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Special Mention: C’est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog)

Written by André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux and Vincent Tavier

Directed by André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde

France, 1992

Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde set out to make their first feature film with little resources and little money. In the tradition of filmmakers who can’t afford much film stock, the trio settled for a faux-documentary-style approach – the result is a high-concept satire of media violence that would spoof documentaries by following around a fictitious sociopath named Ben as he exercises his lethal craft. While the cinematic tradition of presenting villains as suave, charming, attractive, and intelligent individuals is nothing new, Man Bites Dog was still ahead of its time. Much like the great Hitchcockian villains such as Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, Ben is a man of action and ideas. He expounds on art,...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. I am including documentaries, short films and mini series, only as special mentions – along with a few features that can qualify as horror, but barely do.

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Special Mention:

Häxan

Directed by Benjamin Christensen

Denmark / Sweden, 1922

Häxan (a.k.a The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a 1922 silent documentary about the history of witchcraft,...

It’s Alive

Directed by Larry Cohen

Written by Larry Cohen

1974, USA

Although not his first feature, It’s Alive helped establish Larry Cohen’s reputation as a director of ingenious low-budget genre films, which come with unexpected twists, conflicted anti-heroes, dark humour, and sympathy for monsters, both human and non-human. Cohen, writer and director of such projects as God Told Me To and Q, made his first foray into the horror genre with this low-budget cult favourite about a murderous mutant baby on a killing rampage. Lenore Davis (Sharon Farrell) gives birth to the hideous clawed and fanged offspring, which immediately slaughters the delivery team and then escapes the hospital to continue to conduct a flurry of killings in its search for food and shelter. When the story becomes front page news, father Frank (John Ryan) joins the police manhunt, determined to exterminate the baby himself.

Scratching under the...