Here’s part 2 of my look back through my 2010 “Best of Horror” list, reacting to my old self. Click below to listen if you like to hear a nice southern accent talking to herself, or scroll down to read.

The Omen

The scene in which Gregory Peck finds jackals’ bones in the grave of his adopted son’s mother gives me such a feeling that something unnatural and purely evil is going on that I almost can’t stand it.

I think if I was going to talk about The Omen, I would talk about David Warner’s section of the film if I was telling somebody about it now, because he’s a reporter who is the only person who believes Gregory Peck. Doesn’t he find in the photos the way in which someone’s going to die next?

But knowing that doesn’t save David Warner’s character, so I think that’s what I’d point out now if I was telling someone about The Omen.

Hour of the Wolf

Max von Sydow has been going on for the whole movie about demons, and we think he is going insane. He may be, but he has taken us with him when we see that man walk up the wall.

Well, I think that’s the only reason I ever rented that movie was because I heard about that scene. That’s a standout scene. But what I’d say now is, if you like Hour of the Wolf, then you need to watch Wild Strawberries.

Because, excuse me, I think that one may be a little scarier.

The Innocents

Definitely, the best scene in the 1960 version of The Innocents—whatever year that was, it was the ’60s—is when we see the ghost of Miss Jessel across the lake in the rain. She just stands there out of focus, with her eyes like big black holes in her face, but she radiates pure insanity, even though you can’t see her face.

And a face being out of focus is creepy. You see the same thing in the Japanese horror movie Don’t Look Up, and it’s scary then, and it’s scarier when you think about whether or not Miss Jessel in The Innocents was even there. Because you don’t know if Deborah Kerr was insane or not.

And the movie never tells you.

An American Werewolf in London

At the beginning of the film, by design, we have spent a few minutes getting to know and like the two young travelers. So we’ll be shocked by the kill. And even though we know from the slaughtered lamb patron’s behavior that something is out there, we’re still not quite prepared for the sudden brutality of the wolf attack.

When it comes—well, I guess that’s what was on my mind in 2010.

Now I think probably the dream sequences.

Especially where—does he wake up in the hospital thinking that he’s got that face already? Or am I conflating this with The Exorcist? I don’t know, but definitely the dream sequence when his family’s sitting around and the people, the mutants, come in and kill them in his dream.

Number Six: The Changeling

I’m pretty sure this was the first horror movie I ever saw. So it was probably the first time I saw a séance in a film as well. Maybe that’s why I still don’t like hearing EVPs, even when they’re obviously fake.

No, I don’t think that’s what I’d bring up now. I think I’d bring up the dream sequence in that one as well. We’ve got another running theme.

Extreme sequences.

And I did talk about this movie on my second channel just a few weeks ago. There’s a little girl that lives across town, and she starts dreaming about the ghosts of the little boy in the big house where George C. Scott lives. And so I think that’s the scariest part of The Changeling now, or the part that I would point out, because it proves that everything is going on.

Because the homeowner tells Scott, when he comes and asks, “Can you dig up your floor?”

“Well, I wouldn’t let you, except my daughter had this dream.”

Number Five: Poltergeist

Guys, this is the scene I get most excited about seeing every time I watch. This is the one where the family and the researchers watch the ghosts come down the stairs in their filmy human shapes.

I particularly like seeing that some of them have gone to the trouble to manifest hats on their incorporeal heads.

Yeah, I’d go with that. You’re dead and you have to wear your Sunday best, and you still have to have on a hat.

No, I mean, what am I saying? That was like the second scary movie that I ever saw, so I’m just having false bravado. Poltergeist still really scares me. It knows what scares you.

So them manifesting, knowing that they have enough energy to manifest themselves to be seen as figures coming down the stairs—and doesn’t the camera just pick up balls of light? I can’t remember which way it goes, but it’s scary.

The Exorcist

Number four, Father Karras’s dream is my favorite part of The Exorcist. The combination of seeing him try to speak to his mother in the dream, seeing the two bright sunlight on the street as she stands on the other side of the intersection, hearing his sleeping body trying to scream makes me feel like I’m the one having the nightmare.

And of course, there are the subliminal flashes of the demon face. I’m sure anyone who’s ever experienced a nasty dream with sleep paralysis can relate.

I would say, if I was talking about the scariest part of The Exorcist now, I think it’s the arteriogram, when Reagan’s in the hospital having all those tests. And she has to be awake while they’re sticking a needle into her artery, and she’s trying to hold still and be brave and not cry, even though she’s possessed by a demon already, and the blood squirts out before they can get the tube in there.

I have had a lot of body horror in my life being a cancer patient. So I think the hospital scenes with Reagan are some of the scariest in that movie.

And I’ll tell you something else I could do without some parts of The Exorcist.

You know, they made that longer version where they brought back the walking upside down down the stairs and things like that. Okay, everybody remembers the head spinning around, but that’s important to the plot because it explains that Reagan threw the guy out the window, who was found with a broken neck.

But the puking and the crucifix scene—and you know what I mean with her with the crucifix—I could do without either of those scenes. They went overboard, and I’m not being a prude or getting easily grossed out.

It’s just that it went for shock value when it wasn’t needed, when the whole idea of this movie is that the devil has targeted a priest who’s lost his faith. And then, at the end—well, I don’t want to spoil it. He’s got his faith back, though, and the little girl remembers what happened.

Okay, moving on.

Number Three: Carnival of Souls

As someone who’s greatly affected by sounds in the movies, now that the ending of the film is something I’m aware of and therefore no longer shocked by, the best scene for me is the one in the church where Mary plays the demonic music on the organ and then gets fired.

She’s all alone in the world and has lost her mind as well.

I don’t know what I’d bring up about this movie now.

The middle of the film, where she’s running around the city—not a city, it’s a small town—trying to talk to people has this real kind of off-kilter feeling to it that’s specific to the ’60s.

It’s when she goes to visit the psychiatrist.

All of that has a very ’60s feel to it. You know how you can watch black-and-white movies, if one comes on TV, and you can tell basically the time period it was in, not by the way they’re dressed, but something about the lighting, and maybe the depth of it?

By the ’60s, everything was still in black and white, which my brain doesn’t process as well, since I was born in the ’70s and didn’t grow up with those movies.

Something about it seems colder and tighter, and they don’t have as many shadows. And the whole scene where she’s trying to get someone to believe her and goes to that doctor feels like a Twilight Zone episode, in the best way.

So how did that movie ever get to be underrated?

I think now it’s firmly rated.

Number Two: Deep Red

I enjoy the entire sequence with David Hemmings in the killer’s house, trying to get behind the wall with the strange drawing. We’ve been told that the house is haunted, and we definitely can feel that he’s not alone, but we aren’t sure what is there with him.

It shocks me just to see how obsessed he is with the mystery.

When he begins digging at the wall with a piece of glass he holds in his bare hands, shouldn’t a protagonist be protecting his hands better than that? And that does bug me.

In a lot of horror movies, people are like, “We’ll just dig through the wall.” The same thing happened in Prince of Darkness. They dig through a wall, and how did they not tear up their hands?

But if I had to point out something I really like about Deep Red now, upon a recent viewing, it’s the beginning of the movie before the psychic is even killed, when David Hemmings is down in the plaza talking to—I think the character’s name is Marco, the other pianist played by the Italian actor Gabriele Lavia, who was in Beyond the Door and in Zeder, two great movies where he has better parts.

I don’t know. He’s wearing a black suit with a white shirt, and David Hemmings is wearing a white suit with a black shirt, so they’re dressed as negatives of each other, opposites.

I just get obsessed with fashion in films.

I could do a whole episode just on the way fashion changes in the movie Cure, or Pulse, and so on. I talked about fashion in my video on Making Mr. Right, so I think a lot gets shown metaphorically with the clothes that people have on.

And so I like that scene, how they’re dressed opposite. They’re buddies. They’re not real good friends, but they do care about each other, and they’ve got opposite motivations in this film in ways that you can’t imagine.

And Deep Red is definitely an amazing movie. I would recommend it to someone who’s never seen a giallo, except it’s so well plotted that you may never want to see another one, because they aren’t all like that.

Okay, and number one:

The Shining

I used to be most affected by what is in Room 237, to the point that going well into adulthood I was still checking behind shower curtains for that lady.

But the last couple years, that scene has been replaced by the confrontation between Grady and Jack in the ballroom bathroom.

The surreal feeling created by the red bathroom and all those mirrors, combined with the inhuman instructions to correct the family, makes me almost want to dissociate.

It is at that point I’m seized again every time by the impossible horror that the hotel itself is talking to Jack, and that he now belongs to it.

I guess I’m just fated to be scared of bathrooms.

Finishing up this list with some purple prose from 2010, they are about The Shining. I’m clearly passionate about that movie.

Okay, if I had to point out something about The Shining, first of all, justice for Shelley Duvall.

Kubrick got exactly the performance he wanted out of her, and people say that she was—I’ve heard it said that she was overly dramatic, recently in a review of this movie.

How much more dramatic can you be when you’re trapped with your husband who’s trying to kill you and ghosts of, like, perverts and skeletons and blood?

Okay, she’s acting like someone who’s being disingenuous in the film because she is. That’s the brilliance of her performance.

She’s like, “Okay, hon, we could sure have a good party in here. How’s it going?”

You know, she sounds like Goofy from Disney because she’s acting like she’s acting because she’s spent the last ten years of her life being married to this overgrown child, Jack Torrance, and she’s always trying to pacify him so he doesn’t yank her son’s shoulder out of the socket.

That’s what I’d say about The Shining.

But also, when she realizes that—oh, what is his name, the cook?

I’m just—I’ve had a long day, and this is a long video.

Mr. Halloran. Dick Halloran.

When she’s just seen blood coming out of the elevator and perverts upstairs in a bare suit and skeletons, and then Mr. Halloran drives up, and he’s supposed to be gone for six months in Miami.

She doesn’t know what she’s seen.

I’m wondering if, when she runs out of the hotel and sees him dead on the floor and then takes the vehicle, does she think that this is another hallucination?

It’s totally amazing that this woman, Wendy Torrance, would still have the presence of mind to get in the snowcat—I think that’s what they called it, the vehicle that he drove up in—and drive away.

Because, after all she’s seen in that hotel, she’s got to wonder if Mr. Halloran is really lying dead on the floor.

And, you know, having seen The Shining enough times, some of my stupid theories could have probably been featured in that movie.

Room 237.

I’m wondering if we’re supposed to take it as being real.

What is real?

What’s real is I made this list in 2010, and then I dug it up, and it was as if someone else had written all this stuff.

And, you know, I had 500 posts on that blog.

I was insane. I didn’t have enough to do.

So that was real. I really wrote that, and I really don’t remember saying all those things.

And do you write, and do you look back at things that you’ve written?

Because that’s essentially a diary that I’ve just read you—a list of what movies I would have recommended in 2010.

Because I remember that year someone did ask me to take them to a horror movie.

And I took them to The Evil Dead.

And everybody in the movie theater was laughing like it was a comedy.

And I was like, “Oh, I always thought this movie was creepy.”

And my friend was like, “Well, I can see why you would think that Bruce Campbell was cute.”

But this was not a good movie.

You know, he was kind of—I think irritated with me that I had taken him to that movie when he asked to see a good movie.

So there’s 20 of them if you don’t normally watch horror movies.

If you like to hear somebody read out of their old diary, it is Sunday, so I just thought I would connect with all of you.

And it’s been 33 minutes.

That is amazing.

I am gonna stop talking now.

Have a good night.