Part The Phantom of the Opera, part The Ten Commandments, this revenge fantasy follows a disfigured concert organist (the inimitable Vincent Price) as he exacts biblical vengeance on the doctors he thinks killed his wife by reenacting Egypt’s Old Testament plagues. Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Say that 101 times in a row, and you may just it make through this list… alive! Just remember, as you read this list: It’s only a movie. So we’ve gathered all of the old-school monster movies and modern serial-killer thrillers, the creature features and the slasher flicks, the canon-worthy creepfests from Universal and Hammer and A24, and come up this definitive list (or our definitive list, at least) of the greatest the genre has to offer. Naturally, everyone who helped cobble together the 101 best horror films of all time like scary movies. If you can count on the movies for anything, it’s that there seems to be an exhaustible supply of scares. Then, just when you think it’s safe to go back to the theater, something else comes along that reminds us that there are always new ways to come us screaming in the dark. And over the past 100-plus years, the art form has figured out almost every possible way to frighten us, unnerve us, make our hair stand on us, chill us, thrill us and touch upon our most primal of fears. Right at the top of the first episode, UBH resists the urge to shock viewers by depicting the violence done to Brenda and baby Erica.Of course you do! Freaking out with your fellow audience member when something shocking happens, or jolting together as one during a primo jump scare, is one of the great pleasures of going to the movies. We get flashes of a blood-covered body as Pyre explores the initial crime scene, but her death is more apparent through the detective's emotional response. This leaves viewers to remember Brenda as she was when she was alive. It's here that I must remind readers that Brenda Lafferty was a real person and there are things we know about her. Through Krakauer's investigative reporting we know that she was also from a Mormon family, won first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant in 1980, and anchored a local news show while attending Brigham Young University. We also know she was hated by certain Lafferty brothers for her perceived effect on their wives. With that in mind, any further reference to Brenda in this piece is based on the fictional version of her that is depicted in this television show. This Brenda is not perfect, which does not exclude her from the dead-wife trope in and of itself. You see, there are two kinds of dead wives. The ones who are perfect and beautiful and hollow, and the ones who are perfect and beautiful and hollow until we learn they've done a Bad Thing. This bad thing is ultimately what leads to their death and shakes up the protagonist's worldview. In this case, Brenda's “crime” is her willingness to question her priesthood holder, a term used by the LDS Church to describe male authority figures. It typically relates to husbands, but in this case Allen isn't much for authority. Instead Brenda is deemed insubordinate by his brothers for attending college, wishing for a career, and for meddling in Lafferty family affairs, despite her status as a woman and an outsider. If that's where her “flaws” ended, she'd make the perfect martyr.īut it's not. Though Brenda is unwaveringly kind, intelligent, and supportive she's also ambitious to the point of manipulation, often for the sake of status.
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