Stuff: He's making a list . . .

So not too long ago, I got caught up in the list-o-mania response to HMV's "50 Greatest Horror Films of All Time" list. B-Sol, of Vault of Horror fame, approached several bloggers and asked us to participate in creating a response list.

"But isn't that dangerous?" I asked. "I heard that once you start making lists, you get caught up in it."

"Nah, that's just what the squares say to scare people off," B-Sol replied. "Making lists feels good. And you like to feel good, right?"

"Well, I do enjoy feeling good," I said. "But what if the response list ends up containing things like the video to Michael Jackson's Thriller? We could end up a laughing stock."

"No way. We'll get good stuff. You just got to know you're list-makers," B-Sol purred. "Besides, all the cool kids are doing it."

"All the cool kids?"

B-Sol smiled and nodded.

"The cool kids have never steered us wrong before," I said. "And the uniformity of response gives me real confidence in the soundness of their collective decision. But still . . . "

"Look, try it once," said B-Sol. "Just once. If you don't like it, you never have to try it again."

So I did it. I contributed to the Vault 50. Then I put down list-making and went on my way. And, for a few weeks, I was fine. But then I started jonesing again. Where were the contextless titles arranged in neat numerical rows, where was the group-think, where was the odd sense of importance semi-random data gets when it's ranked? I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. My wife left me when she caught me in the kitchen, ranking the utensils in the silverware drawer.

But God help me, here I am again, contributing to another list. Damn you B-Sol, I can't live without your lists! You've made me a monster!

That said, B-Sol's latest foray into canon-building was a deliberate answer to a criticism that many readers had regarding the Vault 50: the post-slasher era was pretty much completely ignored. The new list, again compiled by polling a handful of horror bloggers, including yours truly, focused on ranking the best horror flicks from 1990 to now.

Why the random 18 spread? B-Sol didn't want to step on the toes of anybody pondering a "Best of the Noughts" decade dealie at the end of next year. Thoughtful is how B-Sol rolls.

Here's the top 10 of the new list:

1. The Descent (2005) dir: Neil Marshall
2. The Blair Witch Project (1999) dir: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez
3. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) dir: Jonathan Demme
4. The Ring (2002) dir: Gore Verbinski
5. Scream (1996) dir: Wes Craven
6. The Mist (2007) dir: Frank Darabont
7. 28 Days Later (2002) dir: Danny Boyle
8. Braindead (Dead Alive) (1992) dir: Peter Jackson
9. Inside (2007) dir: Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury
10. Shaun of the Dead (2004) dir: Edgar Wright

For the complete list in all its listy glory and for a rundown of everybody who contributed, make with the clickitiy-click and check out the original Vault story, with added post-game analysis goodness.

Now before you get all "The Descent, WTF? D, that's TFR, Y! I've got HAM 2 PMFBWTSDS, S!" on me, I was seriously in the minority when it came to this list. Only two of my selections made the cut. If you've got a problem with these selections, I recommend you look at the contributors list and flame everybody on it but me.

As for the results, the consensus so far seems to be mild agreement. Sure, there are quibbles with specific titles and few seem to be really happy with Marshall's chicks vs. troglodytes horror/actioner sitting on the top. The prevailing explanation is that it was a widely supported second-tier flick, but in a weighted voting system the widely supported second-tier flick beats the strongly supported idiosyncratic selection.

Honestly, my issue with the list is how mundane it is. One commenter on Vault made the observation that nobody could object to the flicks that made the list. B-Sol responded with something along the lines of "that's the point." Still, I kinda get the poster's point. What's the point of asking horror experts if the results are exactly what you'd expect if you ask anybody? Where are the surprises? Where are the overlooked gems that only "real" horror hounds would know about?

Already a bit of conventional wisdom is congealing around these lists: List-makers favor older flicks because it takes time for a film to become a classic. There is probably some truth to that, but I think that is not what's going on in the Vault lists. Instead, I propose that horror bloggers aren't so much experts as they are cultists.

What's the distinction? The expert is a recognized and reliable source of information and judgment. Though the attention grabbing part of that definition is "information and judgment," the kicker is actually the fairly innocuous "recognized and reliable." Experts become such by making the esoteric useful to the non-expert. Their judgments, while based on special info, share the same broad ideas of what is or is not valuable. Where the expert and the non-expert differ in their overall value-paradigm, the expert can back up their judgment using arguments that make sense to the non-expert.

Cultists, on the other hand, are best distinguished not only by their deep knowledge, but by an idiosyncratic set of critical standards. Take devotees of 1970's grindhouse cinema (please). Certainly, hardcore fans of the subgenre know metric pantloads of data about their favorite slice of the horror superstructural genre, but their judgments aren't recognizable or reliable in the terms of the non-expert. To understand the judgments of the cultists, you have to be one of the faithful. Unless you've bought into the "genius" of Jess Franco, it all looks like cut-rate sub-skinemax pseudo-porn. To understand it, you've had to already agree to adopt critical standards that are, for the non-expert – in this case the film-goer who watches plenty of flicks, but has no particular love for the genre – simply nonsensical. This happens to me whenever I read about a film that is good mainly because it is some variation of "batshit crazy." To the cultist, that apparently means something. To me, especially since it seems like every other poorly made piece of Nixon/Carter Era garbage gets the same label, it simply signals that I'm going to suffer a plotless, pointless, poorly-executed montage of stupidity. I lack the cultists' carefully developed, if somewhat off-kilter, critical criteria.

Even if you grant that distinction, what's it got to do with this list? I suspect that outside of the realm of cult fascination, horror bloggers don't have much to say that any casual horror fan doesn't already know. When you take the restrictions off the list, everybody can dabble in whatever weirdo stuff they dig and you end up with a list that, while utterly lacking in clout or authority, is at least interesting. Restrict the list in any way, and you undercut the cultist tendency of bloggers. The result: you get a list everybody can generally agree on, but it also a list anybody could have made.

Stuff: The "Vault 50" films.

As regular readers may remember, a recent "poll" conducted by HMV listed what it claimed its customers thought the top 50 greatest movies were. This list raised the hackles of many a horror blogger, mainly due to the list's currency and perceived Americo-centrism. Later it turned out that the list was not a poll so much as ranking exercise: viewers were required rank flicks from a list of titles HMV provided them. Still, there was the idea out there that people who really love horror could do it better.

Now the diligent B-Sol of the A-list horror blog Vault of Horror drops the "horror snob's" top 50! And what an odd and interesting list it is. Here's just the top ten. You can clickee on over to Vault for the full 50.

1. Halloween (1978) dir: John Carpenter
2. The Exorcist (1973) dir: William Friedkin
3. Psycho (1960) dir: Alfred Hitchcock
4. Night of the Living Dead (1968) dir: George Romero
5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) dir: Tobe Hooper
6. Frankenstein (1931) dir: James Whale
7. The Shining (1980) dir: Stanley Kubrick
8. The Thing (1982) dir: John Carpenter
9. Alien (1979) dir: Ridley Scott
10. Nosferatu (1922) dir: F.W. Murnau

Compared to the HMV list, the Vault 50 is certainly more nostalgic. The HMV list titles clustered around recent releases: 16 of the 50 titles, about 32 percent of the list, were from the '90s and the first decade of the new century. By contrast, only three of the Vault 50 titles (only six percent) debuted in the last two decades.

Curiously, by some measures, the Vault 50 is actually less international than the HMV list. Taking the broadest view possible of "international" and including expat filmmakers who made films in America, both the HMV list and the Vault 50 get 11 non-US filmmakers in their top 50 lists. Taking a stricter view of the international issue and counting only non-English films, the HMV has only six flicks, while the Vault 50 has seven. But, perhaps most interesting, if you ask for a global scope and look at non-North American and non-European films, the Vault 50 falls silent. There are no films from Asia, Australia, Africa, or Latin America on the Vault list. The HMV list, however, contains four flicks from outside the American-European zone: three Asian films and one Australian flick. UPDATE: My apologies, there is one Mexican film on the list. I mistakenly believed Alucarda was from Spain, but it is actually from our fine neighbors to the South.

Another oddity of the Vault 50 is the strong showing of sequels and remakes, despite the horror blog community's general disdain for contemporary remakes and sequels. Even if you don't take the broadest sense of the terms and do not treat, say, every Dracula film as a remake of Nosferatu, you still get seven remakes and sequels on the Vault 50. That's about 14 percent of the list and as large a representative group as non-English flicks. Only two such films appear on the HMV list (only four percent) and both titles are flicks that appear on the Vault 50. It would seem that horror snobs like franchises and remakes more than the average population. And, honestly, that kind of makes sense. Half the point of remaking a flick or rolling out a sequel is to capitalize on the knowledge of the previous flick. And who has a better knowledge base than the horror fans?

There is another notable trend in the Vault 50, though I'm not sure it can be described just in terms of titles and numbers. It seems to me that the Vault 50 is somehow narrower in general scope than the HMV list. The films cluster around thematic centers. For example, there are 3 versions of Frankenstein and 3 versions of Dracula and 4 Stephen King adaptations on the list. Taken together, these would represent the single largest significant grouping on the list. There's also the quirk of including an original and the remake on the same list – it happens, for example, with The Thing - which one imagines didn't happen on the HMV list because they thought it was a bad idea to try to sell two versions of the same flick in the same marketing push.

All in all, a thought provoking list. It was fun contributing and I'd like to send a hearty Screamin' thanks to B-Sol: you are a scholar and a gentleman. And the boys in legal tell me I can't say any of the other things you are over the Internet!

Opinions, cheers, jeers? What say you Screamers and Screamettes?