Dracula Presents: The Top 100 Movies of All Time (2015 List)

About ten years ago, around 2003 or 2004, I first endeavored to put together a list of the top 100 movies ever made. I would have been about sixteen or so at the time and given that I don’t think I did too bad of a job, but times change and tastes change and that old list is no longer something I’m satisfied with. I’ve seen too many great movies since then and it was clear that it was time to give that list an overhaul. As such I’ve spent the last year carefully assembling a new list from scratch and writing a few thoughts on each one of them. Now, whenever lists like this get made the first question everyone seems to have is along the lines of “is this a ‘favorite’ list or a ‘best’ list?” I kind of reject the notion that those need to be two different things, but if forced to choose one this is definitely a “best” list but really it’s a mix of both. No movie has earned a place on this list simply because it’s something I enjoy watching to pass the time, it needs to have some legitimate importance to the history of film to be here. That said, my specific tastes do play into this as well and I’m not going to put anything on this list that I don’t personally love as well. For example, I’m well aware of the importance of the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Yasujirō Ozu, but while I respect both of those filmmakers their work doesn’t really speak to me so neither of them are going to be on this list.


Additionally, it should be noted that I can be pretty conservative about adding new movies to lists like this and really think films should have to withstand the test of time as much as possible before they’re canonized. As such, I’ve decided to cut off eligibility for the list after 2009 (though I did make exactly one exception to this rule for reasons that will make sense once it’s revealed). I’m not really 100% comfortable putting movies from the earlier 2000s on the list either but if you’re going to update a list there is a certain point where you need to open things up a little so I am going to try a few of these newer movies on for size. That said, movies from the 2000s will be at a bit of a disadvantage here. Finally there was the matter of how film trilogies and sequels should be handled. I did not want to waste space on the list adding multiple sequels/installments to certain movies and there are some cases where series amount to a lot more as a whole than they do in their individuals parts. On the other hand, there are definitely cases where the separate installments of certain series feel more self-contained and where certain sequels would only diminish the original if they were lumped in. As such I’ve opted not to have a consistent rule about whether trilogies are going to be lumped and have instead decided to take them on a case-by-case basis and aggregate when it feels right and not aggregate when that feels right. And on one final note before we begin, if there’s one thing this project has taught me it’s that 100 is a really small number. There were a ton of movies I absolutely loved that didn’t make the list and their exclusion should not be viewed as an insult.


I'm planning to reveal about two titles a day for the next two months or so and hope to generate some discussion each day by doing so.  The list will also be posted at my official blog here and on Letterboxd here.  Without futher ado...

#100 King Kong



Year: 1933

Director: Merian C. Cooper

Writer(s): James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose

Starring: Fay Wray, Bruce Cabot, and Robert Armstrong

Studio: RKO Radio

Country of Origin: USA

Language: English

Running Time: 100

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1

Today it’s taken almost as a given that special effects are the backbone of commercial cinema, which would seem to suggest that there are few films that the Hollywood of today owes more of a debt to than the original King Kong. Released at the height of the Great Depression, the film was the ultimate escapist adventure film and it’s perhaps surprising that it didn’t spawn more clear imitators around the time of its realease, at least not in Hollywood outside of the B-movie realm. The film’s stop-motion effects are extremely well rendered and you have to imagine that they were absolutely baffling to audiences in 1933. Admittedly, the film has some fairly problematic racial material. The native tribe on Skull Island is straight out of the “savage dark continent” tradition of pulp fiction and as anyone who’s seen Inglorious Basterds will know it isn’t terribly hard to read the relationship between Kong and Fay Wray as some kind of miscegenation allegory. It is definitely a film that needs to be looked at on its own terms, but it has definitely sent out ripples of inspiration. Just about all of the big special effects filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson cite the film as an influence, in part because it’s the kind of classic movie that can really reach people when they’re still young and not yet terribly sophisticated in their tastes.