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Mensa members pick their favorite Halloween movies (really)

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Fall prestige pics, maybe. A Shane Carruth Sundance puzzler, sure. Halloween? It’s not the holiday one immediately thinks of for movies that tickle the noggin.

That hasn’t stopped members of Mensa from choosing their favorite movies themed to the holiday. A new survey from the organization asked members to choose their Halloween favorites. The results were compiled in a top 10 ranking, released several days ago.

What do the highest-achieving minds of the nation think of the crop of horror movies over the decades? There is, not surprisingly, some Hitchcock on the list — a couple of titles from the suspense maestro, in fact, including “Psycho” at the head of the list and “The Birds” closing out the grouping. (“The ‘less is more’ approach to gore” helped ‘Psycho’ land the top spot,” a release from the organization said.) Stephen King is well-represented too — “Carrie” and “The Shining” made the cut, both in the top five. (You can see the full list here.)

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More surprising is that the films are…not quite recent. The James Whale-Boris Karloff “Frankenstein” circa 1931 makes the grade, at No. 7. So do three films from the ‘60s. “Aliens” was the newest of the crop, and it came out smack in the middle of the second Reagan administration. Modern classics — the first “Saw,” the first “Paranormal Activity,” the first “Blair Witch Project ” — all fail to make the cut. So does “The Exorcist,” and that one’s of an older vintage.

Perhaps even more unexpectedly, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (the 1984 version) thought of as a slasher touchstone but not necessarily a brain teaser, came in all the way at No. 2. Mensa members like their Freddy Krueger, or at least like to dream.

Still, you have to admire a group that respects its history. Two classics from 1968, “Night of the Living Dead” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” land in the top 10.

In choosing those films, the group may have unwittingly been making a comment about how our perception of genres, particularly horror, changes over time. For all the criticism of “Saw” and its ilk, those older films could be just as controversial. “In [a] mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its [filmmakers], the film industry as a whole and [exhibitors] who book it,” Variety wrote of “Living Dead,” “as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of filmgoers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism.” Yesterday’s orgy is today’s brain teaser.

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