Director Quentin Tarantino had high praise for a couple of horror films including one from Rob Zombie and another from Eli Roth...
Quentin Tarantino is a well known cinephile so it shouldn’t surprise anybody that he’s got rather eclectic taste when it comes to his choices for the top 20 films of the 21st century.
While Tarantino has definitely heaped praise on some well-known, popular films over the years, the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” filmmaker also loves to stretch his legs and color outside the box when picking his favorite movies. Tarantino appeared on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast to reveal his list with the first 10 dropped during his debut episode and it included a couple of cult classic horror films.
At No. 16, Tarantino placed Rob Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects,” which is widely regarded as his best film.
First released in 2005, “The Devil’s Rejects” served as a loose sequel to Zombie’s directorial debut with “House of 1,000 Corpses” as the notorious Firefly family escapes law enforcement after a raid on their compound with one local sheriff determined to hunt them down and make them pay for all the atrocities they’ve carried out — including the death of his brother.
“This rough [Sam] Peckinpah–cowboy–Manson thing [from Zombie] — that voice didn’t really exist before [in ‘House of 1,000 Corpses’], and he refined that voice with this movie,” Tarantino said.
“Peckinpah wasn’t part of horror before this. He melded it with sick hillbillies, and it’s become a thing now. You can recognize it across the street, but that didn’t exist before.”
Of course, Sam Peckinpah was a popular director who made films starting in the 1960s through the 1980s with many of his biggest hits centering around brutal violence carried out in movies such as “The Wild Bunch” and “Straw Dogs” and he’s always been one of Tarantino’s favorites.
Tarantino also put Eli Roth’s film “Cabin Fever” at No. 18 on his list of the top 20 films of the 21st century.
The movie centers around a group of friends going on a camping trip for the weekend when a deadly, flesh-eating virus infects them and the gory results produced one of Roth’s best films to date.
“There’s something so charming. Eli’s sense of humor, sense of gore — it just really, really works. People kind of forget how tense it is in the first half because it gets so genuinely funny in the last 20 minutes […] ‘Hostel’ might be his best movie, but this is my favorite.”
Tarantino is expected to drop his top 10 in another episode of the podcast so it will be interesting to see if any more horror films make his list!
