.
What annoyed me so much about the list of “Ultimate Classic Halloween Classics” that somehow ended up in my mailbox is that it accused me of picking this careless top ten list, because I have made the mistake now and then of landing on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie rating and review compilation site (that has no integrity and is regularly manipulated to cheer bad movies and sink good ones for political reasons). I wouldn’t have picked that dog’s breakfast of alleged “scary” movies after I had been hit over the head with a shovel. I know horror films: my late wife was addicted to them, and there are undoubtedly some great ones I haven’t seen, I also have the perspective and taste to know what doesn’t qualify as a top ten “classic” scary movie. “Classic” implies historic. I wrote in one of my first essays on this topic, ““If you are going to write about history, there is a duty to perform diligent research, even for a silly online list.” Anyone who looked at the list and assumed that these are the top ten scary movies of all time would be seriously misinformed. And if you are going to use “ultimate” to describe your list, is sure as hell better reflect some consistent criteria and astute critical thought.
These are the movies on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Ultimate Classic Halloween Watchlist” ranked 1 to 10:
- “Halloween”
- “Nightmare on Elm Street”
- “The Exorcist”
- “The Shining”
- “Beetlejuice”
- “Friday the 13th”
- “Poltergeist”
- “The Nightmare Before Christmas”
- “Psycho”
- “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
To begin with, the ranking is indefensible and reflects the ignorance of the voters, which figures, since they are people who hang out at Rotten Tomatoes. I won’t quibble that the original “Halloween” now qualifies as a classic: it launched a franchise and too many imitations to count as well as a best-selling Halloween mask, but it isn’t the #1 horror movie of all time by any legitimate criteria. “Black Christmas,” originally “Silent Night, Evil Night” (1975) was before John Carpenter’s hit, the real progenitor of the serial slasher film, and is scarier as well as much better acted.
There is no film on the list before “Psycho”(1960). The Hitchcock film looks surprisingly stilted and tame today (yes, even the famous shower scene), but audiences had never seen anything like it, so sure, it belongs on a “classic scary movie” list—but so do the silent “The Phantom of the Opera,” Todd Browning’s “Freaks,” both of James Whale’s “Frankenstein” movies (“Bride of Frankenstein” is even scarier than the first) and some others we could debate about before 1950.
Leaving out all the Fifties horror movies is indefensible: two absolute classics from that decade, which generated in horror movies as in popular music unmatched creativity and variety, were the original “The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” (1956) and Howard Hawk’s “The Thing From Another World” (1951). The decade also gave us the original “The Fly”(1958) and the iconic “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” (another movie that launched a great Halloween mask.)
A Missouri statute 
