16. The Climax (1944). Boris Karloff again as a doctor who wants to keep a woman's voice for his own. Hmm. That sentence didn't come out just right. Anyway, it's suprisingly good if formulaic.

17. The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971). Karl Malden as a blind crossword puzzle creator in an Argento-scripted giallo flick? Who knew? And it wasn't terrible either. I actually would have liked to have seen that character in something else.

18. "Treehouse of Horror V," The Simpsons (1994). My favorite Simpsons Halloween episode, because not only do you get the Shinning but the Time Toaster. Maggie's proclamation, in James Earl Jones' voice, "This is indeed a disturbing universe," is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

19. The Thing (1982). A classic sci-fi horror flick that we watch every year because it's just brilliant. We watch it all the time and we just caught, this year, some new stuff in seeing it.

20. Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995). Billy Zane in this is hilarious. "FUCK this cowboy SHIT! You human aren't worth the skin you're printed on!" For a goofy EC-based flick, it seems like a kindler, gentler version of Demons more than an actual Tales From the Crypt episode. But it works.

21. "The Galaxy Being," The Outer Limits (1963). Starring Cliff Robertson, this first episode from the series which involves an electromagnetic alien showing up and inadvertantly causing havoc, lacks any subtlety whatsoever. It positively bellows from the rooftops "TOLERANCE, YOU FUCKERS!" Which is a nice sentiment, but doesn't make for good television.

22. Pulse (2006). This was unmitigated crap. The worst flick I saw this year. I will have to post a full review. It begs to be beaten with a stick.

23. The Wolf Man (1941). Again, as I mentioned previously, I love Lon Chaney Jr. And I get Claude Rains. Rains sells "beating a werewolf to death with a cane" better than anyone else has or ever could.

24. Tower of London (1939). Not really horror, except that we have Boris Karloff as Mord. And Cosette considered the costume design a comedy. But how could I resist Karloff, Rathbone and Vincent Price in a single film?

25. Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978). While Pulse is definitely the worst film I watched this year, Zoltan made the least amount of sense.

26. House on Haunted Hill (1959). This is usually my token William Castle film just because it's so wonderfully goofy.

27. Dance of Death (1968). More Karloff, later in his career. And this ending makes little in the way of sense. The credits, when they start rolling, come as a complete surprise, especially since there's still footage playing under them. Very odd.

28. Dawn of the Dead (1978) and 29. Day of the Dead (1985). Obligatory stops on my film festival schedule.

30. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987).

31. Devil Bat's Daughter (1946). I couldn't believe someone made a sequel to this. And it completely retconned the events of the first film anyway, because they probably realized no one would care. Hilarious.

32. Frankenstein (1931).

33. Shaun of the Dead (2004). Ending our festival with the horror comedy classic.

1. "Where is Everybody?", The Twilight Zone, 1959.

Ah, the classic Twilight Zone. The Definitive Collection was a birthday gift to myself. We needed to start somewhere, so the first episode seemed like a good place. Although for some reason, I had always thought "Nothing in the Dark" with Robert Redford was the first episode. I don't know where I got that from. But that was actually from the third season. And Ken thought "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was it, but that wasn't until Season 5. So we're all mixed up. They still hold up, though. The bit with the mirror is fantastic.

2. Dracula, 1931.

A perennial for the Film Fest, I still haven't figured out what's up with the opossum and the armadillos, although they do explain them (if I remember correctly) in the commentary for the most excellent Legacy Collection edition.

3. The Frozen Ghost, 1945

I just love Lon Chaney, Jr. I really do. He just seems like a big (well, no, he is big), likeable guy. The kind you'd want to buy a cup of coffee. It's funny–I thought just now that he would make the perfect Lennie–and he apparently was the perfect Lennie in 1939. I need to go find a copy of that. Anyway, these Inner Sanctum movies are just a great time. And as for Martin Kosleck, is it just me, or was he one of the prototypes for Campbell Scott in The Impostors? Also, how do we know Chaney is cool?

*SPOILER - swipe to see* Because not only does he save the day, but he gets his old girlfriend back and picks up another young lady for his troubles. As the three of them happily march out of the museum at the end, you can't tell me that's not what's up there. Lucky bastard.

What's going to be very funny is that in a few months when I change the theme of the site, the background probably won't be black, and so that will stick out like a sore thumb. Oh well.

4. "The Ripper," Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 1974.

Although he's probably best known to folks of my generation as the Old Man in A Christmas Story, McGavin as Kolchak just rocks. The character is the perfect cynical goofball. He goes after the Ripper in all seriousness, trying to dispatch the bastard–and you buy it. But he also gets arrested in a humorous situation trying to hide and setup watch for the Ripper–and you buy that too. In fact, he makes you believe that you could have somebody like the Ripper running around and getting perforated and still ticking–and that nobody could see it but for him. What a great show, and Moonstone's continuing adventures of Kolchak are actually pretty dead on.

5. The Creature From the Black Lagoon, 1954.

The thing that strikes me now, rewatching this, is how much of this film lacks dialogue. Anytime you're underwater, they're in the old school aqualung gear, so dialogue can't happen. Such a heavy reliance on the film score and the fact that the Creature still looking pretty good (especially when submerged). This is a Legacy Collection edition as well, and I haven't watched the bonus bits to see if they take you through the suit itself (which is pretty impressive for the time, I would think), but I need to do that.

Next…Succubus from 1968.

I have a problem with most horror stories, movies, novels, what have you. I'm wondering if I'm the only one. The problem is this: most movies that you might think of, at first glance, as a "horror"movie, simply aren't of that genre. Most are thrillers, or, if you're lucky, thrillers with horror elements.

Let me tell you where I'm coming from with this. When I first saw 28 Days Later, I found myself feeling horror for the first time in the cinema in a long while. Specifically, I'm thinking of the brief shot of the community message board that this structure had turned into, where people were leaving things like "Have you seen my daughter?" and "I'm infected, I'm so sorry…" and so forth. The entire thing was covered with these messages, and you only got the briefest of shots, but it was enough to let you know that the situation was truly horrific. That was a testament to the lives, in that film, that had been devastated by the outbreak. Horrifying.

When dude goes to seek out his parents and what he finds…that's horror.

That, and other moments within that film, reminded me what it was to get horrified at a horror movie. I realized that what I'd been mistaking for true horror was simply terror. Horror movies should horrify, thrillers thrill and terrify. There's a subtle difference.

Let's get down to brass tacks for a minute. I looked up "horrify" and got "To cause feelings of horror." Great, thanks. But for horror, I got this:

• An intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear.
• Intense dislike; abhorrence.

Painful repugnance. Abhorrence. That works. Now, if I watch a Friday the 13th flick, I really don't feel that. Why? Because most slasher flicks are simply thrillers. There's seldom anything horrific–at least in a movie–about people being stalked and killed one at a time. But compare the feelings you get from watching a slasher flick to the feeling of watching John Hurt "hatch" in the middle of Alien. I can't imagine anybody who didn't twist and turn when they watched that scene unfold.

You can even make the comparison inside a movie–let's take the recent House of Wax remake as an example. The movie was better than it had any right to be, frankly. And it had a lunatic final sequence which deserved a better film to be stitched on. But there's three things here.

First, I don't count what are essentially torture sequences as horror. The heroine having to rip her lips open after they've been super glued together or losing part of a finger–to me, that's just the gross-out. Anybody can go for that. Sure, if you want to be technical, that's horrific. But there's nothing artful about that.

But second, there are some truly horrific moments in the film. When dude smacks at the wax "dummy" of his friend and knocks part of the skin away, only to reveal the jaw underneath–when you think about being paralyzed, encased in wax, and you're still alive–that's messed up. That's horror, folks.

However, most of the rest of the film is just "being chased by/avoiding the bad guys," which is just straight-up thriller stuff. The new spin on the serial killer is that they're brothers and one's disfigured. Whoopee.

And that's the problem: a cheap "boo" has taken the place of real horror. A cat jumping out at the right moment is not horror, nor is the "turn around and be shocked by somebody standing there" schtick.

We need more moments of horror in fiction and film. And it's hard to do. I was thinking Something Else #51 would be horrific in nature, though it wound up simply sad. Something Else #50 is probably the closest thing to what I'm talking about I was able to pull off–the idea that such a terrible ritual could be compared to the Christian ideal of communion I would think would be fairly horrific to any self-aware Christian.

I honestly haven't written too many pure horror stories. Dark fantasy is where most of them fall, which I think is a convenient bucket for anything that simply doesn't want to be taken that far. For that matter, I honestly don't go into writing aiming for a genre of any sort…the things just sort of happen like they want to.

Anybody else feel like this? Or should the shmoe shut up and sit down?