#9 Hocus-Pocus -- I'm not a huge fan of this movie, but my 8-year-old daughter watches it again and again, and it's one of the few family-friendly Halloween movies we own. It's fun seeing a very young Thora Birch in a pre-American Beauty role, and I really liked Penny Marshall's cameo as the disgruntled wife of the "devil."
#8 Halloween -- I'm not particularly a fan, but my husband loves it! I guess my hubby is a bit like Alex: "I don’t aim to sound like a sadistic son of a bitch, but I will never grow tired of watching Michael Myers hunt down poor Laurie Strode on that dreadful Halloween night." Love that line! It cracks me up.
For the record, I don't hate Halloween, slasher flicks just don't appeal to me, even if well-crafted and relatively tame.
#7 The Lost Boys -- I think this was a date movie for my husband and me, back in the late '80s. It's pretty campy, and the quality of the acting is uneven at best, but we still enjoy it. Where else can you meet intrepid child vampire-hunters called "The Frog Brothers" who use comic books as survival manuals?
#6 The Sixth Sense -- This may not be one of the greatest films of all times, but I love the performances by Toni Collette and Joel Hailey Osmont. And I'm one of the five people in North American who did not see the twist coming the first time I watched this movie.
#5 American Werewolf in London -- This was released the year I started high school, before the advent of modern CGI effects, and I still find it slightly creepy, twisted, and fun, with just the right touch of campiness. "Keep off the moors ... stick to the roads."
And to this day, I still think this is the best werewolf transformation I've ever seen:
#4 The Others -- This is my kind of horror movie: old-school Gothic, creepy, and atmospheric. I'm not usually a huge fan of Nicole Kidman, but she was terrific in this film -- she did a great job of walking the line between scared, vulnerable mother and terrifyingly bat-shit crazy bitch. Fellow Whovians -- watch for a cameo by the Ninth Doctor.
#3 Zombieland -- My son and I love Tallahassee's fabulous bad-assery.
"Where are the fucking Twinkies?"
#2 Shaun of the Dead -- Part satire, part campy horror comedy. It took several viewings for this movie to grow on me, but now I never get tired of it. I absolutely love the way everyone shambles around so mindlessly, as they go about the business of their quotidian lives, that when the zombie invasion hits ... well ... for a long time, nobody notices the difference.
"You've got red on you."
#1 The Shining
The best. Damn. Horror movie. Ever.
"Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in. I'm going to bash them the fuck in!"