James Franco reveals his favourite Halloween movies

James Franco has compiled a list of his favourite horror films to mark this year’s Halloween.

The 127 Days and Spring Breakers actor gave his take on the genre to mark October 31 in his regular column James + Semaj, where Franco talks to his reverse self, Semaj (“the other side of me,” says Franco), about films and “the ideas they provoke.”

In his latest column for IndieWire, Franco revealed a selection of his favourite horror films, including the recently-released ‘The Greasy Strangler’ – a film he considers to be “sick! I mean, bad! I mean bad as in Michael Jackson ‘Bad’, meaning awesome!”

In terms of classic horror movies, Franco opts for 1984’s ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’ (“boom – a young Johnny Depp in a crop-top gets sucked into a bed and killed“), ‘Friday the 13th’ (“I love the cut away shots of the trees. They’re these moody shots straight out of Twin Peaks! Except that it was made a decade before Twin Peaks.“), and the Jack Nicholson-starring ‘The Shining’.

“Of course, a masterpiece,” Franco said about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic. “That’s the one film where I finally understood why some directors do a million takes. The camera operator explained that when Kubrick had the actors do 40-plus takes, for the first 10 takes they would be preforming the way they had intended to, and on the next 10 takes they would loosen up because they weren’t thinking about it as much. After that, they would begin to get tired and do it with less energy, a kind of carefree approach, and then finally they would lose their bearings and just do it over the top. So, by doing it that way Kubrick always had a variety of options: the more grounded version, the detached version, and the over-the-top version – which they probably used quite a bit, especially in Nicholson’ scenes.”

Last week, Franco starred in a promotional video for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, calling the Democratic candidate “a fucking wizard.”