<\/p>\n
Trick-or-treating, Jack-O\u2019-Lanterns and scary movies. What better way to prepare yourself for Halloween than to binge watch the Top 5 horror films of all time, according to a Brock University expert on horror cinema.<\/p>\n
Barry Grant, Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film<\/a>, is internationally known for his research on horror and science fiction films and has written or edited more than two dozen books on the topic.<\/p>\n \u201cHorror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in daily life by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror and disgust,\u201d says Grant, who\u2019s Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film<\/em> released in 1984 was the first scholarly anthology on\u00a0horror and helped make the genre an acceptable field of academic inquiry. \u201cHorror addresses fears that are universally taboo and respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties.\u201d<\/p>\n Grant\u2019s research explains how these films offer a release of our own (and collective) fears by providing us with vicarious, but controlled thrills.<\/p>\n Although admittedly challenging, Grant gives his Top 5 picks for horror films in chronological order:<\/p>\n To learn more about the horror genre, read Grant\u2019s essay on Screams on Screens: Paradigms on Horror<\/a>. Grant is also doing a live YouTube interview<\/a> at 12:45 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 31 on the topic of De-Coding Horror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trick-or-treating, Jack-O\u2019-Lanterns and scary movies. What better way to prepare yourself for Halloween than to binge watch the Top 5 horror films of all time, according to a Brock University expert on horror cinema.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":41742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,1,4,5,38],"tags":[4602,4601],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n\u201cThe film that established horror as a viable genre in Hollywood during the classic studio era and made Universal the most important studio making horror movies.\u00a0With its gorgeous Expressionist design, Frankenstein<\/em> and those that followed, whether they\u00a0featured the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, the Wolfman or the Mummy,\u00a0looked very different from the glossy kinds of movies being turned out by MGM or Paramount or the tough movies produced by Warner Bros.\u00a0The film also made a star of British actor Boris Karloff, whose sensitive portrayal of the creature compensated for the drastic departures from Mary Shelley’s source novel.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
\n\u201cThe foundation of contemporary horror, its shocks are perfectly timed by director Alfred Hitchcock, who claimed he played the audience like a piano. Psycho<\/em> brought horror home to middle America from exotic foreign places like Transylvania.\u00a0Tellingly, the film begins in sunny midafternoon in a mundane hotel.\u00a0The shower scene is the most famous sequence in film history along with the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin<\/em> (1925).\u201d<\/li>\n
\n\u201cGeorge Romero’s independent film, made in Pittsburgh, shocked audiences then and retains its power even today.\u00a0Romero rewrote zombie folklore, making the undead unquenchable cannibals as well, and in the process creating a new monster mythology that resonated with contemporary audiences on several levels.\u00a0One by one the film assaults the genre’s conventions and the expectations we once\u00a0brought to the horror experience.\u201d<\/li>\n
\n\u201cBritish enfant terrible Ken Russell was known for his flamboyant excesses and violations of British propriety.\u00a0Some might\u00a0well describe all his films as horrifying, although he only made\u00a0two actual horror films: the campy Lair of the White Worm<\/em> (1988), based on a Bram Stoker novel, and The Devils<\/em> (1971), based on The Devils of Loudon<\/em> by Aldous Huxley.\u00a0In recounting the events that transpired during the Inquisition in\u00a017th century Loudon, the devils of the film’s title are hardly supernatural and all too real.\u00a0The hysteria, collusion and corruption detailed in the film are much more frightening than any levitating beds or rotating heads.\u201d<\/li>\n
\n\u201cThere is a distinct tradition of comedy in horror, which in its more recent graphic phase has been dubbed \u2018splatstick,\u2019 a combination of the two forms.\u00a0It culminates in Peter Jackson’s gorefest of sight gags, which no less an authority than Sam Raimi, director of the cult classic The Evil Dead<\/em> (1981), described\u00a0as \u2018the\u00a0intolerance of splatstick.\u2019\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n