Stephen King picks his number one horror movie of all time

Horror author Stephen King has shared his pick for the scariest movie of all time, choosing a George A Romero classic.

In the 1970s and 1980s, King penned several genre classics, including Carrie, The Shining, and It. Many of his writings have been developed into widely successful horror films. Carrie has been adapted to screen several times, while Stanley Kubrick took on the story of the Overlook Hotel in 1980.

While many people would consider Kubrick’s take on The Shining to be the greatest horror movie of all time, King has a different opinion. Writing for Variety, the horror author named Night of the Living Dead as his pick for the scariest movie ever made.

“I thought deeply about this question,” King began, “perhaps more deeply than the subject — my scariest horror movie — deserves… but then, I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, so maybe it’s a valid Q.”

King concluded that the answer to this question can depend on age. “As a kid of 16, the scariest movie was The Haunting (directed by Robert Wise),” he explained, “As an adult, it was The Blair Witch Project, with that building sense of doom and those truly horrible last 35 seconds.”

However, King declared George A Romero’s “low-budget masterpiece” Night of the Living Dead as his “overall” pick.

Released in 1968, Night of the Living Dead was a pioneering zombie movie. The film follows a group of people who are forced to hole up in an abandoned farmhouse in order to escape the flesh-eating undead emerging from the graveyard. The film has become a classic of the genre, though it initially received a poor reception.

King admitted that the film has “lost its elemental power over the years — has become almost a Midnite Madness joke, like Rocky Horror,” but he has never forgotten how the film made him feel upon first viewing. “I still remember the helpless terror I felt,” he recalled.

King also drew a comparison between two of his picks, Night of the Living Dead and The Blair Witch Project, suggesting that there’s a “real similarity” between the two, “both with minimal or no music, both cast with unknown actors who seem barely capable of summer stock in Paducahville, both with low-tech special effects.”

The author suggested that these elements only enhanced the films. “They work not in spite of those things,” he explained, “but because of them.”

Related Topics

This post was originally published on here