It is impossible to overstate the degree to which I was not a horror fan growing up. So many of my friends in the film-loving community have stories of a happy childhood watched between fingertips, daring themselves to keep watching, keep watching, don’t you dare be the one to look away from the alien/monster/killer. Many of those folks now have children of their own, and report with delight on the experience of getting to pass those classics of fear down as an invitation to the genre.
Couldn’t be me, though. No, man, I was a highly sensitive child (aka a grand wuss) who experienced my media in a very visceral way. If there was even a threat of bodily harm to a character I cared about, I had to leave the room. And don’t even get me started on how upset character deaths got me.
Somewhere around 11 or 12, that started to change a little bit. While I had an aversion to jolts and gore, I was also a ravenous reader who especially loved folklore and myth. Movies were overwhelming, but if a book had ghosts or curses or witches or forbidden trails through haunted forests, that book was coming home from the library with me. This made the jump to literary horror an easy evolution, especially after an English teacher gifted me a copy of Stephen King’s On Writing. Suddenly, writing horror became the end all, be all. Around the same time, I started getting into movies in a much deeper way, buoyed by the explosive DVD market that saw even the most wretched of unwatchable dreck released with a multi-disc special edition replete with commentary tracks and hours upon hours of Making Ofs that broke down the pragmatic and practical matters of making movie magic.
Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to lay out the context for why in the fall of 2004, I had been primed to have my world rocked when the Bravo channel released a countdown of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments of All Time.
For those of you who are young and disgusting, early Aughts cable was stuffed silly with talking head shows breaking down different pieces of pop culture. These shows would feature celebrities, comedians, and participants in the media under discussion cracking jokes, telling stories, and talking about individual reactions to the music/movies/shows/toys/sports/scandals of yesteryear. VH1 built entire weekends around shows like this.
The Bravo list follows this format to a T. Over five hour long episodes aired in the last week of October, it counts down clips of, you guessed it, the scariest movie moments of all time, interspersed with commentary from a wide range of horror luminaries and experts, comedians, minor celebrities extremely specific to the Bush administration, and actors who don’t qualify for their own Wikipedia page.
The list continues to loom so large for me even as an avowed horror lifer in large part because it’s actually a good list, with a wide and interesting selection of films that showcase the history and elasticity of the genre. The Universal monsters coexist with the slasher heavy hitters, while black & white Vincent Price freakouts sit side by side with Italian gorefests. While we might quibble over placement, there are no out and out embarrassing picks, with even the most recent movies placed into this canon (The Others, 28 Days Later, and the American version of The Ring) proving to be totally respectable choices.
As a young teen only starting to get into horror, this series is undoubtedly the first place I encountered names like Bava, Argento, or Miike. The streaming era makes it infinitely easier to sample international and historical titles, so it’s hard to impress upon filthy repulsive young people that many of the titles shouted out on this series were obscure cult objects at best. In many cases, films that are today regarded as unimpeachable classics, like John Carpenter’s The Thing or the Wes Craven canon, were only beginning their climb towards respectability after decades of being seen as disreputable at best, repulsive at worst.
In hindsight, what’s even more impressive than the list itself is just how many people from the horror scene showed up to play. To this day, I have no idea how this thing came together, but the density and quality of guests is staggering. Craven, Carpenter, Romero, Hooper, Gordon, Dante, Landis, Coscarelli, Tom Savini, Stan Winston, Stephen King, Rob Reiner, the list goes on and on. You got the Broken Lizard team hot off of Club Dread, Rob Zombie fresh from House of 1000 Corpses, and waaaaaaay too much Eli Roth, then just the up and comer from Cabin Fever (and who alternates between two outfits, suggesting that Eli Roth was asked back to film even more after hiring a stylist). Critics like Mark Kermode and Kim Newman and Mary Maitland weigh in, while the likes of Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro detoured from conquering Hollywood to spend a little time talking through what some of these classics meant to them, whether it’s Jackson waxing rhapsodic about the gore gags in American Werewolf or del Toro extolling the virtues of Mario Bava’s production design. Also the Budweiser Twins are there.
(Filthy, ugly youth, go Google who the Budweiser Twins were.)
These talking heads offer insight, context, and humor, sure. But more inspiring (and inviting) was the unspoken feeling of community that they generated, intentionally or not. Through the recurring figures, you get a sense of a group of peers egging each other on and driving the genre to new and bolder heights. The way that the likes of Craven, Romero, and King refer to each other by first name help make the idea of working in horror somehow attainable. These weren’t distant, distinguished beings flinging fear down from Mount Olympus; they were affable craftsmen having fun and trying stuff with their colleagues and friends. And seeing the directors of Lord of the Rings and Hellboy talk about how the DIY efforts of Evil Dead and Texas Chainsaw inspired them to pick up the camera only underscored the notion that horror is an endless continuity, one generation inspiring the next, and so on and so on.
Revisiting the series these days, there’s a bittersweet feeling that wasn’t there before. So many of these cheerful, welcoming voices have gone silent. Craven, Romero, Hooper, Gordon, Winston, Reiner, all gone. Many of the other participants have also passed away, like the luminous Elizabeth Peña who shows up to represent Jacob’s Ladder. Carpenter’s still with us, but it hurts to look back on him in this moment with a fire in his belly and a rascally twinkle in his eye, and know that he only made one misbegotten movie after this before being consigned to the status of beloved relic (I would like to make sure I say on the record that I wish nothing but joy for John Carpenter and if he’s happy making cool music, smoking weed and playing video games, and picking up residuals, then I am happy for him). Landis is still here, but in the time since this series, his unforgivable conduct on the set of Twilight Zone went from horrifying trivia item to the sum total of his legacy.
Like horror cinema’s own Last Waltz, this series acts as both primer to the larger genre and eulogy for the moment that is already passing even as camera rolled. No one involved in this production could have known that the same month that this series aired, a couple of unknown Australian filmmakers would unveil Saw and usher in a new, brutal era for horror, an era that was worlds removed from the creature features and haunted houses celebrated in these episodes.
But if the Bravo list can’t help but increasingly feel like a haunted old ruin, it’s a reminder that not all ghosts need be feared. Rare is the October where I don’t find an excuse to look the series up on YouTube and watch it piecemeal over the course of the month. Some of it is nostalgia, of course, for being newly 14 and sitting thunderstruck on my couch in broad daylight as clips from Re-Animator and The Beyond blew my mind wide open. Some of it is just that it’s a highly rewatchable package, expertly put together by director Patrick Moses to keep you hooked from one segment to the next.
But all that aside, I’ll just always be grateful that this series exists and that I caught it when I did. It served as a roadmap to the next few years as I began diving headlong into the ever-expanding world of horror cinema. My life continues to be shaped in so many ways by horror, horror movies, and the horror community, and I owe much of that to the men and women who took the time to sit down for a few hours and reminisce on camera about the joy, and the effort, and the joy, that went into being scared and scaring others. And I expect this series to continue to serve as a primer for the genre, even as an odd little object lurking in the algorithm. After all, there are always newcomers watching from between their fingertips, daring themselves to keep watching, keep watching, don’t you dare look away, until it’s their turn to pick up a camera or a pen and pass the fear along.
