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

finally caught "You're Next" - loved it. Are this guy's other films as good?

Go watch The Guest now.

home sick - wingard's debut feature - is pretty uneven and flawed, but it's still an interesting and druggy take on slasher tropes. not brilliant by any means, but still special for me. on a druggy tip, maybe try pop skull i guess.

saw Baskin last night. Pretty good film on the whole. Loved the colour scheme and some of the performances were great. Fantastic use of an obviously low budget, although the last part, a grotesque Silent Hill-style torture fetish sequence went on too long and just came off a bit disappointing. So tired of gore being the conclusive raison d'etre of so many films. When primetime TV shows like Game Of Thrones show people getting stabbed in the face on a weekly basis, it's hard to be shocked by sicko schlocky stuff so much any more and I'd rather film makers tried to explore more nuanced ways of frightening or thrilling us.

watched the Guest - thought it was okay, not great, a bit too by the numbers, although the big setpiece at the end had some nice De Palma + Lady from Shanghai nods. Was hoping the backstory for the villain was going to be more fleshed out/interesting than it was, as portrayed it felt thin.

The Guest was bonkers and great but, yeah, pretty slight. And not a horror film even by any of the usually loose criteria I use.

Any thoughts on Conjuring 2?

Green Room is the new film to beat, IMO. Unassailable good.

Unassailably

Ah fuck I just realized the male lead is the guy that just got killed by his car.

good movie, but nothing to do with horror, imo

I watched Jin Na's The Wailing the other night. It is easily the most deranged and entertaining horror movie I have seen in ages. It is about a village where people start becoming familicidal maniacs after a dodgy looking Japanese dude takes up residence nearby and when the hapless investigating cop's daughter becomes possessed he calls in a Bhuddist voodoo shaman for help. Some might find it a slog, but it certainly didn't feel 2 and half hours to me.

yeah, its not a horror.

only horrors i see in cinemas now are either the conjuring and all those franchises (though have unfortunately not seen most of them), or art horror crap like the witch or to a lesser level of indie horror pretension, it follows.

i did love unfriended though. want to see friend request too :)

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/11/11906016/the-wailing-horror-film-review

Article bout The Wailing I saw a while ago.

Not getting why some people think The Witch is so arty farty, it's pretty straightforward. It's near the top of my favourite films of the last few decades and has many of the qualities I look for in horror.

I know I cast a wider net than many, but I'm really not sure how people make these particular horror/not horror judgements. I feel like half of the 70s classics would fail the modern horror test.

green rm is at least horror adjacent

I know I cast a wider net than many, but I'm really not sure how people make these particular horror/not horror judgements. I feel like half of the 70s classics would fail the modern horror test.

― Here, let me Danesplain that for you (jjjusten), Thursday, 14 July 2016 16:46

And a large amount of the horror book canon.

witch felt like two films.

Green Room clearly horror.

green room is horror, the witch was one film, sorry haters

i just don't get what might tie green room to horror, other than suspense & gore.

it's not scary, supernatural, spookily atmospheric, ghoulishly macabre, or obviously tied to horror tropes & traditions.

it's a tough, tense little siege thriller, like deliverance or assault on precinct 13.

where borderline cases are concerned, i can usually see what might make someone class a film as horror, but here i'm at a loss. is it just desperate situation + gore = horror?

Well, all you would have to do is tweak the context a hair to make it horror. Like, pretty much keep it exactly as is, but instead of neo-Nazis they're vampires or werewolves, trying to keep it on the down low. Like Dog Soldiers or whatever. Does it need a supernatural or unusual (like serial killer) angle to be horror vs. merely horrible?

Yeah, I mean "Ils/Them" wouldn't fit into horror by that measure, right?

Or "The Strangers". Or "Wait Until Dark".

I guess there's a really fine line between a thriller and horror. Like, Last House on the Left/Hills Have Eyes are what?

you want me to say what now, like I don't get it, is that it

Does it need a supernatural or unusual (like serial killer) angle to be horror vs. merely horrible?

Not necessarily, but it needs something.

I mean, I can see why Psycho is considered a horror film. It's deeply macabre and clearly out to scare its audience to death, not just put them through a suspense wringer. Norman's madness sort of warps reality, lending the fundamentally mundane proceedings an edge of the otherworldly. The shower sequence, with its shrieking string stabs and frenzied montage, aims for the texture not of waking life but of nightmare. Similar things could be said of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Though neither film has any supernatural element, to enter the worlds they create is to plunge off the edge of the known into an imaginative space that feels darkly fantastical.

Again, there's none of that in Green Room. It's just a movie about some decent people in a bad situation. If it's a horror movie, then so is Full Metal Jacket. And sure, the case could be made...

Is Last House on the Left horror?

I think it and most home invasion/people hunting people movies of that ilk are classed that way so I don't have a problem labeling Green Room as such. Agree though the line between these films and more thrillers is pretty blurry (I mean I don't often hear Deliverance classed as horror for example, but it's probably no less so than Green Room is.)

I really dug The Witch but everyone I watched it with was like, ehhhhhhhhh whatevs. It really bugged me!

Is Last House on the Left horror?

no. it's a sleazy 70s rape-revenge thriller. like green room, there's no trace of horror in either the subject matter or the approach.

arguments about what is or isn't horror are pointless, dumb by nature, and strangely hard to resist

I think you have a super narrow of definition of horror then.

i probably do. i consciously want my definition to be coherent and to express a sensibility. i'm curious about other definitions, though.

i mean, if last house is a horror movie, then is the virgin spring one too? why or why not? it seems to me that they both aren't for the same reason.

I think the mood and aims of each film is uh slightly different. This is why some serial killer movies are horror and some are probably thrillers or even just straight dramas, ya know. :)

I think we've discussed this a few times, but after films like Wake In Fright, I Spit On Your Grave and Last House On The Left have been either shelved in the horror section or mainly supported by that audience, there's enough of a consensus. Deliverance and Straw Dogs even show up in the guides and magazines.
Experts and scholars cast the nets wider than anyone.

war is the real monster

i've always deferred to fangoria:
http://www.fangoria.com/new/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/FANGO346UPDATECOVERNEWS.jpg

I think the mood and aims of each film is uh slightly different.

sure. one's a down & dirty exploitation flick, while the other isn't. careless blurring of the already vague lines between horror, exploitation and "shock cinema" (or w/e) makes me low-level ia.

i mean, i'd simply describe the films mentioned by RAG as "of interest to horror fans".

xp - okay, fair point. i'm a fuddy-duddy.

I'm comfortable labelling as 'horror' any work featuring at least two or three of these elements:

-suspense
-dread
-psychological abnormality
-physical monstrosity
-the supernatural/uncanny/unknowable/unexplainable
-gore

Some fairly standard thrillers might hit two of those marks and not quite make the cut, but I think that otherwise covers the bases for even the most tenuous cases of what I would personally consider horror.

I'd say those are pretty safe criteria.

counterpoint: UNSAFE

Confession: Among other things, I'm attempting to set up and enforce separate but overlapping Venn bubbles for "horror movies" and "films in which terrible sights are seen". As a fan, I'm troubled by the tendency to subsume any film that graphically depicts rape, torture, gory violence or "disturbing"/"shocking" subject matter into the horror genre. I push back against this because I believe the genre is inherently trivializing and deserves better than to become a catchbasin for grimy exploitation of every sort.

This kind of moralistic boundary policing is utterly futile, I know. Like the old school "Famous Monsters" fans who are said to have objected to the arrival of gory slashers, I'm clearly on the wrong side of history ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i watched Citadel the other night. Despite some absolutely nonsensical premise-points and a questionable approach to the 'hoodie horror' sub-genre, i thought it was nevertheless pretty good at doing the Babadook trick of juxtaposing mental anguish with a supernatural entity.

Don't really understand the need to gatekeep horror, any more than I understand the need to gatekeep jazz - nothing much to be gained by insisting on rigid formal boundaries, far as I can see. If people want to say it's horror, it's horror.

FWIW, some of the gore in Green Room was nasty enough to make me look away from the screen - as good a working definition of horror as any, I'd say.

yeah sorry, i'm with contenderizer on this one. i think it's more useful to separate supernatural horrors and 'extreme thrillers' (as it were). Obviously there's overlap. I can't bring myself to think of Green Room as a horror. But something like Eden Lake or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I might do for some reason and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because in the former, the situation is very real and the bad guys are very human and fallible, whereas in Eden Lake the kids seem to have near-preternatural powers. And again, SAW though, is a gore movie but I'm not sure about the horror element despite the premise being firmly in the fantastical.

I guess there's a difference between films that make you flinch and films that make you want to go to sleep with the lights on.

contenderizer bang OTM

less rigid genre definitions are good, but when it becomes so loose as to become meaningless, i think it damages the genre.

this list for example -
http://www.indiewire.com/2014/10/the-25-best-horror-films-of-the-21st-century-so-far-270790/

is good until it gets to the top 5.

under the skin is horror?
mulholland drive is horror?

these kinds of choices to me ruin it for the real horror films to be given the credit they should get.

here too -
http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/why-mulholland-drive-is-a-great-horror-film.html

im not with this attempt to gentrify horror

It's not gentrifying horror when Walter De La Mare, Oliver Onions, Henry James and Robert Aickman are foundational creators. If Mulholland Drive and Under The Skin were never mentioned it'd be a change for the worse, not in keeping with the longer history if anything.