Mike Flanagan Blind Ranks Horror Movies—See What Won

Mike Flanagan
Director Mike Flanagan, on set, 2016. ph: Justin M. Lubin/© Universal Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection

When I tell someone I’m a horror fan, the first thing they ask me is what my favorite scary movie is. I’d reckon anyone who has ever mentioned being a horror fan has been asked the same thing. It’s not an easy question to answer. Favorite how? J. A. Bayona’s The Orphanage ranks among my favorites, but it’s also not something I’d want to put on for funsies. Black Christmas is a horror perennial, but it’s not my favorite to pop into the Blu-ray player in the middle of August. I usually just go with Scream, which is accurate, but it also feels unfair to restrict myself to a binary comparison. The Wailing is also one of my favorites, but there’s no conceivable metric against which I can make the case it’s better or worse than Scream. They’re just too different.

If you’re a sadist, you might try your luck on Tik Tok where the burgeoning trend is to blindly rank, well, everything. There are blind ranks for Taylor Swift albums, hottest anime men, and even horror movies. Last week, acclaimed filmmaker Mike Flanagan tried his hand at one.

Did you see Mike Flanagan struggle on that last one? It took me a moment to forgive him for choosing The Strangers over Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, but that’s what makes these filters so addictively fun. You never know what’s going to be paired against what, and when your choices are reduced to one over another, it becomes increasingly more difficult.

Scream won out the day. It would have done the same for me, but it would have been hard. Scream or The Blair Witch Project? Can I please have both? Even The Conjuring is a personal favorite (don’t let franchise fatigue fool you—the original is still incomparably scary). If I had to subsist with just one scary movie, yes, it would be Scream, but like Mike Flanagan, it wouldn’t be an easy choice to make.

What do you think? Do you agree with Mike Flanagan’s picks? Are you interested in trying the filter out yourself? You can access it from his video, and if you do try it, be certain to let me know how it went over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.

Share: 
Tags:

Categorized:

Sign up for The Harbinger a Dread Central Newsletter