[neverending]

I had to agonize over this one! My initial list contained 23 entries. I easily eliminated 2 low budget sleaze-fests, which, while both great films that perfectly exemplified horror films in the 60s, just weren't the true top-notch quality of the others. It then came down to a contest between Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunted Palace.

House of Usher lost the contest for a couple of reasons- I know a lot of others will include it on their lists, and I knew I wanted Tomb of Ligeia on my list. It covers the same themes as Usher, and features one of my all time favorite Price performances.

Many, many, many, many really, really good films didn't make the cut. I grew up in this era, and let me tell you, it really was an exciting time for a young horror fan. Society in general at that time was experiencing a lot of loosening of boundaries and experimentation. This showed up a lot in horror films. Horror was in, in a big way.

The classic films were liscened for TV for the first time, and every major market had their own horror host on Saturday night TV. ESP, UFOs. ghosts and other such topics were the daily fodder of talk shows and magazine articles.

Combined with that, the TV news was full of real life horrors like the Viet Nam War and the Boston Strangler. Horror films reflected this in films such as Psycho, Repulsion, Witchfinder General, and Targets. We had met the enemy and he was us. Humans were the monsters. Hammer's Evil of Frankenstein revealed a truly MAD scientist who was a cold and evil man. He was far more frightening than the creature he created.

That was the legacy of horror films in the 60s. Humanity was exposed as the monster. Sure, there were exceptions- The Birds- but this was the dominant paradigm.

Many will point to the 30s or the 70s as the greatest decade for horror films, but for me, it will always be the 60s.