ok lets all shit our pants to something new: post 2005 horror film thread

latest stuff i saw. not a good run :

'lord of tears' was a somewhat interesting folk/ghost story almost ruined by tacky dialogue and some poor performances. props for the owlman, tho.

'kristy' is a sleep-inducing slasher/survival horror. basically the final girl running from a group of hooligans (wouldn't even call them a cult) for almost the whole movie. totally pointless. 'preservation' was slightly better, but the influence of 'ils' is becoming obnoxious.

'clown' seemed like it could be fun and tried a new approach to the clown mystique, but drags along in whole the family drama. starts good, just gets boring.

really liked 'what we do in the shadows' btw - it's a comedy, i know.

I'm still raging for spending €30 on Lord of Tears. It looks amazing but the acting is truly painful

I had to turn off Lord of Tears because of the lead actor, so bad I thought they were maybe taking the piss.

At least when they were acting, they weren't dancing.

i don't know if i can watch it follows

i think i just need to watch the descent again

but like, alone

bc i can't be disturbed

bc it's so good

also it's been at least 2 months since i've watched black swan which is kind of like, a problem

also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Vk5iloGrw

'it follows' is amazing

ugh i know i rly should suck it up and see it

Looking forward to watching the second instalment of Enfield Haunting tonight.

Recently:

It Follows
Liked this a lot. It's not quite multiplex-slick in its pacing & construction, but I dig the rough edges, they help give it some character. Plus interesting contrast between hazy, Virgin Suicides-style teen languor and Detroit's (sub)urban decay. 8/10

Ex Machina
Not horror, but spooky at times and quite suspenseful overall. Definitely worth catching in the theater. 8/10

Unfriended
Fucking awful. Hated everything about it. Just die already. 2/10

Lesson of the Evil
Turgid drama/black comedy about a high school shooter. I don't think Miike's made a film I care about since Gozu. 4/10

Spring
Horrible horror romance about star-cross'd love between a dull young American tourist and some kind of immortal fish woman monster thing. Spoiler alert. 3/10

As Above, So Below
Not bad! Inventive and energetic handycam horror wherein a daredevil archaeologist & her team spelunk the Paris catacombs in search of the Philosopher's Stone. Dopey but quite entertaining. 6/10

TaxidermiaB
Clever, visually spectacular and SO SO GROSS. One of the most revolting films I've ever seen. Hooray for gross things. 7/10

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
A stylish and romantic coming-of-age drama about a skateboarding, hijab-wearing vampire girl. And a very good cat. I love this movie! It's everything Only Lovers Left Alive should have been but (mostly) wasn't. Slight in the best possible way. 9/10

Unfriended
Fucking awful. Hated everything about it. Just die already. 2/10

now I'm curious about what it takes to get 1/10 or 0/10

Here I thought Unfriended was supposed to be the best of the last few months.

(Haven't seen it.)

I don't think Miike's made a film I care about since Gozu.

― a faded dose from rays gone by (contenderizer), Tuesday, 12 May 2015 17:46

Not even Great Yokai War? I think I enjoyed the tasteless deleted scenes to 13 Assassins more than the actual film.

I bought Izo recently and hope to watch it at the weekend. Over Your Dead Body hopefully someday.

Unfriended is like watching a building implode and thinking it was for the best

Sold.

Oh, I thought you said watching a bulldog implode.

Spring
Horrible horror romance about star-cross'd love between a dull young American tourist and some kind of immortal fish woman monster thing. Spoiler alert. 3/10

I'm Old Gregg

Oh, and Headless.

I watched Headless last night, and I don't know quite what to think. If any of you caught 2012's Found (and you should, it's great), you'll probably remember Headless as the fictional video nasty with which the young protagonist's serial killer brother becomes dangerously obsessed. While Headless was heavily featured in Found, it seemed little more than a low-budget wallow in torture, murder and sexual depravity. It didn't strike me as anything particularly promising, but fans apparently set up a clamor, so now some of the same people who made Found have unveiled a feature-length version.

It's done in what I guess we'd now call a "grindhouse style", complete with a tongue-in-cheek fake trailer and lots of ersatz print damage, cigarette burns, etc. The title credit even claims 1978 as its year of release. As a piece of fondly recreated retro-exploitation, it's quite convincing. The score, script, costumes, locations, characterizations and even the filmmaking all feel true to era. The minimal synth score, consisting mostly of sickly, murky, repeating phrases is especially effective, lending Headless a quality of queasy mournfulness that it likely wouldn't otherwise possess.

The story follows a mute, nearly feral lunatic as he goes about the business of kidnapping and butchering women (big surprise). True to its remit, Headless leers at and fetishizes these revolting crimes to an uncomfortable degree. While framing the events onscreen as the toxic product of another era does soften the blow somewhat, I nevertheless had a hard time with the prolonged scenes of sexualized violence. That said, these scenes are used as punctuation and not (as Found suggested) the film's primary content. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Headless is that, despite its crude trappings and stomach-churning carnage, it eventually generates an atmosphere of forlorn, death-haunted hopelessness that's unusually resonant. The score deserves a lot of credit for this, and so does the presence of "Skull Boy", a hallucinatory masked figure that seems to guide the film's killer to his task.

It's not great, but nor can I easily dismiss it. Recommended to desensitized, fix-hungry gorehounds only.

Not even Great Yokai War? I think I enjoyed the tasteless deleted scenes to 13 Assassins more than the actual film.

I did like The Great Yokai War and at least half enjoyed 2013's The Mole Song. Zebraman was kind of fun. But I wouldn't put any of them up there with Bird People in China, Visitor Q, Happiness of the Katakuris, Gozu and Audition. Agree about the hilarious shit sadly cut from 13 Assassins :)

thx for the tips!

I've realized that I only really like visitor q and happiness of the katakuris and thus maybe don't really like miike.

He's done such a huge variety. He's not easy to sum up despite doing shitloads of violent yakuza films.
My favourites are definitely Great Yokai War, Audition and Bird People In China.

Surprised you saw Headless. Were you (also) part of the crowd-funding effort?

I'd switch your ratings for It Follows and Spring, BTW.

And she's not a (SPOILERS) fish woman monster thing. What she is is a lot more ingenious. I loved Spring. the occasional castration aside, it is also not a horror movie.

Happiness of the Katakuris was one of my favorite films for awhile; I need to rewatch it sometime soon.

I'd switch your ratings for It Follows and Spring, BTW.

Not trying to throw shade, Mr. Hal Jam, but what was the last critically acclaimed, popularly beloved horror movie that did it for you?

Katakuris was dope. Bird People and Zebraman good too.
What I love about Audition is really the level of commitment it takes to being a completely cheesy, kinda inappropriate rom-com before turning hard into Lynchian horror.
I probably haven't seen anything he's made in the last ten years besides 13 Assassins (which I thought was fine/entertaining) so I still largely remember him as the wacko that did gonzo hardcore stuff like Fudoh, Ichi, Dead or Alive, etc.

"Robert Adam Gilmour
Posted: May 7, 2015 at 12:48:20 PM
Maybe my rant unfairly characterises the audience and creators of some of this stuff but I think there is a portion that is roughly what I described. I don't know how much self-loathing comes into what they do.
I generally try my best to avoid making fun of people or aggression but here I found it very difficult to say what I meant without being insulting."

I'm not talking about the filmmakers having self-loathing, I'm talking about horror fans compartmentalizing their vision of horror as the good kind and rejecting all the rest of it as crap or shameful. That cuts both ways, with people thinking that their mannered ghost stories are simply better than more extreme fare, or gorehound psychos fighting against subtle creepouts. I've staked my claim on my position on the shitty misuse of the term "torture porn" as a discredit to modern horror in general, so I won't go after that old saw, but sometimes horror fans are their own worst enemy.

that's easy, Eric: The Babadook. i thought it was nearly flawless. the list would be longer if you didn't specify "popularly beloved."

It Follows just DID NOT work for me. what i saw was a years-late American J-Horror that erred fatally by presuming that sexual activity is as much a source of existential dread for teens in the USA today as the depersonalization and isolation created by the Internet were for Japanese millennials. It so is not. IF had some positive elements - and i loved the music and cinematography - but the last act just did not work at all.

Fair enough. "Popularly beloved" was def the hazier qualifier of the two. Basically I meant "non-deep cut."

I don't think of myself as a genre dilettante, but I do think that the bulk of my favorite horror movies overall are pretty canon.

'it follows' appears to inspire mostly deep hate and deep appreciation and i've been surprised by which pole people hew to

the unshakable suspicion/impression that the production of It Follows was church-funded in some part was certainly off-putting.

I won't go after that old saw

Intentional, right?

anyone who walked away from it follows feeling it was somewhat unjust or had a puritanical subtext had a less rocky and traumatic early sexual history than i did. to me, the film was a parable about sexual injury sustained in and around puberty with links (though somewhat underdeveloped and with indeterminate mission creep) to suburban classism and racism / neglect and THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN CITY.

and when are parables not religious?

let me ask this: have you seen The Myth of the American Sleepover? Mitchell projects a lot onto his teen characters without quite understanding teenagers. the actors do their best to sell the material, but the motivations in both screenplays are disingenuous and highly suspect.

there's nothing about it follows that suggests sex is inherently bad and there is remarkably no slut-shaming; i'd rather not spoil the ending but the suggestion of parental abuse makes the film to me more about how we recover our sexuality from the injury and assault that all too often "follows" the early inexperience of being a sexual being

have not seen myth of the american sleepover

i haven't seen Myth, but It Follows felt very genuine to me in its handling of teenage emotion, loneliness, sexual confusion
good call that it evokes J-horror and Japanese teen malaise (actually I did think of Evangelion and its city of children and mysteriously absentee parents) - and I love that! and the unique approach to conflate it with this nebulously timeless but vaguely '70s horror setting

basically forks otm. very surprised at the thought that there's a puritanical subtext behind It Follows. but tbf i know nothing about the filmmaker's background. i didn't get that from the film at all, especially given the dark, depressing/ambivalent solution of the ending

A lot of the best horror movies seem very flexible to contradictory liberal/reactionary reads.

there is remarkably no slut-shaming

at long last the legacy of the original Black Christmas bears fruit

I'm not talking about the filmmakers having self-loathing, I'm talking about horror fans compartmentalizing their vision of horror as the good kind and rejecting all the rest of it as crap or shameful. That cuts both ways, with people thinking that their mannered ghost stories are simply better than more extreme fare, or gorehound psychos fighting against subtle creepouts. I've staked my claim on my position on the shitty misuse of the term "torture porn" as a discredit to modern horror in general, so I won't go after that old saw, but sometimes horror fans are their own worst enemy.

― a strawman stuffed with their collection of 12 cds (jjjusten), Wednesday, 13 May 2015 07:46

But I did state I didn't think there was an inherently bad subgenre and that I liked some stuff from every style. Several of my favourite horror films are serial killer films.

I like genre tags but I think they often need to keep changing to be useful. "Horror" as a genre tag is often either too vague or not vague enough to carry all the associated things the fans enjoy.
The science fiction and horror magazines will cover each other's stuff plus fantasy and superheroes; I'd use these horror threads to talk about Dean Spanley or Donkey's Skin. I'd like it if a larger umbrella like "Speculative" or "Fantastic" caught on in films but it probably won't, especially as so many horror films are more or less realistic.

"Ghost Stories" covers all sorts of things, a large amount of the time not even involving ghosts but it doesn't fit enough modern horror.
"Monster Movies" was Dracula, Frankenstein but also King Kong, Godzilla, dinosaurs, robots, giant insects, aliens and even Planet Of The Apes. A lot of modern horror fans couldn't be bothered with some of that stuff, including myself. Monsters sadly aren't in horror films as much today.

The "Weird Fiction" tag gaining popularity has changed things in the past few years. The books are still under the same horror section but with the presentation now and the way the writers, editors and publishers have organized, it's more difficult to buy a book looking for supernatural stuff and ending up with what is basically violent crime stories. I think this is a good thing.

I don't think you can successfully divide up a genre because there's always so much crossover but getting more specific with compartmentalization helps. It taken me ridiculously long to learn that maybe looking for acclaimed "horror" films in general probably wasn't going to help me find what I wanted; I'm more of a supernatural horror/dark fantasy fan than anything and I really miss monsters. I think a lot if not most horror fans are looking for very different things.

I've seen "Horrorcore" used for modern gore/slasher stuff. I don't know if giallo and older slasher films are ruled out of that. Whatever the case, it shouldn't be surprising there's more crap films like this than there is of genres that require a lot more resources to pull off. Bela Lugosi films like Ape Man, Scared To Death and Black Dragons weren't gorey but they were surely easy to slap together.
I think gore stuff is generally dumber than the rest of the subgenres but then there's probably more dumb fantasy than science fiction, yet I vastly prefer fantasy.

If horror fans are their own worst enemy I think that has little to do with policing the genre styles than general low standards.

What I'm taking issue with is the approach of "I don't like this therefore it is not good, and is the product of people that know it's not good". Especially when it leads to more ideas like writing gore stuff out of the horror genre, or sticking it in its own derisive named sub genre. Horror works best as a big tent imo - that doesn't mean I can't dislike tons of it, but it also doesn't mean that I get to choose that things I don't like ought to be excluded from the genre, or Balkanized into some weird "lesser lazy horror for creeps" category.

To be fair I should have also quoted

"Robert Adam Gilmour
Posted: April 3, 2015 at 8:09:06 PM
It also makes me extremely uncomfortable thinking how I'd act around someone who made crap like that."

Which definitely raised my hackles a bit about what you're trying to say here.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e3hVmpGzl7A

Anyone else really excited by this trailer? I haven't been this impressed by a film trailer in fuck knows how many years.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Monday, 27 April 2015 19:02 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In case the link disappears it's Tale Of Tales by Matteo Garrone

Based on a 17th century collection of fairy tales by Italian author Giambattista Basile, the film weaves realistic and fantastical elements together into three different storylines, one of which involves Salma Hayek eating the heart of a giant beast. Vincent Cassel, John C. Reilly and Toby Jones also star.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Monday, 27 April 2015 19:07 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Gets a rave from P Brad at Cannes:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/13/tale-of-tales-review-eat-your-heart-out-for-matteo-garrones-royally-nasty-fairytale

i tried to watch some movie recently called like 'everyone loves mandy lane' or some shit with some hot blond girl

it was ok but the filter was awful

Ha pretty sure I bitched heavily about mandy lane upthread - just junk across the board, pushed forward on a wave of unreleased "will we ever get to see it hype". It's awful.

yeah i didn't finish it

who's the girl in it tho? is that Amber Heard?