Martin (1977)

What makes a good horror movie? Enough malice, confusion, or muck to induce discomfort but enough intelligence, humor, and cock-eyed skepticism to dispel it. As a genre, horror, when it works properly, calls on our suspension of disbelief only to revoke it as, fusing the two methods with more force than finesse, its operations burlesque the high seriousness of religious or psychological superstition while contrasting that satire with the gross iniquity of nature-- moral, metaphysical, and cosmic. Consequently, the greatest horror movies are those that most economically, or extravagantly, marry the inherent comedy of chance--accident, because it is essentially disjunctive, makes us laugh--with the abusive tragedy of limitation. What we cannot know surrounds us, defines us, and opposes us, and we choose to confront this unfortunate state by transforming its difficulties into mysteries, banishing knowledge in order to replace modest and incomplete facts with vain and comprehensive ignorance. Horror is an art of tensions. It doesn't really aim to scare or unsettle; rather, through its discordant engine of faith and cynicism, it mocks our reflex to explain everything through appeal to the unknowable, a solution as complicated, inevitable, and sad as it is paradoxical and self-defeating. Terror is not the consequence of the genre. Horror charms its spectators by agitating and then amusing them.

If we reconsider horror as a complex genre practiced in order to provoke the audience into self-embarrassed superstition, Martin must be its exemplar and, as such, the greatest horror movie ever made, followed, perhaps, by Dawn of the Dead, Vampyr, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Thing.

If you want to hear a terrific live performance of the Soft Cell song written about Martin, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmBqVjGt5C0.