Scary Movies...

By Russel D McLean

Since I've already shared my five scary books (here, at What's On North), I figured I also needed to share my five favourite scary movies here at Do Some Damage. It is, after all, Halloween... Just to warn you, I'll be sharing clips here, and some of them may not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition...

Happy Halloween, folks...

1) The Shining - Jack Nicholson may have later become a parody of himself, but here, despite the final reel's overacted moments, he is truly chilling as a writer who slowly loses it at a haunted hotel high in the mountains. All work and No Play makes Jack a Dull Boy...




2) Night of the Living Dead - the low budget shocker than spawned a million and one imitators, but there's an atmosphere here that can't be beaten by any of the other movies in the sequence and a low budget inventiveness that is truly unnerving.




3) Invasion of the Body Snatchers - "They're here already! You're next! You're next!" Another movie that spawned imitations and remakes, but that's never quite been beaten. The very fact that the invaders look like those you know adds an atmosphere of unsettling paranoia that can't be beat!






4) The Thing - John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the classic horror is a classic in its own right; a paranoid, terrifying thriller where there is no escape for anyone at the icebound Arctic research station, it again plays on the fears of how those we know could be hiding something dark and terrible inside. The effects are both bloody and brilliant, and the film still holds up today with its unsettling atmosphere, making the 2011 remake utterly unnecessary

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5) Misery - Again, as with The Shining, a movie crafted from a novel by Stephen King, this movie has no supernatural ghosties to chill you, just an intense and dedicated performance from Kathy Bates who plays author Paul Sheldon's "Number one fan". When she rescues him from a car accident she seems like an angel, but as Paul soon discovers, she's perhaps far more sinister than she first appears. Its essentially a two hander between James Caan and Kathy Bates, but the limited cast and the increasingly terrifying stakes make this movie one that truly gets inside your head.