The big day is finally here! Halloween itself, where Dracula and Boba Fett walk hand in hand down the street with ballerinas and Ariel. Where free candy abounds and it's considered perfectly acceptable to jump out from behind a blind corner wielding a knife in an effort to traumatize children. (I do that all the time, of course, but today it's acceptable.) Until it's time to hand out candy to all the wee boogeymen that come to the door, I'll be watching a boatload of horror movies—and probably a few "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, to boot. To add to the celebration here's a list, in no particular order, of my ten favorite scary movies. 1. The Omen 2. Alien While not specifically buttonholed as a horror film, Alien is still a movie that's scary as all hell. Though the series managed to stay excellent after shifting its focus to full-ahead action, this first suspenseful entry is my favorite. The agonizing buildup to the first monster attack keeps you glued to the edge of your seat and reduces you to a quivering shell of a human, drained by the tension. Then, once the alien bursts loose and starts roaming the ship, it's one perfect ...

[rating: 5] If the question is "Eric, would you like to see a horror movie starring Gregory Peck?" I immediately fire back the answer of "Hells, yes!" I'll give you that answer every time. I love horror as much as every red-blooded American ought, and Greogry Peck was perhaps the very ultimate achievement in manhood. Gregory Peck knew how to be awesome at all times. He also knew that if your child was a demonspawn destined to destroy all of Christendom, the least you could do was stab him in ritualistic fashion with a series of ceremonial knives. The wisdom of Solomon, he had. It's not just the Peckinator that makes The Omen great, though. This may well be my very favorite horror movie of all time. I'm usually torn between it and Poltergeist, an odd state of affairs when you consider that neither film has any excessive gore or exposed breasts and that The Omen doesn't even have any bad words! Not an f-bomb or raunchy sex scene in sight, yet I love this picture. You know what that means right? That means it must be really good to hold my toddler-like attention span and keep me from wandering outside to ...

[rating: 2] The original blob is an interesting film to dissect. On the one hand, it's a classic. On the other, it's not any good. The lead character, Steve Andrews, is played by Steve McQueen. It's safe to say that he does "okay," but it's clear that he's only going through the proverbial motions, just as many of today's big name actors do when they're cast in a big budget picture, with a questionable script but a large paycheck to make up for it. And man, is this script questionable. Maybe no one noticed in 1958, during the age of moster movies--when Giant Gila Monsters and Creatures from 20,000 Fathoms roamed across the silver screen--that an unstoppable, all-consuming, shapeless, slow-moving blob of goo is a completely lame monster to have to thwart. Literally, the only thing that can be done to this thing is to freeze it. Oops, I ruined the ending for you. But nothing can ruin the sheer pleasure of laughing at the script, as a policeman shoots down a power line to try and electrocute the Jell-O, and another looks at it after the big climactic moment, and says simply, with no shot of the still "alive" blob, "...It didn't work." This ...

[rating: 0.5] Well. That was pretty unimpressive. I think the word that best describes The Tooth Fairy—the one word that sums up every aspect of the whole thing—is simply: Meh. Not actively bad but by no means very good, it's a completely flat and underwhelming nothing of a picture. There are images and sounds, but if you stop looking or listening somewhere in the middle you aren't going to feel like you've missed out on anything. It's meh, I tell you. Meh. The movie doesn't leave an impression of any kind on the viewer. I watched the thing twice and here is what I can remember of the plot. A family is at a house. There is a mean lady who apparently takes teeth, and if she takes them all you'll die. Or maybe even if she takes one? Then there's some neighbor lady who isn't a killer but who dresses just like the killer, why I don't know. There are some mean-spirited hillbillies, although what they add to the proceedings is beyond me. A dude with no money shows up. And I think there may also have been a ghost, perhaps? A ghost on a bike? The cast is equally enigmatic. Who ...

[rating: 0] This fourth installment in the Saw series takes the dreadfully familiar "been there, done that," sentiment that strikes all horror franchises to a level all its own. Not only are the regrettable torture scenes familiar, pointless, and, for the first time, unimaginative, but a decision was made to have the events of this film occur at the same time as the third one. This decision served absolutely no logical nor thematic purpose to the story told, but instead acts as nothing more than a gimmicky way to trump up yet another relentlessly abstract "twist" ending. Like the re-hashed torture devices, the acting in this film reaches a new low. Costas Mandylor as detective Hoffman makes you think you're watching a bad softcore porn story on Showtime rather than a multi-million dollar movie franchise. Thank god the random assortment of detective-looking actors they call a "cast" have absolutely no chemistry with one another, or else you'd spend your two hours waiting for Mandylor to inexplicably take of his pants to familiar "Baw-Chicka-Wah-Wah" music. How did they end up making a Saw IV, anyway, when The Jigsaw Killer is dead? Good question. Turns out he's far more active as a dead man than he ...

[rating: 3.5] A movie came out a few years ago that effectively put an end (temporarily, of course) to the serial killer film as we know it, because it was so unique, so original, and so clearly difficult to top, people gave up trying. What's more, it launched nearly a decade-long spat of films which belonged to a trendy offshoot of the horror genre, known as "Torture Horror." No, this film was not Saw. Hardly. It was called Seven, and long before Saw's Jigsaw murderer tried to teach us that our vices were worth dying for; before Touristas wanted us to believe that Americans deserve the wrath of the third world; and light years ahead of Hostel's feeble attempts to punish the rude and the young for sport, Seven was a film which analyzed and dissected our ills as a society, while humanizing a serial killer, his victims, his captors, and society at large. The others, beginning with Saw, stand for nothing but utter dehumanization. And of course it was only a matter of time before a fan of Seven--a film which left all the gruesome torture to our imaginations, and forced us to focus on the cause and effect of the acts rather ...

[rating: 5] A lot of times you'll see The Exorcist take the number one spot on lists of the greatest horror movies. The first time I saw it, as a wee 'un, I was pretty dang blowed away and very inclined to agree with that assessment. Then there came a time when I thought I would be just too cool for school, and I'd say: "The Exorcist? Pah! That's not scary, that's just a bunch of tinkling and dirty words and occasional weird masturbatory process. Totally overrated, that!" Then, some time later, I realized I was just being an asshole, and The Exorcist really is pretty danged great. Is it the "best ever?" That's essentially impossible to say. But I know this much: it still manages to scare me after more than a dozen viewings, and it's effective in everything it tries to do. Much of the reason the movie works so well is that Linda Blair as Regan is so adorable before she turns all green and gross. She starts out as just the cutest kid there ever was, making stuff out of clay and stealing cookies, and her radical transformation just breaks your heart. As we watch this innocent little ...

[rating: 3.5] Horror giants Stephen King and George Romero teamed up to make a crazy-ass spook movie? With those two dudes running the show, it surely must be the greatest thing ever created! Well, it's not. It's enjoyable enough—although undeniably overlong and unforgivably plodding in some spots—but it's not the ultimate achievement in fright you might expect it to be when you first hear about it. The pictures an anthology piece, like Trilogy of Terror and The Twilight Zone Movie, divided into five totally separate stories. The device they all hang together on is that they're stories in the comic book Creepshow, a loving homage to the classic E.C. horror comics of old. If these stories don't quite live up to the ones that provided the original inspiration, they're still very much in the same vein and a pleasant enough diversion for anyone who's a fan of that sort of thing. The individual stories are as follows. Father's Day A family of rich, stuffy old people have gathered round, as is their yearly tradition, to celebrate Father's Day, including newcomer-by-marriage Ed Harris. The father in question is, unfortunately, unable to attend the festivities due to a severe case of death. Years before, you ...

[rating: 4] Family is another episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror, and while it isn't the mind blowing thing of supreme excellence that Pelts was, it's still pretty goshdarn great. The director this time out is John Landis whose helming of An American Werewolf in London I guess qualifies him as a master of horror but who I always associate with comedy (Animal House, The Blues Brothers and such). Despite the fact that I don't immediately connect Landis with the genre, this is still a mighty enjoyable little picture. The story borrows pretty heavily from Psycho and Bergman's The Virgin Spring, but it never tries to hide those debts and when it lifts things it does so in a way that's always fun. The tale that's told is that of a guy named Harold (George Wendt! YES!), your local crazy man. He spends most of his time chillaxing with his titular family. Harold isn't blessed with your traditional nuclear family, though; it's more of a "dressed up skeletons of the people he's killed" type of family, which I must admit is frowned upon in most of your nicer neighborhoods. But, hey, it makes him happy, and he's basically a really nice guy. ...

According to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, beloved Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore is gay. Now, I'll be the first to point out that pretty much everyone involved with those stuffy British private schools is enormously repressed in one way or another. From the mincing, discipline-obsessed faculty members to the foppish dandies that take classes from them, there's something about them that just makes you think "I bet that guy is a murderer," or any number of other hidden secrets. And we've all discussed the apparent tendencies of professor Dumbledore, on this site and others (See Meltcast #1: Harry Potter and the Sodomite Teacher). But this "admission" from Rowling poses an interesting literary question which is sure to be endlessly debated in the halls of English literature classes for no reason at all. And that question is: If a character is thought to be something by the creator, but never actually manifests that trait in the creation itself--is the character more like what the author considers him, or more like he appears to the audience? It's a chicken and egg situation. I'm not suggesting that Dumbledore isn't gay because I don't think he should be--quite the contrary: I could care less. ...