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

big monster reveal at the end of debra logan is all time, and the mother-daughter performances are great, but yeah, i've lodged my objections upthread.

have seen what we do in the shadows. it's pretty great. much more comedy than horror, but funny and smart, with strong writing and winning performances.

a couple nights ago, i watched one of the long list of horror movies that i'm anticipating in 2015: wyrmwood, an aussie hybrid of high-octane action and tongue-in-cheek zombie mayhem. was not worth the wait. it's an obvious labor of love with some nice ideas, but way too enamored of"badass", cgi-enhanced butt kicking and no-homo bro comedy. picks up toward the end, but leon burchill's benny really should have been the main character all along.

Yeah I'm allergic to anything that sees itself as "badass" at this point.

so after massive hype around it follows, its actually not THAT scary, and more of an indie horror, i.e. teen character study with a few scary moments/horror premise arching over it. its basically another film like the guest, a semi-80s b-movie semi-homage, right down to the score. i liked it, theres some interesting ideas about sex/adolescence/flipping of genre tropes in there somewhere, but i didnt get as much as hoped out of it, though i think maika monroe might be my new favourite american actress. i can see why so many people have gone crazy for it follows though - its a bit sinister, but its not really a Horror movie. its more a horror for people that dont usually watch the genre.

When does that movie open? Does it open wide, or as wide as something like The Guest opened? Been waiting a while and don't want to miss it.

not sure but its out in the uk this weekend

Have we talked about 100 bloody acres at some point? Because those peeps have something new going on, and I'm stoked.

maybe, but it's news to me (100 bloody acres). intrigued.

watched 2014's town that dreaded sundown remake last night. owes a lot to the meta-cinematic likes of wes craven's new nightmare and the last couple installments in the scream series, but slick, tense and inventive enough to stand on its own. ending's ridiculously contrived, but it didn't ruin the film for me (as it seems to have for others). probably helps to have seen the original.

Anyone seen Italian film from last year called Across The River?

Yes, it's not very good. Initially promising but really dull and disappointing.

xp hmm, i'll have to check out Sundown then

Jesus, does Deliver Us From Evil ever end? It feels like I've been watching it since Thursday.

one of the worst movies i saw last year

As this year's 'breakout' Indie Horror (in the UK at least), thought It Follows was a much more satisfying and inventive movie than The Babadook. Genuinely scary in places - the film really whispers to dream logic fears of slow, inescapable pursuit by something sinister - and the 'sexually transmitted demon' aspect was a nice inversion of the usual have-sex-and-die trope (the film definitely takes some of its suburban setting and visual cues from Carpenter's Halloween). Interesting the way that both this and Only Lovers Left Alive use Michigan's crumbling homes and decayed buildings to conjure the eerie and unsettling - post-austerity horror; the sequence in It Follows set in the abandoned building actually called to mind the ending of Tsai's Stray Dogs!

Jesus, does Deliver Us From Evil ever end? It feels like I've been watching it since Thursday.

I'm happy with the brightness settings on my TV, yet watching this, found minutes rolling by and forms barely distinguishable on the screen. Seemed like that happened throughout, as I fast-forwarded. Reminded me of the awful, also underlit "The Dark".

xp i can't wait for It Follows to play here

I still can't figure out where and when it opens here.

Oh, I see. Music Box next weekend. Kind of a bummer. How does a movie like "The Guest" get into big theatres and a massively buzzed about even more genre film like this gets sent to crappy screen and sound art-house purgatory?

I don't know about you, The Guest was in exactly one theater in my area and didn't even make it a week sadly.
I hear a rumor that this is actually going VOD very soon, which is probably why no theaters are taking it

it follows looks up my alley

It's on VOD from the 27th

Don't watch the trailer btw. Ruins a couple of the best moments

I really enjoyed As Above, So Below but it definitely felt like it fell short of its potential. Devolved into fairly standard found footage horror at times.

^^^ just watched it last night with some friends. Way WAY better than I was led to expect. Not great, but more than good. I want an mp3 of the insane choral music!

http://www.avclub.com/article/it-follows-getting-wide-release-wont-hit-vod-early-216832

That's what I'm talking about.

Backcountry isn't badly filmed but it takes FOREVER to stop dropping misleading hints and finally get to the part where the shoe drops and by the time it does, neither of the main characters are well delineated enough for me to care about them. Then we get into bad camera work through an artsy concussion filter and more-or-less torture sequences. Worst of all, it succumbs to the cardinal sin of arthouse horror: it's boring.

"It Follows" is excellent if a bit heavy handed. I'd kind of prefer that they played the subtext down just a tad (there's a character that's mostly there to read Dostoyevsky quotes for fucks sake) but the idea of sexual injury as a monster that violates us at or before puberty and that stalks us into adulthood is sharp and generally well-executed. The final shoe dropping of where the monster visualizations come from was well telegraphed and the scares were quite effective. Kinda wish they'd left off the HEY IT'S A HORROR MOVIE KIDS sequence at the film's start but I guess that's to be expected from a wide release. In sum, I'd recommend it highly.

Honestly, there's enough to talk about in that one film to merit opening a thread but I'm too tired to do it just now. This made an odd double header with Whiplash, lemme tell ya.

lol Whiplash. saw It Follows today too, very good work. glad it's getting a wide release and is doing decently this weekend.

Just watched ABCs Of Death 2, hard to believe but it's even several steps down from the last one. The only thing I liked was a Robert Morgan animation. There are a few that aren't terrible and there are some kinda interesting things (a women pregnant with a fully developed child, kids entering a world like Masters Of The Universe, a Bill Plympton animation with heads fighting) here and there but there's not much point going on about them. There is going to be a third one, and unless some really good directors are announced for it, I'll avoid. I could have swore this one had good directors initially attached who must have pulled out.

The tagline is "Some people never learn" and the end credits have a note stating that they love the internet hate. I feel stronger than ever about what I was arguing in the worst films thread: low budget horror films are often far worse than any blockbuster or prestige film. Regardless of inept craft, the stench of the banal lowbrow smugness is harder to stomach than mainstream stupidity and emptiness.
What's particularly sad is that I'd even prefer a soulless, cynically made film to one made by people personally invested in their proudly shallow ambitionless fare.

Why have a little genre ghetto when it's used to nurture such crap? I like any sort of horror done well enough but there's so much shit in the gore/sleaze area that I think maybe it's actually necessary that the Weird Fiction/Dark Fantasy/Ghost Story area drifts away from the shared "horror" umbrella. I'm so sick of having to wade through that sort of Xtreme crap to get to what I want. If a different genre name had stuck, maybe things would be a lot better?

It also makes me extremely uncomfortable thinking how I'd act around someone who made crap like that.

Stuck at home watching rubbish on Netflix at the moment and caught the following:

Starry Eyes - unusually well reviewed for a low(ish)-budget horror film and clearly made by directors with ambitions towards quality but hampered by a paper-thin story. Alex Essoe is pretty good as lead actress. A turn towards basic horror cliches prevents it from capitalising on much of its promise.

Devil's Backone Texas - found-footage film with five idiots bickering in an RV while searching out a mysterious...blah, blah, blah. Pointless.

The Houses October Built - found-footage film with five idiots bickering in an RV while searching out a mysterious...extreme haunted house attraction. The underlying concept is actually a decent one and this could have been excellent in better hands. As it is, it's just effective in places.

I caught As Above So Below recently. Mediocre, though considering I generally hate the found footage genre, better than normal. Not an entirely bad premise with the catacombs of the dead in Paris, alchemy and whatnot.

not exactly horror, but since there was some brief talk about stuff like 'mmmm' upthread, i guess it fits the criteria. watched 'faults' the other day and really liked it - a bit all over the place tonally (some cohen-ish attempts at black humour included), but the impressive acting and pacing manage to carry the movie fwd quite seamlessly...

looking fwd to see 'the harvest' - michael shannon + mcnaughton seems like a killer combo. and i guess i might give 'spring' a try.

Trailers for Spring do look fairly interesting. Looks like it might even come to lots of cinemas.

With its arrival on Netflix, finally watched Babadook. I was a little let down, probably because I'd read/heard so much hype about it. I thought it was really well made, she's an interesting filmmaker. Good performances and a great first half. But once the metaphor became clear, I thought it got less interesting, less scary, overly schematic. As far as grief-horror goes, a few pegs down from Antichrist, and not a patch on Don't Look Now. (Not surprising that she trained under von Trier.)

babadook was improved by knowing nothing about it going in... i'd say the more you know the lesser the returns. it's a first film after all!

Agreed, minus the expectations I would've been impressed. As it is, I was impressed but not quite at the level I was hoping.

I just watched it tonight and that was some full-on triggering shit in the second half, I think I was crying for most of it.

i liked it - LOVED the look, lynch/twilight zone.....but i cant objectively talk about whether it was good or bad, it really fucked with me emotionally

Davis went into her Mum character so hard, so much of her anger felt and sounded so real... I am really, really blown away by how they really poked around in some difficult stuff re motherhood/child etc but jesus fuck it was rough going, i feel wrung out

'spring' was bad. 'the harvest' is quite good overall, but some of its flaws are quite hard to ignore - especially how pointless the character played by peter fonda is.

finally saw the Babadook. loved it, genuinely unsettling and with a thematic focus and empathy that feels rare to me in the genre. Also really appreciated that the film supports a psychological reading but not really a literal one - the monster is never "explained" in any realistic way, but is perfectly explicable as a reflection of the underlying psychological conflicts of the characters.

probably the best horror movie about parenting & grief since the peaks in the 70s (Rosemary's Baby, It's Alive, Don't Look Now)

Kotoko isn't really a horror but it might be quite harrowing for some parents to watch. It even used the two stars' (Cocco and Tsukamoto) own children

Ok I'm about to watch the Babadook but if this turns out to be some word virus crapfest I'm taking this whole thread down with me.

http://eil.com/images/main/Laurie-Anderson-Language-Is-A-Vir-504906.jpg

Babadook was phenomenal.

glad to see some babadook love ITT after some backlash further upthread. i thought it was great.

lol jj you can trust me not to recommend any word virus crapfests I swear

I loved that the presence of the book is never explained, that there's a gradual (but significant) shift from the child being the threat to the mother being the *real* threat, that it captures the madness of sleep deprivation, that it doesn't devolve into generic haunted house tropes - so many great things about it

Babadook was fantastic. Reminded me of Repulsion in some ways. Also loved the casting of the little boy. He looked like a spooky little Shelly Duvall.