Title: Beagle's Top choices for Horror Movies
Contributed by: mcookie013
According to www.filmsite.org/horrorfilms.html Horror Films are unsettling films designed to frighten and panic, cause dread and alarm, and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale, while captivating and entertaining us at the same time in a cathartic experience.
These films are the ones we're too afraid to watch, but still dare to. Agree with me? Horror is a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's primal fears. These films ignite the viewers' imagination, deal with the viewers' fears and nightmares.
Horror Films *in no particular order*
*The Exorcist (1973)
Summary:
A movie actress taking up temporary residence in Washington D.C. has her troubles. The script for the movie she's filming seems inadequate. Her ex, who is also the father of her adolescent daughter, Regan, neglects to call the girl on her birthday. And the attic has rats. Meanwhile, Father Karras, a priest and a psychiatrist, is losing his faith; and he's dealing with a sick mother who needs medical care he hasn't the money to provide. Another priest, the old and ailing Father Merrin, has just returned from Iraq with forebodings of evil. These three persons meet when the sweet and cheerful Regan turns foul-mouthed and violent. But her sickness is beyond the reach of a medical doctor or a psychiatrist. What Regan needs is an exorcist.
source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070047/plotsummary
Review
- The Exorcist (1973) is the sensational, shocking horror story about devil possession and the subsequent exorcism of the demonic spirits from a young, innocent girl (of a divorced family). The Exorcist was notable for being one of the biggest box-office successes (and one of the first 'blockbusters' in film history, predating Jaws (1975)), and surpassing The Godfather (1972) as the biggest money-maker of its time. And it remains one of the few horror films nominated for Best Picture. However, it was also one of the most opposed films for its controversial content. Roman Polanski's successful Rosemary's Baby (1968) played upon similar fears of devil possession. Originally X-rated, the film was released as an uncut 'R' rating which allowed minors to view the film if accompanied by an adult.
The controversial nature of the film's content - exorcism (accompanied by blasphemies, obscenities and graphic physical shocks), was supposedly based upon an authentic, nearly two-month long exorcism performed in 1949 on a 14-year old boy (with pseudonym "Robbie Mannheim") in Mt. Rainier, Maryland by the Catholic Church (in the form of a fifty-two year old Jesuit priest named Fr. William S. Bowdern and Fr. Raymond Bishop). The official exorcism was reported in Thomas B. Allen's and Carl Brandt's 1993 book Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism. [Possessed (2000) was also a pay-TV-cable Showtime movie of the same name, starring Timothy Dalton.] The film's plot was also partially inspired by a similar demonic possession case in Earling, Iowa in 1928.
(To read the full review: http://www.filmsite.org/exor.html)
