July is "Real Horror Movie" Month

"No. I wasn't scared." This is what I tell people constantly when they ask me what I thought of the latest horror movie.
Now, while many people will try to tell you never to watch a black and white horror movie, first of all: Why are you listening to them? They are not your friend. And secondly: Let's define some terms.

Gore = people's jaws falling out, lots of blood, crazy monkeys attacking the world, lots of blood, intestines falling out awkwardly, the ringing of a phone (apparently), lots of blood, blood, random black mist, eerie lame music, bad white sounds, people playing twisted games, houses melting, Split personalities one which is evil, hands in boxes, lots of blood, brains being spattered on the camera, and lots of blood. (You get a gold star if you can name what all of those movies are. Even though some of them have several possibilities, I'm only asking for one. The lots of blood just goes for all.)

Suspense = the scene in "Rear Window" where Jimmy Stewart can't get away, and the guy is coming up the stairs, The scene in the attic of "Gaslight", The scene watching the wine bottles decreasing in "Notorious", Cary Grant bringing the milk up in "Suspicion", All of "The Wrong Man", The carousel scene in "Strangers on a Train", the last scene of "Dial M for Murder", The lights in "The Third Man", All of "Twelve Angry Men", the basement scene in Psycho, the fin in Jaws, and many, many, many more.

The problem with you is that when you ask me if I like horror movies, I feel like we need to have the above conversation before I can truly answer. The "horror" movie genre has been eaten up by gore movies. Gore movies are movies that exist for no other reason than to gross you out. "Horror/Gore" movies hope that if they throw enough physically repulsive evidence at you that you'll be scared.
You'd have to be stupid to fall for that.

Suspense movies are movies created to make you fear someone or something intensely, and then alleviate your fears in the end. But, they have made you so scared that just the thought of that person or that thing will take you back to the time in the movie where you didn't know it was going to work out all right, where you didn't know that the hero was going to escape, where you weren't sure you would make it. Suspense movies make you fear yourself and others around you.

I've said it a million times, and I'll probably have to continue to say it: "There is a reason that Jaws is considered to one of the greatest horror films of all time. It's because people were scared that a shark really could come eat them. Most people don't live in fear of turning on their TV, because a girl might crawl out of it. (One of the lamest scenes in all movie history, by the way) And if you are one of those people who gets scared by people crawling out of TV's, you're obviously far off better never seeing a truly scary movie."

By the way, one of the thing's that made me love Roger Ebert so much was this sentence from his review of "The Ring", "Rarely has a more serious effort produced a less serious result than in "The Ring," That was about it for me. I read that and I was in love.

So here it is, July as "Real Horror Movie" Month, and if I feel I have enough strength, I just might tell you what I think is the scariest movie of all time. And I mean all time.