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

Third one is terrible awful garbage.

Watching "sinister" tonight in the hopes that it will be the first good horror movie of 2013. Not optimistic.

Ok that was fucking fantastic. More tomorrow when I don't need to go to sleep

It's great, isn't it? I'm not sure why my expectations were so low going in but it's really effective.

ethan hawke

I'd be skeptical too

Sinister looks like a great movie from the trailers

It honestly barely ever missteps throughout - performances are great, writing is solid, expectations are thwarted in all the right ways, soundtrack is capital C creepy and awesome. Basically gore free, but that isn't to say theres not some pretty terrifying moments. In a lot of ways it felt like the classic era of modern japanese horror stuff.

I am here today to urge you to see Little Deaths, a resolutely unpleasant but very interesting UK anthology film. You'll be a bit disappointed by the conclusion of the first of the three stories, but the storytelling, style, and editing is solid throughout. The second story, "Mutant Tool," is by far the most fascinating--hard to fully grasp but possibly brilliant. But each story has something worthwhile, or at least highly unusual. Get on it.

a couple dudes i'm pals with made this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRq1SmwJnN0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRq1SmwJnN0

is there a genre name for that kind of straw dogs/funny games/strangers home intrusion horror?

"Home invasion horror" sounds snappy enough to me, not sure if there's a proper term.

Sinister had some great BOOs I just couldn't forgive what idiots all the characters were.

also that house had the shittiest lighting - you couldn't even see the walls during dinner

i mean you move your family into a murder house (i guess so you can stare at the backyard where the murder happened), and find a box of murder tapes in the attic that you know was recently empty. then you watch one tape a night, stroking your beard in horror instead of GETTING THE FUCK OUT OF A MURDER HOUSE WHERE WELCOME WAGON LEAVES YOU SNUFF FILMS.

Netflix streaming surprise tonight "citadel" which although treading similar ground to "Eden lake" and "ils" is well worth giving a chance. Not without flaws certainly, but still

that movie would be a lot scarier if it were called your next but good on them for hiring barbara crampton

xps

Yo, we watched "Sound of My Voice," which is more of a drama about a cult than a straight-up horror film, but what the hell, I'll mention it anyway. Undercooked but mostly the undercookedness works for it. Plus the vomiting-tarp scene is classic.

Loved that movie until the last minute

Sinister had some great BOOs I just couldn't forgive what idiots all the characters were.

Recalling a funny New Yorker takedown.

How can you hope, or presume, to crank up our dread of the inhuman when, from the start, you refuse to play by regular human rules? Throughout “Sinister,” the rooms remain darker than crypts, whether at breakfast or dinnertime, and the sound design causes everything in the house to moan and groan in consort with the hero’s worrisome quest. I still can’t decide what creaks the most: the floors, the doors, the walls, the dialogue, the acting, or the fatal boughs outside.

Earlier:

. His latest project—“This could be my ‘In Cold Blood,’ ” he says—concerns a family that was hanged from a tree outside the very house where Ellison now dwells, although somehow he has failed to inform his wife, Tracy (Juliet Rylance), of this cheerful fact. Up in the attic, he stumbles on a clue: a boxful of old Super-8 films, plus, helpfully, a projector on which to show them. Switching it on, he finds himself watching scenes not just of the hanging but of other multiple murders from the past. Who made the film? Or, rather, *who made the film?*, as Ellison writes on his notepad. The director of “Sinister” is Scott Derrickson, who co-wrote the script with C. Robert Cargill, and we can but pray that they move on to a new bio-pic of Melville. Imagine his questions: *one leg only?* and *why a whale?*

looool

eh thats a pretty lazy review, very rex reedish in its "couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the film because it was beneath me" vibe. particularly in the second paragraph, where it looks like hes willfully ignoring information from the film in lieu of zingers

god i hate reading half-assed critics banging their self-satisfied boners on the table wrt horror, its just the worst

no, jjj, that is valid criticism, delivered with perhaps a touch too much snark. the J-horror audio and visual stylistics were overplayed to the point of distraction.
i think you're just unwilling to accept criticism of a movie that you loved. personally, i am a lot cooler in my enthusiasm for Derrickson's film. it was... okay. with a hilariously bad climax and ending.

Ha lets be clear, I didn't love the movie. Still, complaining abt the idea that dude didn't tell his wife abt moving into a murder house when a huge plot point is the fact that dude didn't tell his wife abt moving into a murder house is crap criticism.

Mostly I'm just using this as an exemplar to bitch abt mainstream critics tackling (and failing) when they approach the horror genre. Starting with a "these characters are unrealistic" move when totally unrealistic situations occur to those characters leads down a stupid path.

"How convenient that a projector is in the attic when the existence of a box of films in an otherwise empty attic in a recently sold house is also completely counterintuitive?"

Good catch champ. Also ghosts might not be real.

"Jack couldn't possibly be in the old photo of the overlook hotel, this movie is garbage!"

Starting with a "these characters are unrealistic" move when totally unrealistic situations occur to those characters leads down a stupid path.

uh... not really.

Characters reacting irrationally to irrational situations shocker

Why would that lady jump out of a second story window to escape from leatherface she might sprain her ankle

Why would Nancy fall asleep knowing Freddy is waiting for here there?

I just watched Martyrs and it really didn't do anything for me. I found the whole secret society thing cliched and silly. So they all really invest all this money and time to hear a testimonial that probably won't change their lives in any meaningful way? Also could not stand Lucie's imaginary predator.

Yep.

xpost Nancy tried really, really hard to stay awake! You try it!

Haven't seen the Hawke movie myself, but I guess some horror movies are hurt when the house looks totally haunted from minute one. It pretty much cuts down on the suspense, because it's not a matter of what will happen but when. I think it hurts "The Shining, too." Oh, look, crazy guy alone in a spooky hotel, what will down? Something scary, I bet!

rewatched beyond the black rainbow a while back, just after the 2011 horror flash poll. i fucking blew it on that one. though it falls apart in the final stretch, it's a fascinating film, a hell of a lot better than (say) human centipede 2.

pretty low bar you've set there

wull yeah

Man, I was so primed to like "Evil Dead." The one reaction I didn't expect was indifference. The world it created wasn't tight enough (logic holes were everywhere) or loose enough (see the original) to make it anything more than 90 minutes of scare-free suffering. The new additions of a nail gun and an electric knife do not = "creativity." I'm sure I'm not the first to note that the movie only finds it feet in the last few minutes when it gives up its pointless "grit" and gives into over-the-top-ness.

90 minutes of scare-free suffering

otm. i'm always griping about the sadism of contemporary horror, so i didn't want to be the first to say it, but this is exactly how i felt. it's slick, fast moving, grisly as hell, and kind of dull in spite of all that.

loved the Evil Dead remake, to my great surprise. I'm generally anti-remake but a friend asked if I'd like to go see it and I so seldom do things with friends I thought what the hell and we went to the theater at this pretty awful and weird mall in a theater I normally don't go to at all and I thought it was really good. I could not really give a shit about plot holes in a horror movie, I come for the vibe and the scares and the darkness and man oh man the fucking Evil Dead book with the drawings and the writing...still great, perfectly re-done. thought the addiction metaphor, albeit clumsy, worked and was effective. the various call-backs to the original were cool and the whole thing was...refreshingly reverent, I thought.

brought down somewhat by the mother and five-year-old two seats ahead of me, no five-year-old needs to see that opening scene. as the movie went on the rest of the family gradually joined them but with every gruesome part I'd be thinking "man...your kid does not need to see that"

wtf is wrong with people? your kid has to learn to seek out onscreen eviscerations on their own, at age 9, like any normal human being

"Home Invasion" as a genre is troublesome. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I miss the days of a bunch of dumb teenagers going out into the woods to drink and celebrate their last days of freedom for the summer, before they all get chopped to pieces. I miss that." - one of the guys who does the weekly trailer recap on Grantland OTM

I am pro home invasion and chopped to pieces in a campground horror, because I am a universalist.

camp invasion

Underrated Aerosmith -- I'd agree that plot holes in horror movies can be irrelevant. Less so logic holes, though, when they upset the film's own created logic. But anyway: I too rather liked the addiction metaphor. I also appreciate the general verve with which the filmmakers attacked the film. They took their job seriously, that's for sure. (A minor quibble: I didn't like how the Book of the Dead looked. I thought the scratchy writing was cheesy and looked like the opening credits to Seven. It looked like a movie prop rather than something ancient and unknowable.)

And also! The people entering the theater right in front of us were a mom with three little kids (maybe 8 to 11 years old). Are they advertising this flick on Nickelodeon or something?

"Home Invasion" as a label always makes me think of that scene in Twin Peaks where Bob crawls over the living room sofa into the camera. I know that's not what "Home Invasion" means, but still, that's like the worst home invasion moment ever.

I always think of this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ac/Ice-t_homeinvasion.jpg/220px-Ice-t_homeinvasion.jpg

Is there a good "cell phones will kill you" movie (he asks from his cell phone)?

One Missed Call? Haven't seen it but the Miike original is supposed to be good.

Was going to say Cellular, but the cell is what's supposed to save her.