RANK AND FILE

The After Dark list is so mathematically precise, the rankings are always adjusting based on how films trend over time. I collect new data from various sites and recalculate the list at a rate of about 100 titles a day. You probably won’t even notice when a title moves slightly. The Invisible Man (1933) was posted at #152 and now it’s dropped to #153. Newer titles move a little more. Sinners would be down 2 spots from last month, but because Creature From the Black Lagoon also drops, it only goes down one. The changes also get big further down the list, but on average a film rises or falls no more than 10 positions.

However, once a year in the Spring there is a major update from They Shoot Zombies, which is where 25% of our data comes from. (Even our own influence on the list is 18%.) Zombies does most of the work weighing and evaluating each new list’s value and their conclusions will reshape our list considerably. It’s all worth it because there simply is no finer list of Horror/Thriller recommendations that place statistical consensus over personal opinion.

This is a list of the movies that made we want to work in this business and the sets I wished I had worked on. Now at last we come to a film I actually DID work on. Obviously, this means I can’t go into specific detail, but there’s still information I can share. When I worked on the film it was still very early into the production. Cameron had found his Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), but the studio wanted him to screen test someone else to see if they could change his mind with someone more bankable. That’s how I got to meet a future MCU star, who was nice and visibly a little nervous.

I watched Cameron work on two different sets. The main room was all green, like greenscreen but it was on the floor, and the ground had various elevations. The cameras were mounted in housings that looked like steering wheels, and in front of the set was a large television. The image was blurry because you needed 3D glasses to really see how it all looked with the computer work roughly sketched in. Surrounding the stage were technicians at computers able to move the topography of Pandora around at Jim’s command. The trees and plants all had numbers and by now Cameron could say “let’s move 239 back about 12 feet and put XG16 on the right foreground” and they knew exactly what that meant.

On sets, James Cameron has a reputation for having a temper, and I wondered if I would witness it at any point or if the years since Titanic had mellowed him out. It was on the 2^nd set that I saw something quite different from the legend. The other set was more familiar to me. It was a lab built by construction with all the set dressing and lit by Mauro Fiore and his crew. They were filming a dialogue scene on Dolly Track, and Cameron didn’t like the speed of the Dolly Grip. He said ‘Cut” mid-take and his head snapped to the Grip. In a calm voice he explained how slow he wanted the Dolly to move ending with, “we’re going to get this right. Let’s go again.” I saw that Cameron was an exacting perfectionist, and he was demanding but not mean. He had surrounded his project with the best crew, and he was not going to move on until he got their best work.

The best Horror/Thriller of 2025 is also a Fantasy, Musical period piece about culture, history, religion and immortality. It’s been almost a year and many of us are still just getting into the many layers Ryan Coogler put into his screenplay so dense, it spends over half the movie deliberately NOT being a Horror/Thriller. It doesn’t make a surprise turn like From Dusk Till Dawn. The opening gives a taste of the Horror to come, and it comes back every time Jack O’Connell’s Irish demon shows up.

But, it would be a disservice to the film to merely talk about the vampire stuff. Kind of like how Michael B. Jordan plays twins and possibly gives the finest performance(s) of his career so far, but just as important is the contribution of the rest of the cast. The film is dramatic, but it’s also a lot of fun. If not for what happens, that Juke Joint would go among the top fictional places that fans would want to visit and eat at in real life. The film has not only the best big creative swing of the year during “I Lied to You”, it also has one of the best, most unmissable mid-credits scenes of all time. And I’m still just getting into it.

Batman is immortal, like Dracula, and by that I mean there will always be films made about him. There were Batman films before I was born and three-dozen films later it is certain there will be Batman films after I’m dead. I like the Tim Burton ones, and they’re currently on the list, but imagine being among the 50+ crew that got to work all of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. The Dark Knight could be an entry by itself, but I actually prefer the intricate plotting of Batman Begins, the first film to center on Bruce Wayne.

The trilogy has a number of fun – and not so fun – scenes to shoot, and it would be tempting to want to be on set of The Dark Knight when they flip the truck, but I think a lot of that was enhanced by the Post Sound Department and the Editing. I would go for something simpler. The Batmobile has been an icon through the ages, and I would like to be at ExCel London Event Hall when Bruce Wayne first tests out the camo version of The Tumbler. Most of the scene was filmed by the 2nd Unit, but I would also like to be there on the day with the cast so I could hear the multiple takes and variations as Christian Bale asks, “Does it come in black?”

I have a list on IMDB of the Top Active Directors and right now Steven Spielberg is at the top. It’s not by a wide margin, but Spielberg has incredible longevity. He’s been around the top for six decades and is currently doing some of his best work. (I have that list too.) I could go in a lot of different directions writing about The Fabelmans, and while most pieces want to unpack Sammy’s relationship with his parents, I’m more fascinated by the cinematic decisions.

Easily the scene I’ve rewatched the most is the coda with David Lynch playing John Ford. Ford is such an outsized character, and was previously played by Ward Bond in a John Ford film called The Wings of Eagles. I’m curious about Spielberg casting David Lynch, having one legendary director play another. Also interesting is learning that the big inspiration that kicked off Spielberg’s entire career was 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth. I’ve seen every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture and Greatest Show is at the bottom. Green Book and Crash got nothing on Greatest Show. We all have our personal inspirational favorites, mine is Streets of Fire. Spielberg today doesn’t defend the whole movie. He gets that it’s seen as corny and melodramatic, but it also showed him the power of spectacle to create emotional storytelling. I have to consider that without The Greatest Show on Earth we wouldn’t have the greatest showman in movies.