My 100 favorite horror films. Ranked, in the spirit of pain. Some personal, and probably contradictory, decisions were made regarding what counts and what doesn't.

Every horror fan has their reasons for obsession: expunging or working through traumas, venting bloodlust, stimulating the adrenal gland, genre nostalgia, etc.

I come to horror because it's transformative, or suggests transformation. Its fear, destruction, degeneration, have, for me, creative energy, demented slides on Heraclitean scales between would-be values. Horror is as much absurdity as it is fear -- that's why a laugh is as likely as a gasp, the pleasure/pain division erased to make an uncut feeling, sensation. It stimulates far edges and weird corners of the intellect, blending ideas, materializing abstractions, giving emotions lurking physical shapes -- horror is a bridge, a gate. It speaks of personal and mass suffering and fear -- horror is psychological and political. It's big and small, intimate and expansive, moving between with ruleless abandon the envy of other expressions. Horror resides in the shadow of self, it's something larger than genre because, as yet, we still cant truly explain our attraction to it, our draw to what undoes our certainty and comfort. It's an unexorcised us.

So horror is a lot of things for me. To put it more simply, and to adapt from maestro Fulci, I love it because it removes borders, it makes porous a membrane between what is and what is not or could be, and you either travel through it, or something crosses towards you -- there may not be a difference. The dark side gets its due, polarities flip, good becomes the shadows and evil the sun in the sky; it's my happy place.