Top 5 Horror Movies and Why I Picked Them

by Travis Loebs
(St. Louis)

This is just a quick list of my top movies with a lot of bloodshed.

5. The Saw Series -- These movies are ingenious, who would think of making people cherish their lives by making them hurt themselves? The idea of being abducted and strapped into a death machine scares me, and what makes the series interesting is how there is always a way out - it's just a mind-over-matter situation.

Everything Jigsaw does is messed up, and the scenes are dreadful and grotesque, making it almost hard to watch.

4. Friday the 13th (2009) -- I went into the theater opening morning expecting to see a so-so Jason movie, like the last handful that have come out. When I saw it, I couldn't stop thinking about how incredible it was. The 20 minute intro was absolutely brutal, and set the dark mood for the heart of the movie. Jason was more bad-ass than ever, and the kill scenes were absolutely raw.

Teenagers spending the weekend at an abandoned camp with a killer on the loose, sounds good to me.

3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) -- Yeah, I just said that, the remake found it's way to the top five while the 1974 version didn't even make the list. As much of a 'breakthrough' the original was, it just didn't scare me at all. The remake dominated in terms of realism, camera effects, and don't even get me started with the special effects. Leatherface was scarier and the scenes were darker.

2. The Descent -- This British horror was close to making the number one spot on the list. The story and the characters blend together perfectly, and the concept of having an evolved group of cave- dwelling humans is creative. The movie had a relentless sense of claustrophobia throughout.

With flesh-eating monsters pursuing you and flashlights as your only source of light, this movie becomes really scary really fast.

1. House of 1000 Corpses -- Yes, I know what you're thinking, this was just a weird movie that Rob Zombie made with his sick mind, but that's exactly why it is so scary. This movie is demented, and if you haven't noticed, all of the movies on my list are movies where the characters trying to survive have nowhere to go even if they do escape. This made the movie seem very real to me, because the only way things like this could happen in real life is if the characters were in places with no other people than the ones trying to kill them. The way Rob Zombie has the cut-scenes that have the inverted and unusual filters just mess with your head, and scenes like the one where Otis is holding the gun to the cops head and pauses for what seems like an eternity, just add to the effect Rob Zombie was getting at.

This movie is dark, satanic, and twisted, and it sticks in your head for days.