If you really like movies—and not just a little, but enough that your friends tease/complain/admonish that you never talk about anything else—then you’re going to hear this dreaded question at some point:
“So, what’s your favorite movie?”
I don’t know, maybe you don’t find it such a horrifying query. If so, well. You lucky bastard. I don’t have a favorite anything, at least not in broad categories like that. Favorite movie, favorite band, favorite food, favorite animal, favorite weapon to hastily dispatch my enemies with . . . nope, can’t do it. I need more details, categories, specificity.
I try to explain this to people, and they inevitably give me this look, like I’m being difficult just to make their day worse than it already is. (To be fair, that can be kind of fun to do to certain people.) So they might ask, “Well, what type of movies do you like to watch?” And I’ll be like, “Well, I enjoy all kinds of movies, but I’m definitely partial to fantasy, sci-fi, and horror.”
And when they zone in on horror—because nine out of ten times, they will, and you’d be surprised by the amount of people who honestly don’t believe that girls are capable of liking scary movies—they’ll ask, “Well, what’s your favorite horror movie, then?”
And I’ll be like “. . . can you pick a sub-genre?”
So, with that unnecessary and somewhat long-winded opener out of the way . . .
I’m specifically asking about spooky movies today, not fantastical comedies, so if your favorite haunted house movie is Beetlejuice . . . well, I can certainly respect that, but it’s simply not a choice for today. Pick something else.
Poll closes on February 20th. Results will be posted then.
My Geek Blasphemy 
As one of those movie people you referred to, I really like your blog. It’s impressive how many reviews you’ve put together. I’d be honored if you’d give mine a look. I’m just getting it going. http://joesmoviereviews2012.wordpress.com/
Thanks! Your blog has a nice, clean setup. I see that you have a movie list on the side, but if you still want an index on top, you just make a new page instead of a new post. (If you hover over “New”, you should get a drop down menu that includes post, page, media, and link.)
I enjoy making lists, so I have rankings of my favorite movies, favorite directors, favorite books, favorite video games, favorite bands, favorite songs, etc. For instance, my 14th favorite song is “Free Falling” by Tom Petty. Number 18 is “Purple Rain” by Prince. My 8th favorite book is It. Streets of Rage II for the Sega Genesis is my 9th favorite video game. I like to know these things. I’m strange, I know.
I keep a list of every movie I’ve ever seen. Every couple of years or so I like to update my 100 favorite movies list. I browse through the list of movies I’ve seen, write down the ones I like a lot, then rank them against each other. Pulp Fiction is number 1, and will probably never be unseated. Blue Velvet is number 50. White Men Can’t Jump is number 100. Even without checking previous versions of the list, the rankings are usually very close with each edition. When trying to decide between Reservoir Dogs and Aliens at number 63, I’ll ask myself questions like: If I was stuck on an island (where I still somehow have electricity), and I was only ever going to access to one of these two movies for the rest of my life, which would I choose to have with me?
So this poll is easy for me since I know that Poltergeist is my 21st favorite movie. The only other movie in the poll that’s on my 100 Favorite Movies list is The Shining at 71.
I’m definitely a fan of lists, but I just can’t rank anything. I’ll try, but they just change around too much, and I have trouble comparing, you know, apples and oranges or whatever. But then, I’m generally an indecisive person 🙂
I have the same problem and wouldn’t mind being able, like Macabre, to easily rank that stuf.
Huh, from the list it would have to be Poltergeist. I thought The Shining was just HORRIBLE. Shelly Duvall was atrocious and Jack Nicholson really really needed to be reined in, his performance verges on caricature. The kid was also flat. Best actor in the whole thing? Scatman Crothers.
I will try The Shining again someday, I will, but not anytime soon. From what I remember, I didn’t have a problem with Nicholson, but I HATED Shelley Duvall, HATED. And, yeah, kind of the kid too.
I thought she played the character exactly right – yes, she was irritating and very stupid, but that’s exactly the kind of woman who would have married a dude like that, and who would have stayed with him that long. The kid didn’t bother me. The way he played it seemed to fit, too. Nicholson could maybe have been reined in a bit, or at least had his madness take a little longer to reach full boil. Anyway, the only thing I didn’t like was the black dude getting iced that way since he survived in the book which worked much better.
See, but I take issue with that, the idea that women who stick by their bad husbands are necessarily stupid because, really, that’s not true. There are all kinds of reasons that women make bad choices in marriage, and a lack of intelligence isn’t usually one of them. I don’t think she needed to be nearly as irritating as she was—I mean, I watched that movie actively rooting for Duvall’s death, and I’m relatively sure that’s not the reaction I was supposed to have. (To a lesser extent, I felt the same way with the kid, who just bothered me for reasons I’m having trouble pinning down right now. But he’s a kid, and unless they’re absolutely atrocious, I don’t tend to hold child actors to the same standards I hold adult actors to.)
I’m sure there are a lot of different reasons, but in her case it must have been stupidity.
Btw, why is it that sometimes there’s no reply button on comments? I had to just reply to myself rather than to you with that last comment – and this one.
Oh man, I haven’t seen ‘The Uninvited’ in a long time. We still have it on VHS somewhere.
Haven’t seen it myself. Actually, I haven’t seen about half of these movies, but a lot of them were on other people’s top ten lists, so I threw them in anyway. Sometimes, it’s a good thing. I did a poll about witch movies awhile back, and I threw in Teen Witch just for the hell of it, even though I’d never heard of it before. I was surprised by how many votes it got.