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

well yeah

My surprise nominee (and none of these are going to be academy greats duh) is The Haunting In Connecticut which will not go down in history or anything, but was a totally capable jump scare flick. I have no idea why they promoted the movie the way that they did, the initial theatrical release campaign made it look like some sort of slow yawn slightly creepy snoozefest, when in fact it is 100% cut from the flash of CREEPY DUDE in the mirror/corner/behind the kid school of filmmaking.

plot holes? well yeah, duh, but who cares

This is prob a good place for me to fly my challop flag and say that as great as Let the Right One In is, it isn't really a horror film IMO.

i kinda want to see paranormal activity.

yeah me too! although i fear the possibility that it might be a hype triumph and disappoint.

Drag Me to Hell!

man, still haven't seen that. or even zombieland (which doesn't sound like horror).

all i've really seen in 2009 is drag me to hell and zombieland, which isn't really a horror movie either

xpost

i just watched drag me to hell last night, and as a old school Raimi fanboy it was a ton of fun (srsly sam it is amazing how much mileage you can get out of the power of people/corpses/demonwhatevers vomiting on other people). Curious to find out how it worked for people that weren't kind of the target audience, esp the classic moments of Raimi complete set up nonsense (the best of which had to be the "well duh why not use these ice skates i was about to pawn on my suspended anvil" idiot lunacy).

anybody see any of the big remakes (last house on the left, whichever one rob zombie did this year, etc)?

drag me to hell was so great -- just rewatched but seeing it in the theatre was amazing what with everyone laughing & screaming simultaneously

i think the only nasty cut-em-up flicks i like anymore come from france or asia, though the first 'hostel' and the first 'saw' were good. i have a ton of friends who are in the horror film community and they're all pretty cynical about it these days, everyone wants to turn shit pg-13.

no desire to see the halloween remake, but the trailer was fucking terrifying (i've long held that horror movie trailers are usually way scarier than the actual movie, you just get a succession of jumps and creepy images without any context or warning).

loved drag me... anyone seen paranormal activity yet?

or left bank?

the french stuff is just brutal, but its been some of my favorite stuff as well, im sure a bunch of the usual whiners are going to lump it into the totally dumb invented "torture porn" genre but it just has such a deep sense of misanthropic malice and self-loathing xpost

i have a ton of friends who are in the horror film community and they're all pretty cynical about it these days, everyone wants to turn shit pg-13.

― access flap (omar little), Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:09 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://tcmmoviemorlocks.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/famous-monsters-speak2.jpg

^^^ omar's friends

considering using my mod cheat powers to edit the title to include 2008 because so much great unheralded stuff came out last year

'inside' was just as rough thematically as it was in terms of gore imo, i.e. it's one of my favorite films of the past few years.

id make it the whole decade but i think that the hostel/saw/ring/rob zombie non remake stuff would just take over and we've talked about that a billion times already (i love all three of the originals, and will go to bat for hostel 2 as well)

me too hostel 2 is so underrated

really felt roth didn't want to cheap out with an easy sequel on that one

the saw series has turned into a joke imo

oh yeah saw 3 was particularly awful

never seen a saw movie (i am okay w this)

I didn't really feel Hostel when I watched it - though that might've been because I'd watched Wolf Creek the night before which ten times more brutal and believable. Still haven't seen any of the Saws.

martyrs was the best horror movie I've seen in years. it's french torture porn, and then again, it's not... which is what makes it so great. it totally transcends the genre and I can guarantee you won't guess where it's going.

eden park was pretty good. not the greatest film ever made but a nice patch on the "hunted by locals in the woods" genre.

Eden Lake you mean? I liked that a lot, some bits haunted me for a few days. Such a dark ending!

duh, yeah eden lake

there are a lot of recent horror films I wanted to see that I haven't gotten around to. off the top of my head: teeth, the uninvited, embodiment of evil, dead snow... and I guess the haunting in ct now...

anybody repping for inside in this thread needs to see martyrs stat

paranormal is not that great. download it and see it at home. more of a living room thing than a theatre experience.

I wanna see nightmare, too. it's an older film that just got released on DVD, kind of low budget but looks promising.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455983/

oh hey btw for the french horror heads, if you haven't seen frontier(s), thats pretty essential

Eden Lake is british, right? some great horror coming out of britain in the past few years, esp if you like a bit of comedy mixed with your gore (top recs would be Severance and Shrooms)

paranormal is not that great. download it and see it at home. more of a living room thing than a theatre experience.

― let them eat cankles (jeff), Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:33 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really? how so? i would think it would be a quintessential movie theater movie!!

I liked Drag me to Hell. Also liked Jennifer's Body actually. I think a lot of good recent US horror has been genre pastiche/comedy (I'd include Hostel ii).
The French/Asian stuff is nice because it still does well playing the eeriness/bone-gristle straight. I've only seen the first 2 Saws but had to stop because why bother when there's stuff like Martyrs out there.

dead snow is pretty half-assed tbh

theres a foreign language film that is a great companion piece to Eden Lake that i can't remember the name of right now and it is killing me.

Eden Lake is british, right? some great horror coming out of britain in the past few years, esp if you like a bit of comedy mixed with your gore

Yep, it's British. Not many laughs though.

Just grabbed some new 80s movies to watch. Can anyone vouch for these?

Combat Shock
Demented
Don't Go In The House
Night of the Demon

oh yeah wait, Ils (or Them) is the Eden Lake parallel. creeeeepy

haha yeah Eden Lake is def not chock full o' laughs

really? how so? i would think it would be a quintessential movie theater movie!!

Because...

SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
...it is pretty much just a Blair Witch clone and more fun than scary. For me, the experience was ruining by a theatre of 500 groaning teens.
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS

*ruined

combat shock is fucked up. also pretty interesting and pretty good.

thread title edit for the purposes of why not

In light of the new title I will mention Wolf Creek again.

dead snow is pretty half-assed tbh

yeah it looks totally cheeseball but I'm a huge shock waves fan so...

speaking of which, the aussies have def had a horror boom this decade as well xpost

for aussie film fans i def recommend this hilarious doc:

http://www.smartartists.com.au/not-quite-hollywood/nqh-poster.jpg

"The Descent" is still the scariest film of that time span. "Drag Me to Hell" was tons of fun, though essentially just a remake of "Night of the Demon." "Zombieland" was entertaining, but totally sloppy and lazy.

Aussie-wise, "Rogue" is an undervalued and very well made gem in the giant croc genre.

Just came across some Korean POV torture porn flick called "The Butcher," which from the look of it may be the most unpleasant movie ever made.

backrooms is one of the most insultingly stupid and eyerolling experiences i have ever had in a cinema

oh here we go

The vibe and visual execution of Backrooms was strong. I would have liked just a leeeettle more in terms of plot and screenplay.

It suffered from a backwards-engineered sense of "How can we hang a plot over this?", similar to what happens with a lot of video game adaptations.

I found myself thinking back to Christophe Gans' 2006 Silent Hill movie. A cinematically-strong horror that suffers when it tries to explain itself. Silent Hill also happens to under-use its secondary characters who end up completely extraneous to the plot's development*.

Speaking of video games I also got strong Control vibes: A game in-turn inspired by the online creepy-pasta-ish collaborative fiction of the SCP Foundation universe. But unlike The Backrooms, once Control establishes its eerie brutalist aesthetic we get to go deeper and deeper.

The Backrooms holds back on this. Once it's established that "This is a never-ending set of rooms and corridors with the odd jumpscare", we cut to a pace-disrupting expository scene that attempts to nutshell how the world works.

But rather than providing any sort of cathartic "Aha!" moment, it is frustratingly contradictory in its logic. Clark's long, semi-coherent ramble doesn't quite explain whether this is a straight-up Silent Hill-esque metastatization of the main character's inner psyche, or a more general Annihiliation-style melding of the real and the unreal. While this ambiguity could have been a strength and left open to interpretation, the fact this scene (and the final scene) exist at all feels like a half-baked attempt to offer an explanation without cohering to the film's own rules **

The whole concept of the Backrooms - ultimately an endless series of unheimlich rooms and corridors full of junk - is at once limited but also ripe for potential development. I could see it being expanded into a franchise if the creators were willing to go a bit deeper. But for all its world-building, the film is compromised by its own sense of restraint: Careful not to break too far beyond the walls of its well-established aesthetic but hitting a dead end once the impact of those ideas has run its course.

*Weird choice to kill-off the two young supporting characters literally minutes after they step into the Backrooms. They were well fleshed-out and provided a good sense of light relief, but were entirely underused. I happened to leave the screen for literally 3 minutes to use the loo and when I came back my friend told me they'd both just died!

**If they are just a representation of Clark's state-of-mind then how do the backrooms figure into the lives and mindsets of the other characters? Why do the backrooms seem to be invariably filled with objects and people from Clark's life if people like Phil and his team have also apparently been exploring them for years? And why is Phil so interested in Mary's experiences of the Backrooms if they appear to be identical to those of him and his team? Does everyone get their own version of the Backrooms? It doesn't feel like it. But also why are they mostly full of furniture and other items from Clark's immediate real world?

To answer the second question, I was under the impression that this portion of the Backrooms ran alongside/inside Clark's store, so it absorbed things about the store and about him from some kind of osmosis. The idea being that they run through/behind all kinds of places, and in other places they would absorb/reflect whatever was in the outside world — so the backrooms behind a car dealership would look and feel different. But that's just me extrapolating, they didn't really say.

That would make sense. Sort of...

I fully expect Backrooms to be a bit stupid but I love never-ending hallways and fucked-up architecture so I'm going to have to go see it at some point. I was a teenage House of Leaves fanatic, y'know.

Looks like I'll probably be going to Mayhem Festival again this October, so I'll actually be on top of a few new films rather than my usual thing of being half a decade behind. I'll do a scene report if anyone wants that!

So of the many problems I had with Obsession (aside from it being relentlessly unpleasant, which was by design), it felt like it was written by a 16-year-old for 16-year-olds, and might have been better if played by 16-year-olds? And in fact, there is this one point where I thought, wait a minute, are they supposed to be in high school? Anyway, I couldn't stand the direction or writing (how many times does someone yell some variation of "what the fuck?"), I couldn't stand the acting of the male leads, I couldn't stand the jump-scare sudden bursts of screaming, which gave me a headache, I didn't think the humor was handled that well and might have even preferred the whole thing without the supernatural component at all, as more of a smart psychological study, where you are wondering how much of this is in his head, or if it's just the rationalization of a sexual predator. I thought that's where it might be going with the introduction of his medicine cabinet filled with pill bottles, but no, they were just plot-pills.

Two movies that came to mind were John Carpenter's "Christine" (another movie about obsession, but starring Keith Gordon, a type perhaps better suited to this role) and "Deadgirl," which I (very distantly) remember as surprisingly successfully addressing control, consent and male entitlement in a similarly gross and disturbing scenario.

Obsession was written and directed by a 26 year old and my guess is that the actors and characters are around the same age. It's Misery meets Big, sort of.

Not sure I agree with that many of your points. Jumpscares and people screaming "what the fuck?" are kind of par for films like this. I thought the scares were quite cleverly executed and timed, especially considering the film's budget. Speaking of which, apparently they couldn't afford stunt actors, so the action during THAT scene was literally Inde Navarette wearing a helmet with fake hair attached to it.

oof i'd nearly forgotten about deadgirl, which i find unwatchable

re the Obsession characters' ages, I thought it was very realistically early-20s, especially for a group of young people who weren't attending college, or were taking time off before attending.

early-to-mid-20s townie burnouts is more or less what i assumed too

i think one of the reasons the movie shook me to my core is that it used horror to accurately depict a relationship that my best friend was in for four years in her mid-20s, years she considers basically lost

that's what I figured, but I'm also pretty far removed from that age, and their emotional maturity or lack thereof seemed very very foreign to me.

xpost

It was relentlessly unpleasant though. When the credits went up, I said aloud to my friend "What a horrible film!", only half-jokingly. Upsetting, stressful, pessimistic and mean-spirited. So by virtue of that it succeeded. I can see why it's so popular with young Zoomers and Alphas

And Ivy, I could totally see it resonating on that wavelength, maybe that's why I wish it wasn't literally about someone being magically roofied, that there was more psychological ambiguity to it, maybe.

I thought it did well in that respect, myself. Inde's spellbound character was creepy and terrifying (and that is some INCREDIBLE acting and makeup work), but really it's Bear who is the villain of this film by dint of his own cowardly choices. Reminded me of Midsommar in some of those respects

respects respects respects

So his cabinet full of pills, what were we to make of that? I was under the impression he was maybe off his meds, but at the end when he goes back to the medicine cabinet, he's looking at the pills like he had never seen them before, almost. Maybe they were left over from his grandmother? And he kept them in there for some reason?

I don't know, in that regard maybe I was expecting some sort of rug pull akin to other more or less housebound movies like Don't Breathe or Barbarian, where there is more going on. But nope.

the pills are leftover from his grandmother they have her name on them

xpost I mean, Bear is obviously the villain, and a coward. (And she is great.)

Another thing it reminded me of, tangentially, is American Werewolf in London, where the Griffin Dunne character keeps coming to him in a vision telling him to kill himself. Here though, I just wish (ha) it wasn't so similarly binary.

and this isn't in the explicit text of the movie or whatever but the guy is clearly in some sort of grief fugue over his grandmother bc he hasn't changed a thing about the house. probably says something about his ability to actually deal with his feelings about things (he has none) xp

That's what I thought about the pills, why was he saving them all?

xpost, there we go. That's why I wish it was a little better written and more focused on his psychology, rather than just glossing it over. he had clearly been dealing with stuff even before the cat.

i doubt that he was saving them, they were just there, he wasn't prepared to deal with them after they killed the cat so he just put them in the medicine cabinet xp

well you know a movie doesn't have to hold your hand and tell you these things

So his cabinet full of pills, what were we to make of that? I was under the impression he was maybe off his meds, but at the end when he goes back to the medicine cabinet, he's looking at the pills like he had never seen them before, almost. Maybe they were left over from his grandmother? And he kept them in there for some reason?

Yeah my first thoughts were "Oh he's on (a LOT) of meds" but no Ivy is correct, they're his grandmothers. I don't think that was particularly well explained

i just think it's good that it isn't explained! it would be a tedious movie if time were taken to explain bear's situation, it's not really the point of the movie, it's just an environment that reflects his own internal eternal stuckness

i will also note that josh has trouble understanding character relationships and motivations even when they are painstakingly explained in the text, so many tv threads have devolved into this

xp otm, as well as his need for someone else (a woman) to save him and pull him out of it. didn't turn out so well!

actually both posts otm

I noticed gramma's name on the pill bottles. Only problem with this movie (other than the profound emotional disruption) was how did the cat gobble a damn pill on its own? Not my experience with cats!

xps Is it not believable enough to think that some softboy in his mid-20s might not be fully in-tune with his emotions and general ability to sort his shit out?

i also don't think it's strange at all that he kept the meds. if you have a giant bottle of narcotics it may be useful at some point. it was shown clearly that these people liked to party!

I understand motivations, you dork, lol. this movie ain't complex. but there's a difference between leaving things out strategically but also because you're lazy or inept (whatever one thinks of this).

xpost

It's not the greatest plot beat, I must say. How does a cat get into a medicine cabinet and open a bottle of pills exactly? Luckily it's also not a pivotal or important plot beat

Someone wished on a one wish willow that Bare's cat would die

The obvious intel commentary, I think, is how, even though we later find out she probably would have rejected him, all he had to do is say a simple sentence to find out for sure.

Instead, he relies on magic because he just wants it to happen with zero effort or work put in on his behalf. He'd rather a lifetime of discomfort than to be disappointed once

While Bear is deemed a villain, some of the discourse I've seen around his character doesn't quite ring true for me:

- It's true he's cowardly, but does it make him an outright villain? Even towards the start when Nikki straight-up asks him if he likes her, he chickens out of admitting it. While he should have just outright said "yes", I read that as being down to nerves rather than the stronger accusation of "cowardice". She does keep saying "Eugh!" any time the idea of them getting together is mentioned, so he's rightfully wary of making a fool of himself or ruining the friendship. I actually enjoyed this early scene in the car between the two main characters and just the awkwardness of it all. Is it me or does Nikki behave a little erratic/hard-to-pin-down even before the "curse" is afflicted? I couldn't work out why in that bar scene his friend tells Bear to go and make a move, then instantly comes up and cock-blocks him? Did I miss something there?

- To be fair to Bear, he didn't know the Willow-stick thing would actually work any more than his friend thought it would rain a billion dollars. It was all done on a whim, a spur of the moment, rather than with malicious intent. So for audiences to sit back and say "Whelp, looks like this loser got his just desserts - don't use ChatGPT, kids" feels a bit high-and-mighty

- I've heard people say "If Bear really loved Nikki and wasn't a cowardly villain, he would kill himself as per the rules of the Willow-stick". Which... okay, you'd try out a few other avenues out first (which he does) before resorting to that, no?

- Another thing is people saying he should have got help or spoken to someone sooner. Especially when his friends pressed him to explain what was going on... Um, yes he should have, but it wouldn't be the first time someone's covered-up for their partner's strange or abusive behaviour

So I don't know - there might be moments I'm missing that might paint him out to be a lot worse than I remember; and if I ever do watch it again it might drive it home a little more.

his friend doesn't want him asking Nikki out at trivia because he feels it will ruin trivia night. He mentions that to Bare in the opening scene, telling him to find any other time to ask

Re: Bare, sure, he didn't know it would work, but his actions after that show he isn't factoring Nikki's agency into his concerns. He's in Heaven for the first few weeks when she's relatively normal and only gets bothered when she makes *him* uncomfortable. His first request to the guy on the phone isn't to cancel his wish, it's to alter it. He wants Nikki without the obsession and the daily reminders that he forced this on her

Like Nikki frequently attempting to break free by injuring herself, the note on the Polaroid, none of this really scans for him as a cry for help as much as erratic behavior due to his wish.

The fact that people are having trouble seeing him as a villain is a factor of him seeming so ordinary. I remember having "secret admirers" as a young woman and it always instantly made me repulsed by the person. If you like me so much, why can't you simply say so? Why the big to-do? The notes? The weird interactions? He is SUCH a coward that he prefers magic to a simple "yes" when asked "do you like me"

And still! If the love object were to express this disgust, the reward is "oh but he likes you, he's just shy, etc etc etc" which is a boatload of bullshit.

his cowardice is what makes him villainous

Yeah that all makes sense Neanderthal

yeah, he's a villain because he is a coward. That's sort of why the literal what the fuck moments got annoying. he knows exactly what the fuck, but convinces himself to look beyond it, even as extreme as things get.

why were they turned away from the hospital?

Had the wrong opinion on the best Husker Du album

monster

But the reason he looks past it is the same incel logic, they view relationships as euphoria, like it will fix their misery.

It's like being on ecstasy. These are the types of people who love the first few months of a relationship, the excitement, the passion, the feeling of infatuation.

And often when the real work starts, the digging deeper, working through disagreements, seeing it grow into something deeper and less intense, they lose interest.

He's trying to get that crazy, unhinged passion back, and on the other hand, he's also scared of her. He feels like maybe if she can just stop doing things like cooking his dead cat, they can resume their ultra exciting passion again. That's what people like him think a relationship is.

But also he's afraid of what she'll do if he leaves!

The obvious analogy is AI and especially AI girlfriends. I did like the twist at the end where it looks like they're both just going to be forever zombied together, like two chatbots in a loop