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

the making-of bonus features on the inland empire dvd were really eye-opening for me -- i'd been a lynch fan for a long time but never watched any documentaries (were there any before "lynch"?) or read much about him beyond entertainment mag stuff -- because you can see what *total control* he exercises over every aspect of the movie, down to repainting the walls or furniture if the shade doesn't match the effect he wants/saw in his head.

yeah, i saw that! i'd read enough in interviews and stuff to know that he was like that, but to actually see it was really cool.

"surprised by martyrs fandom. was bored by that one. seemed pretty exciting at first, but the director was unconcerned with anything other than delivering carnage"

in what way? it struck me as a kind of quiet, muted violence, compared with say Prince of Persia. (not in terms of graphicness, [it certainly is graphic] but sensibility) by the end it is very clinical.

re: lynch -- none of the intentionally creepy movies are effective to me in that way, because the over-the-top elements completely undercut any menace, and on some level, lynch definitely wants to make us laugh, he has an odd sense of humor and he can't help himself, which undercuts every impulse to be frightened, but the straight story is certainly creepy in a pure way. How do you make matthew farnsworth sinister? He did it!

hm, i definitely think Lynch has a sense of humor, but i doubt we'd agree on what he intended as "over-the-top" and humorous. The Straight Story i didn't find remotely creepy in any way.

how are you guys seeing A Serbian Film? downloading it?

xpost

reading back what I wrote this morning - I'd like to clarify that I do think that inland empire is a better film than martyrs. (which I also liked quite a bit.) the more I think on it, the more I feel like inland empire is some kind of masterpiece specifically for the same audio/visual qualities a couple of you have mentioned already. masterful stuff.

and upping the quick edits/visceral carnage does not necessarily make for a better film. (as my comments may have read.) tho both that and the drawn-out, hypnotic style inland empire goes for are obviously both valid methods and both hit me the same way in the end - prolonged anxiety/dread.

and yeah, "clinical" is exactly the right word to describe the last act of martyrs. hard to argue with the notion that martyrs is interested in doling out carnage but I don't think that's all that's going on there either.

re: straight story creepiness
http://www.sullivanmovies.com/broadcast_library/new_images/mini-series/anne_richard.jpg
versus
http://www.lynchnet.com/absent/farnsworth.jpg

well, the 1st half of martyrs pays more attention to ad-style slickness and people being blasted through doors (etc.) than character development, credible plotting, performances, ideas, etc. 2nd half gets all mysterioso and more clinical (i.e., suspense-driven), themes come to the fore, but it all still seemed pretty silly to me. didn't care about the characters or their plight, didn't believe in the situation depicted, was bugged by the pop style. not saying that it's a terrible movie. it's very well made, but didn't work for or appeal to me.

you saw a different martyrs than I did

the 1st half of martyrs pays more attention to ad-style slickness and people being blasted through doors (etc.) than character development

the time laugier spends with the family in the beginning shows that he's interested in developing characters, not just moving targets. if the stylistic trappings of the film are turning you off I guess that will keep you from getting fully immersed, but I imagine most people find martyrs wrenching and draining because they care about the characters, not because the director is producing a slick + empty gorefest. also thought the acting in martyrs was top-notch across the board.

(most of what you said about martyrs is how I felt about hostel tbh)

I don't remember martyrs having any characters, just modes, IE "vengeful," "victim," "villain." we feel sympathy because we are watching defenseless people go through unspeakable pain, not because we know them.

^ otm

loathed hostel, kinda dug hostel 2. a bit of real humor and some likable, quasi-credible characters go a long way. actors in martyrs did a good job of being all freaked out and terrified, opening their eyes really wide, but i only cared about the characters to the extent that i'll always care about women/children put in distressing situations. not hard to win that kind of sympathy/empathy. and i'm probably coming down too hard on the film, but i just never got into it. watched it all the way through without giving a damn about anything that happened. part of that comes down to the fact that i never believed that anyone was gonna get out alive.

it's an old truism that you can break through an audience's reserve by doing something really awful (e.g. killing a cute kid) - thereafter, they'll never know quite how far you'll be willing to go and will therefore not be able to maintain skeptical distance. but it works in reverse, too. if the audience fully expects that the worst will eventually happen to everyone onscreen, no matter what they do, there's no reason to emotionally invest in their struggles. maybe i'm losing the ability to emotionally relate to the more extreme forms of survival/endurance horror in general. my expectation is that total bleakness will triumph in the end, and i therefore can't even force myself to care about the sacrificial lambs offered.

I hadn't thought of it that way before re: pitfalls of unrelenting bleakness. That's an excellent point.

not to spoil it, but the "good guys" kind of won in martyrs from my viewing, but I was watching on a laptop with the subtitles in a separate text editor.

oddly, i first thought of this a few years back while watching a different serbian film. in that film, mehanizam, a psychotic hitman abducts a teacher and a cabdriver and brutalizes them for a couple hours as he forces them to accompany him on a rape/murder spree. was gripping until i realized that the filmmakers had this didactic/philosophical structure set up wherein the teacher's attempts to extricate herself from the situation could not succeed unless the cabbie helped her out, and the cabbie, for philosophical reasons of his own, refused to engage with anything. at which point i stopped caring.

since then, i've found it hard to emotionally invest in these types of films, and often when i do (eden lake), i wind up feeling manipulated and abused.

the "good guys" kind of won in martyrs

i might agree, but that's put an awful lot of stress on the "kind of"

^ ...that puts...

well it's at least as much a victory as passing health care HEYO!

maybe it's really lazy to repost something I posted upthread, but since you brought up eden lake:

I can understand somebody being haunted by eden lake, and not just cause it's showing you horrible things - it's well done so what you're seeing has a good chance of getting under your skin.

but it felt mechanical to me - I could see the chess pieces getting set up on the board from the beginning, and I really didn't get surprised by any of the subsequent moves. I can't imagine any horror film fan would? whereas something like martyrs, the chess pieces get set up on the board and then WHAM BAM wait I didn't know we were boxing I thought we were just playing chessssss

the reward in emotionally investing yourself in martyrs is an intellectual one, and it's not a reward that a formulaic film like eden lake can deliver. whatever you want to say about martyrs, I don't think you can call it predictable.

eh, I think I love this movie too much to write rationally about it.

would agree entirely that martyrs wasn't predictable and that eden lake was. it was fairly easy to predict all the major plot movements in eden lake, but i was no less emotionally involved with the characters for that. that kind of sympathetic identification arises more from performance, dialogue and directorial emphasis than from plot or theme.

what would you say is the reward obtained by emotionally investing in martyrs?

catharsis?

makes sense. that's always the promised reward for vicariously experiencing someone else's martyrdom. only recent film that i felt something like catharsis in response to = lars von trier's breaking the waves. spent several minutes weeping as the credits rolled, not in sadness or anger, exactly, but in something almost exultant/grateful that arose out of those emotions. but that movie (and its star, emily watson) had to work so goddam hard to develop the sympathy and understanding required to pull off the emotional effect. didn't see martyrs doing anything similar, but you know, different strokes...

I was really surprised & pleased with Black Death. It had a really small cinema showing but horror fans need to lovefilm/netflix it hard....

Its the missing link between Witchfinder General & The Wicker Man.

2 of the best ever British horror films imho.

and I agree with Eden Lake sticking with you, but I feel that might be more for britishers. In the UK, the setting, the characters & the antagonists are so close to real life. Kids like that are regularly stabbing each other in my neighbourhood. whereas I was never that worried about meeting a knife-gloved killer in my dreams...

seeing Black Death and probably interviewing the director later this week - I kinda hated Severance so I'm hoping you're right about its goodness.

Ok halfway through "the children" right now and holy fucking shit, why have I not heard more about this film.

never heard of it. checking other reviews gets me all curious. will further.

Ok that was absolutely fantastic.

Ok

want

NOTE: do not watch the crappy terrible trailer for this.

I think this might be my favorite modern british horror film

that good huh? up on the netflix queue it goes

Yeah, The Children is great.

turned it off

I'm a wuss; hate broken bones protruding from skin

ok just watched the end

fukd up film

Ok so def not a new film per se but a recent compilation by Other Cinema Digital called Experiments in Terror is half awful and half awesome. Most of the modernish stuff is kinda artso-crap, but the standouts are "Outer Space" by Peter Tscherkassky which is v v unsettling and the completely and totally unhinged "Dawn of the Evil Millenium" by Damon Packard. Worth a run through if you dig weirdo gonzo stuff.

I'm a wuss; hate broken bones protruding from skin

don't watch Broken

Just finished "Creep" (which is maybe technically 2004 but whatever) and oh man what a squandered opportunity - every decent moment gets followed by something lunkheaded and awkward and str8 up stupid. kept trying to like it all the way through, and although it certainly isn't bad (i mean yeah theres much worse stuff getting pushed out of the horror grist mill) i cant really recommend it at all. in a lot of ways the fact that you could see the bones of something great under all the mess made it way worse, because it was totally frustrating, esp from a director whose stuff ive liked for the most part (severance, triangle)

pontypool was awesome, not on netflix unfortunately.

it had its share of flaws but if you're able to do something new + smart w/ the zombie shtick in the oh 10 I'm gonna be in yr corner.

it's suspenseful, and it gets a lot of mileage out of leaving things up to yr imagination e.g. ppl describing the horrible things that are happening over the phone rather than actually showing them. which would prolly seem cheap in another film but here it's endemic to the plot, survivors trapped and cut off from what's happening outside their bunker.

"let's all shit our pants"

umm...ok, you first

done

OK...oh is that the time? I gotta go, sorry.

ok, I'm stuck at home while a dude installs central air, so im cruising through another netflix disc - Seventh Moon. And it is just fucking awful. iirc its one of the dudes who did blair witch and part of that ghost house underground collection, which thanks to this is dropping to a 1 out of 3 success ratio (The Children was great, this is awful and Lake Mungo was boring as hell.)

Yeah, gonna finish this out of obligation but man I know its not getting any better.

yeah, trailer for seventh moon looked kinda promising but then I heard nothing but bad things about it

"I'm a wuss; hate broken bones protruding from skin"

this is the one gore-ish thing that still gets a "ughhhhh" outta me. that post-seagal moment in the '90s when it migrated from horror and seemed to show up in every mainstream action movie was a living hell for me.

this was talked about way upthread but i watched the last house on the left remake last night. it was kinda bizarre for me. like it was a good movie but that rape scene left me so unnerved i couldn't enjoy anything after that point. and capping it with the dumb microwave scene didn't really redeem the experience for me.

should i bother with the original? or would it mess with me just as much?

God the last scene of last house '09 is so awful.

The original is a much stranger beast. Worth seeing.

yeah im still pissed about the stupid ass microwave scene fucking up what i thought was otherwise a pretty well done movie. stupid as hell.

original is very different, totally worth seeing

and the drawn out brutal rapey bit...?

still quite drawn out and rapey iirc

Has anyone seen House of the Devil?

Its a 2009 film shot in that 70's/80's horror style. I mean every detail from the filming technique to the waxy Coca Cola cups they once served drinks in at fast food restaurants is a throwback to that decade. Its also a pretty solid haunted house/slasher film. Not heavy on the gore but very creepy with a great pay off at the end.

http://imgur.com/f1orP.jpg