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

ok beyond the black rainbow has some great minutes and some pretty O_O shots and cinematography but omg it is so sloooooooooooooooooooooooooow. and the ending is weak as fuck. made that "entrance" movie i watched a few weeks ago feel like a non-stop adrenalin thrill ride.

BtBR is really not horror at all.

deadgirl sounds interesting but I dunno how much zombie-rape I can handle

deadgirl is i think amazing but yeah its deeply upsetting throughout

So Dead Sushi sounds dumb, but maybe fun?

re: deadgirl, a difficult film to watch but worth it, it's def not some grindhouse atrocity flick, more like a downbeat indie film that turns on a horror plot point

hmm well how graphic would you say it is

xpost: after an intriguing X-Files intro, I thought that Yellowbrickroad degenerated into an utterly charmless and dull piece of survival horror by the numbers. Given the title, I do wonder if the original script didn't have to be amended after the production team received a stern legal warning not to step on those ruby slippers.

technically there's nothing more graphic than what you'd find in an R rated film, but the context is everything, the movie's never on the side of the abusers, it's not prurient, and the title character's performance is incrediblly brave, as central to the movie's success as polyanna macintosh's was in the woman

xp

the movie's never on the side of the abusers, it's not prurient

okay yeah this is kinda the key thing for me, didn't know how to phrase it

Ok, totally against all my expectations, paranormal activity 3 was amazingly good - not only the best of the series by far (1 I was mixed on, 2 was terrible), but among the best found footagey video tape things I have seen. Big scares, super creepy, never boring. Huge recommendation, and it is on Netflix streaming. I am totally shocked.

Yeah, a friend of mine was going on about how 3 was actually really good. Wasn't sure if I believed him. I'll have to give it a go. Ended up just turning off the 2nd one.

Do you need to have seen P1 and P2 for P3 to land?

probably not? i mean, there is an overarching plot that's being advanced but it's so stupid that i don't think you'll miss much.

paranormal activity 3 was ok but i was annoyed that the ending makes no sense as a set-up for paranormal activity 1

pa3 might be a little better if you haven't seen the first 2 because the scare effects might be less familiar and you won't actually think about how it supposedly ties in to the previous entries

funny the PA movies seem to be moving down the same road as the original halloween series (subgenre-definer gradually introducing more occult content to try and "explain" the supernatural elements of the first two films, though in this case 3 is a prequel rather than a wholly unrelated story)

PA 3 was as solid as the second one, and while not as fresh as the first, proof that they can just do this forever. We'll always be afraid of the dark, cheap scares and what we can't see.

PA 3 did make some small changes to the format, though. Moving camera, more than one location, additional cast (babysitter, camera guy). Same idea, though.

I'm a fan of PA1, PA2, and PA3 in almost equal measure.* I wondered if they'd keep going back in time, with PA4 shot on 8mm. But nope.

*Then again, I'm the only human on record to like Apollo 18. I'm a sucker for found footage.

I find this article all sorts of wrong outside of the title: http://www.salon.com/2012/10/25/have_horror_movies_hit_a_new_golden_age/

Weird that the article keeps going back to torture porn.

Yeah, the thrust of the piece seems to be saying, "isn't it nice that horror isn't so upsetting once again?"

Weird article, he keeps bringing up movies and then saying he hasn't seen them.

Watched Yellowbrick Road and overall I liked it, nice sense of dread throughout and I liked the idea of people just walking into the woods and going insane. But what happened at the end?

arrgh ok i am too tired to deal with that salon piece but advance warning tomorrow i plan to pedantically take it apart sentence by sentence.

i wouldnt worry too much abt the ending of yellowbrickroad, its the point where the movie indulges its lynch in all the wrong ways.

xp You can start w/ them mis-identifying the "gold standard in found-footage horror."

In other news, I finally watched Inland Empire (which technically qualified for inclusion here based on the thread title) and it fucked up my whole weekend.

did this finally, join in if you want: Hey it's halloween, everybody should shit their pants - ilx horror crew top tens.

ok my line by line claim about that salon article was a little ambitious considering i havent seen the movie he starts out with, but i still plan on taking that dumb article apart

Good!

At first we don’t understand why César (Luis Tosar), the protagonist of the new Spanish horror thriller “Sleep Tight,” would dream about suicide in the opening sequence. Sure, he has to get up at 5 a.m. to go to work as the front-desk concierge in a middle-class Barcelona apartment building, and the grumpy old guy who manages the building gives him a hard time about watering the plants and staying out too long for lunch. But he also gets to wake up next to Clara (Maria Etura), a vivacious younger woman who likes to show off her terrific figure in high-end lingerie. It takes quite a while, in fact, to figure out the problem: Clara doesn’t actually know that César is sleeping in her bed, night after night, let alone that he’s the source of the creepy love letters and abusive text messages she gets every day.

“Sleep Tight,” first of all, is a nifty new Euro-horror film, with several wicked-cold Hitchcockian twists, that shows off the range and craft of terrific Spanish director Jaume Balagueró, co-founder of the “Rec” franchise (still the gold standard in found-footage horror).

Ok, we can start here - REC is a good film, but in no way would be the definitive gold standard found footage film, and actually comes a bit late in the game. Privileging it over Blair Witch or the Paranormal Activity films or a bunch of other less well known things is a misstep.

It also offers a way to talk about the odd predicament of 21st-century horror movies, which remain enormously popular but seem – and this is inherently a subjective judgment – to have lost critical respect and cultural relevance in recent years.

Pretty willful falsehoods here - the pre-scream era was a critical wasteland for horror (not that i like the way horror turned after scream better.) theres no way you can say that horror is at a critical or cultural ebb at this point, it is examined constantly in the media, and mainstream horror movies are huge events now. On one hand you have the crazy success of the PA films, on the other you have the media preoccupation with the scummy edge of horror (human centipede, serbian film, etc.

There’s a standard critique of contemporary horror that gets trotted out during Halloween week, which goes something like this: Wasn’t it better when horror movies relied on psychology and atmospherics, rather than splatter and special effects?

Well yes, but not from informed sources, this is like mentioning that your parents think that all that rock and roll sounds like noise - i dont see a lot of trustworthy critics going down this route much anymore

Hasn’t our culture gone irretrievably downhill, from “The Haunting” in 1963 to the original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” to “Hostel”? Blah blah blah!

again, three great films, but only the most facile interpretation rates them in this way. in fact id put odds on most people rating TCM on top here, and i think its the nastiest and most "debased" of the three.

I’m not sure how valid that line of argument ever was – and I speak as someone who has written versions of that piece, more than once – but here’s the thing: Over the past several years, horror has pivoted decisively in a new direction, thanks largely to an injection of new energy from Europe (especially the bizarre richness of recent Spanish horror cinema) and the indie-film fringe.

bizarre take on the modern era as a time where the influence of asian and french extremity doesnt exist that is 100% a disingenuous way to set up the next totally false baseless argument:

In what we might call the “Paranormal Activity” era, slasher films and “torture porn” (a phrase that was never quite fair) have faded away, and the biggest horror hits have been designed as spooky thrill rides, built on innovative technique, narrative suspense and clever surprises, but hardly at all on gore or out-and-out sadism.

haha lol waht. if you define "the biggest horror hits" as basically being a stand in for "the paranormal activity films, then maybe i guess? but thats hardly a comprehensive look at successes in the genre. Also, a quick look at the shift towards gore/sadism on television even outside of the horror genre, i think dude is seeing what he wants to see here.

Even as fantasy has become a dominant current in both Hollywood film and fiction publishing, horror is still perceived as a low-prestige, low-budget and somewhat disreputable niche product.

considering the speed at which major studios are scrambling over each other to nab these films, and the explosive success of the walking dead and to a lesser extent american horror story, nah.

Looking at the genre from a historical perspective, I’m pretty sure that “torture porn” was more of a media-outrage meme than a real phenomenon, and the success of Eli Roth’s admittedly gruesome and unrelenting 2006 “Hostel” was pretty much an aberration.

do i even bother to make a list here? theres been far more proliferation of (ok largely bad) torture porny stuff than the usual flogged to death found footage stuff.

Despite the name, for instance, the “Saw” franchise was mainly a series of heavily moralistic puzzle-box fables; people assumed they were incredibly gruesome, but by contemporary media standards, the bloodshed was nothing special.

alright, 2 things. 1. Saw has some pretty grotesque stuff in it, to the point where this guy is either lying or doesnt remember or didnt really watch the movie. 2. so wait, torture porn failed to be significant because the rest of the media landscape now exceeds one of the progenitors of the genre in severity on a regular basis? what?

(OK, you won’t catch me defending “House of 1000 Corpses” or the rest of Rob Zombie’s spectacularly gory directing career. But the guy’s not exactly flavor of the month anymore either.)

well other than being handed endless big budget horror remakes to fuck up, so i would say he is still a player, and in fact is doing a lot better than darren lynn bousmann or eli roth for that matter

Along with “Sleep Tight,” which is admittedly a subtitled film that will play in a few big cities and on VOD, this week also brings us “Silent Hill: Revelation 3-D,” second in a video-game-derived series and follow-up to a big hit that flew somewhat under the radar six years ago. I haven’t seen it, because the distributor saw no percentage in screening the movie for the New York press, which should tell you something.

yeah it tells me that you probably shouldnt use it as an example or talk about it

This movie will be dismissively reviewed by mainstream media, or ignored altogether, and draw teenagers and young adults by the millions.

why sneak the old "horror is for kiddies" trope into an article about why horror is having its golden era? sounds like most of these supposed hang-ups about the critical acceptability of horror are your own.

The first “Silent Hill,” which was scripted by one-time Quentin Tarantino collaborator Roger Avary and directed by French import Christophe Gans, is a phantasmagorical journey, rich in digital effects but also in creepazoid atmosphere, with clear nods to David Lynch and the Wachowskis.

hahahaha what? phantasmagorical journey are you shitting me? also gtfo with this clear nods to Lynch thing, ive seen the movie and just because something weird happens it doesnt make it a goddamn homage to lynch ffs. i guess the wachowski nod is "look this has a shitload of cgi in it, remember the matrix, that stuff was all over in those movies."

It makes a terrific late-night Amazon or iTunes rental, at least if you don’t need to be up early the next day. (Yes, it also suffers from a bad case of plot-resolution stupidity, but horror fans are used to being abused on that front.)

and again, mr. i support horror throws in a "eh horror fans dont care about plot or stuff making sense" dig, because deep down he really doesn't respect horror or the people who watch it very much. or maybe at all.

Like the recently released “Paranormal Activity 4,” which I skipped (is it worth the 12 bucks?), “Silent Hill: Revelation” will probably yield one of the best returns on investment of any Hollywood movie made this year.

wait, so we are all living in the paranormal activity era, you can't be bothered to go see those movies, despite using them as a lynchpin for your description of the modern horror scene?

No one was expecting that kind of yield, however, from the surprise hit “Sinister,” a nifty little creepshow that stars Ethan Hawke as a true-crime author who gets trapped by his own inability to stop watching a series of horrifying Super-8 films. It’s like a meta-lesson on the evils of film criticism! Wrapped up, that is, in a disturbing yarn that’s both a haunted-house movie, a demonic-possession tale and a serial-killer drama. (With a supporting role by Fred Thompson, the one-time GOP presidential candidate turned TV pitchman!)

havent seen it, but congratulations on getting 2 super lazy throwaway zing lines in there wrt film crit and fred thompson, who's a clever boy

Just in the last couple of months, I’ve reviewed the imaginative indie-horror anthology “V/H/S,” the claustrophobic and scary Jewish-exorcist film “The Possession,” the delicious L.A. zombie-vampire farce “The Revenant” and the oddly intoxicating Filipino-made horror fantasy “The Road.” Quite a few other horror movies have been released this year that I haven’t seen or didn’t cover — “Smiley,” “The Tall Man,” “Lovely Molly,” “The Corridor,” “Intruders” and so on – which may or may not be any good but have little or nothing to do with the torture-porn or teen-splatter stereotypes.

hahaha wait, did you just list a bunch of movies you haven't seen and then use them to support your earlier point about how torture-porn and splatter is dead? while couching the possibility that you are wrong by cautiously throwing the little or nothing in there. and btw you are wrong wrt lovely molly imo, and ignoring the fact that the director of the tall man is the martyrs dude, who just maybe got this cushy hollywood gig by establishing himself via one of the most gore and sadism laden movies in recent memory is a pretty big oversight here, cmon man.

To find anything like that, we have to go back to Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s “Cabin in the Woods,” a brilliant mashup that’s part H.P. Lovecraft and part Philip K. Dick.

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, namedroppin cool dude references like it aint no thing

Is it too early to proclaim that we’re living through a new golden age of horror, and almost nobody’s paying attention?

nope. its way too late, because it happened 10 or so years ago, and you're the dude not paying attention.

“Silent Hill: Revelation 3-D,” second in a video-game-derived series and follow-up to a big hit that flew somewhat under the radar six years ago

can we marvel at this for a bit

"a big hit that was under the radar" ie I am a mouthbreathing feeb who can't even sustain a coherent argument for the length of a sentence

I kiss you, jjjusten.

Just a dude makin stuff up baout horror movies

Absentia. Good movie. But I don't get why [SPOILERS AHOY] if the husband was just underground in bugtown, why he was showing up as a ghost in the first half of the film? What did I miss?

Excision. Ah, Christ, lots of energy wasted on this one. Wants so bad to be May that it tries to create its own Angela Bettis. I imagine anyone who has seen the still photos of this film gets pretty bummed when all that vibrant imagery is relegated to a few dumb dream scenes.

I will add:

Absentia was really well done considering how smalltime it was. I really liked the two female leads and they were totally believable sisters.

Excision, on the other hand, had a ton of celebrity cameos and none of them could save it. The desperation to be cool reminded me of that Robin Williams movie where he swims naked and is serenaded by Bruce Hornsby. Not recommended.

hahahaha what? phantasmagorical journey are you shitting me? also gtfo with this clear nods to Lynch thing, ive seen the movie and just because something weird happens it doesnt make it a goddamn homage to lynch ffs. i guess the wachowski nod is "look this has a shitload of cgi in it, remember the matrix, that stuff was all over in those movies."

Yeah, whut? I actually was quite impressed with the original Silent Hill, but it is in no way Lynchian, ffs. Plus one thing I liked was that they used live-action for a fair few bits that they could well have fucked up with CGI, but I dunno, pretty sure it had quite a bit of it still.

haha i just reread my critique and got mad all over again. i was just writing as i thought of stuff, theres lots more in that article to be ridiculed. i mean for starters, theres the great point where he talks about how enormously popular horror films are and then say that they have lost cultural relevance IN THE SAME SENTENCE

now i understand why people get all hulked up about rockism

Re: "Absentia," it was the rare film where I appreciated its lack of explanation, but the implication was not simply that they were underground but that they were in some sort of parallel dimension. So I got the impression he was trying to break through to her, though why as a scary ghost, I dunno. Unless he was just miffed that he was being declared dead in absentia, rather than "absconded by bug spirits to an alternate world." OTM with them being plausible sisters. The one was even plausibly pregnant, which is even more rare in the movies.

First dude to appear in the tunnel was all "you can SEE me?!?" They were around. Assume scary ghost aspects were her subconscious attempting to make sense of his presence.

xp: she was actually pregnant.

I liked the cops too. Good casting all around in that movie.

huh i liked absentia but feel like it's a tad overrated here, the acting was the weak spot for me

None of that satisfactorily explains why the husband was a scary ghost. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that might be a fault with the film.

Yeah, it def. would have worked better if he was a nicer, "help me" sort of ghost.

did anyone else see "silent house" (not "silent hill")? the ending was kind of lame (you don't HAVE to have a twist, guys, especially when it's totally obvious) but it was effectively scary. good use of gimmick (takes place in real time, edited so it looks like all one shot), darkness, and the quirks of digital video to create a really claustrophobic, creepy tone.

I think they had to keep the twist considering it was a remake

i got a netflix dvd of it waiting at home. already know the twist so i'm hoping it's less likely to annoy