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

so darknet takes a serious downward turn by the end of the first season. 5th ep is pretty bad, last ep is pretty terrible. i think they were opening a second season path but yeesh, it's a harsh decline in those last 2.

"the woman" (2011) was excellent. a shame about all the bar rock stinking up the soundtrack tho.

Kimberley Pierce's "Carrie" remake = crap, tons of wasted opportunity
Ti West's "The Sacrament" = tasteless, pointless Jonestown pastiche

otm re: both points on The Woman. McKee is an interesting filmmaker with terrible taste in music.

So the Babadook was flipping excellent.

Yeah, apart from the end. The mum and the kid are both fantastic.

It's a shame you don't see more of Daniel Henshall too, just because he's so good in Snowtown, but also nice that they didn't feel they had to shoehorn a romantic subplot in.

Yes! Mixed feelings about the ending - sort of anticlimactic but at least it made sense and resolved in a way best suited to the rules and tropes of the monster.

Don't know much about, but in passing the movie sound a bit like ... "Mama"?

not seen Mama I'm afraid.

Babadook sounds on paper like it could be yet another haunted house movie with a wide-eyed little kid and lots of shadows and jump-scares, and to an extent, it is. But it's just done so much better and more originally than that. I'd say go and see it.

Really enjoyed, belatedly, "Oculus," even if I never quite understood what its central characters were trying to do. "We have to wait here by this cursed mirror to stop my contraption from destroying the cursed mirror, it's the only way to destroy it!" Flanagan clearly knows how to make a scary movie, much less hacky than James Wan.

I always had this feeling that was gonna be horrible, but it's on my list for Amy Pond and Starbuck.

I'll never understand what people like about James Wan's movies.

Feeling cautious about Babadook because it does look a bit too familiar from trailers.

Housebound. a keeper, though perhaps a reel or two overlong. draws from other films, but the parts are put together in a way that feels fresh. a distinctly Kiwi sense of humor helps. hard to do this sort of horror comedy well, and i think they pulled it off. tonally reminiscent of Murder Party, which is never a bad thing.

American Mary. Not really my cup of tea but it was okay.

Why do so many films need a country, state or city name in them when it rarely seems like the location has much relevance? It's annoying.

Since Tokyo Fist is one of my all-time favorites I'd hope there was a good reason and I think it's Tsukamoto's view that Tokyo is a nightmarish energy sapping place.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems fine too.

MR. JONES was pretty good! The first half was really fantastic. When things started getting weird closer to the end, it sort of lost me. I feel like I've been seeing more of this, filmmakers abandoning logic for a last-act freakout, and though I generally appreciate the instinct, it was pulled off better in things like A FIELD IN ENGLAND and YELLOWBRICKROAD.

Oculus was really good. as an exploration of family trauma and its cycles I thought it was quite effective, even if it did borrow really heavily from the Shining. and of course why didn't they just smash the mirror right away etc. also lol at the deathtrap, was obvious what was gonna happen with that as soon as it was introduced.

on the plus side, it *did* have an ending, and a quality one that didn't betray the spirit of the rest of the film.

So this too many cooks thing scratches some of my short horror film itches. If you haven't well:

http://youtu.be/QrGrOK8oZG8

Yeah, Oculus did have an ending!

For about 10 minutes I thought "Dead Snow 2" was an improvement on the original, just for being sillier, but that got tired fast. Unless you think the very presence of Martin Starr is enough to make anything good - and it usually is - all this one has going for it is some gleefully grotesque gags. Michael Bay wishes he could make a movie where a zombie Nazi uses a stretch of intestine to siphon gas from an RV into a tank to take a town in northern Norway.

that... sounds great?

It has its moments.

How long before the inevitable Babadook backlash begins?

not yet plz I still haven't seen it!

Yeah, I think more people need to see it. All the reviews went up, but then I couldn't find it playing anywhere!

it's not even on DVD/Bluray yet

I downloaded it last weekend, it's really good and the ending, though fucking odd as hell, does not suck!

Cognitive dissonance warning, the terrifying lead sociopath from Snowtown Murders is in it and is not a psycho.

Babadook is pretty good (playing at IFC in NYC) but it has some drastic tonal missteps and, while i do understand why the monster is designed to look the way it does, it lost me everytime they put the baddie onscreen. As always, much more frightening when it's not shown. but the ending is excellent and adds a level of sophistication and complexity to the story. I'd like a list of horror movies where adults are the monsters... Shining, Night of the Hunter, Parents, what else?

A Girl Walks Home at Night Alone is not any sort of horror movie but it's as good or better than babadook and it's got vampires.

babadook's biggest weakness is its overly auteuristic flair; there were a lot of shots where I just wanted the director to calm down... though child in the closet was shades of Devil's Backbone

Babadook is great. Starry Eyes is good. Looking forward to catching A Girl Walks Home... and Housebouund soon.

I just did not like the Babadook (just got finished watching it.) I guess that's some backlash. I liked a lot of parts of it, but not the whole movie. I thought the ending was pretty clever though.

Strange color of your body's tears (the amer follow up) now streaming on Netflix.

Yr man who did The Pact has a new film on US Netflix, At The Devil's Door. It's at least as good.

FOUND FOOTAGE TRIGGER WARNING ALERT

watched "Mockingbird" which from clown box art etc would not have ever been on my viewing list, but it turns out that it's done by the dude who did "the strangers" and it sits comfortably in that same zone themewise, yes yes it's FF but the explanation for why is at least sound and overall i was pretty knocked out by it. nice feel of being kind of a puzzle movie, despite knowing what pieces are sliding into place it still feels surprising and fresh. good stuff. you'll probably hate it.

I did!

Partly because it was so obvious what was going to happen and partly because the route it took to get there was so silly. I did like The Strangers though.

haha that was meant as a general you, but point proven!

Strangers was great up until the last 5 minutes. good enough that I would watch other stuff dude did, although FF is def at the bottom of the pile in terms of horror tropes I like to watch

Strangers I always thought was a remake of Ils/Them, but I guess not? Anyway, looked up the team that did Ils/Them, and their career has been - how you say? - not so hot.

Saw Babadook at the cinema a few months back and I still think about it a lot. Haven't bought a DVD in ages, but I'm thinking of doing so with this one.

Echoing ShariVari and the thign upthread, holy fuck you guys, the taking of Deborah Logan is stunningly good.

Sorry, the thnig

YES, ITS FOUND FOOTAGE SHUT UP

Also, in the not horror more thriller Primer vein, Coherence is very much worth the hype. Should scratch the thinky thinky itch for all you terrible Pontypool types without ruining it all by being Pontypool.

the taking of Deborah Logan is stunningly surprisingly good

Anne Ramsay and Jill Larson are fantastic. To the extent that the movie concerns their characters and interactions, it really is stunningly good. Problem is that it's at least equally concerned with the utterly vapid team of youngsters conducting the investigation and doing the filming. And the found footage conceit is completely unnecessary here. And it's taken to ludicrous extremes - there is simply no reason for them to place cameras in the house's hallways (and the elderly subject's bedroom for god's sake). And the "spookiness" is exaggerated for no good reason (your senile mother wanders naked around the house at night, you don't act all terrified by the non-diegetic soundtrack, you take her a fucking blanket). Then again, the mystery plot was more interesting and satisfying than is typical for films of this type. A mixed bag with, yeah, stunning high points.

agree with all of the above.

Totally disagree that this movie would have worked the same as a non ff/handcam pseudodoc - the movie (and the 2 lead performances) need to be personal and up close to work as well as they do, and the interview/investigation is the setup for that. FF isn't always about cheap jump scares, it's more about where you place the viewer, which I think this does near perfectly.

Yeah, agree that the found footage aspect added to the sense of immersion (and in some instances, realism). But it could have been dialed back quite a bit, and better thought through besides. At this point in the game, I think hybrid FF almost always works better. But that's just me.