Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: The 10 Most Terrifying Unintentional-Horror Movies (Part Two)

Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: The 10 Most Terrifying Unintentional-Horror Movies (Part Two)

Think horror always comes with axes and monsters and hockey masks? Think again. Not long ago, we brought you the the first five of the ten most gut-wrenching unintentional-horror films. Here, after a short hiatus for turkey and excessive vodka consumption, are our top five. Watch and be afraid.

5. The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Guess what? Everything you ever feared about the innate shallowness of human beings is true. No matter how beguiling, brilliant and charismatic you may be, the world will nevertheless judge you on a set of genetic factors over which you have absolutely no control. All that crap about “inner beauty” and “gorgeous personality” is, quite simply, an elephantine crock. You may have spent decades cultivating chemical magnetism and tender compassion and a rapier wit and a laugh that shoots beams of charm from your soul-but if you do not look like the chromosomal mix of Rita Hayworth and a pound of IF-grade diamonds, all that character and spirit will not matter for shit. Men/women will not approach you, they will not notice you and they will likely not respect you. And if you do manage to land the hot English photographer on the basis of said personality alone, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if he/she is plotting to trade up. Bow before the power of the Pretty, and be horrified. (For a joy-destroying double feature, watch this one back-to-back with No. 2)

4 . Julie & Julia

Every creative thought you may have, every scrap of inspiration you may glean, every goal you set about to achieve-it’s already been done, and better. Think you can write about cooking? Bitch, some pasty Amazonian chick did that four decades ago, and trumped any bourguignon your sorry ass could ever imagine. You are not original, and you have nothing new to offer. And so you will be reduced to a creative tapeworm, parasitically sucking off the achievements of others to wrangle readers and book deals, staging cheap simulacra of great accomplishments from your cheesy Queens apartment with your whiny husband who’s upstaged by the swishy fashion editor from Devil Wears Prada. And then you will ruin the aspic, because you are no fucking Julia Child (though at least the part of You wasn’t played by Meg Ryan).

3. A River Runs Through It

Death comes at random. It doesn’t give a shit if you’re smart or successful or benevolent or handsome, or how much time you’ve spent working out your filial differences through pregnant bouts of fly-fishing. It could take you young, it could take you rich, it could take you even if you have a face that looks like it was farted out by Aphrodite and crafted into anthropoid perfection by Michelangelo on a bender. Death could take any of us, at any time. It could take the better brother-and that brother may not be you.

2. Pretty Woman

You better be pretty. You better be really fucking pretty. You better be so fucking pretty that the concrete melts and the heavens rumble and the woodland creatures frolic and sing before your all-encompassing epochal beauty. And you’d better STAY that pretty, and pray you get the chance to display it before the Richard Gere equivalent of Charles Keating. Because if you aren’t, and you don’t, you’ll end up like Kit De Luca, beaten by pimps and butt-slammed by winos and scraping for next month’s rent as you strive to avoid getting knifed by the unwashed troglodyte with track marks under his toenails who just paid you $15 for backseat head.

If you are male, simply substitute “rich” for “pretty” in the above paragraph.

1. Kramer vs. Kramer

Think evil clowns under the bed or Tim Curry in the sewers is scary? Try this, my children: One day you will wake up, and your entire existence will have been sucked down the existential toilet and ground into shit clafoutis. Your parents will have transformed into narcissistic monsters, bent on destroying whatever remains of your mangled childhood. They will cry and shriek in public and divide their belongings with masking tape and parade you in front of lawyers and tell your teachers your bad math grade is “all his bastard father’s fault” and head to California to find themselves and fuck their therapists and drink excessively and make you tiptoe around the scary naked people who invade your house on Sunday mornings. You will be transformed into a pawn, a human cigarette butt tossed and stomped at the will of raging sociopaths who have complete power over you until the day you turn 18. And you will spend the rest of your life wondering, “What did I do to bring this evil upon us?”

Give us your chainsaws, your torture porn, your artery-crushing eyeball-slicing genital-mashing carnage. Anything but this.

Melissa Lafsky prefers horror movies for some really good reasons.