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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpPdgrr5diM

I hope the Conjuring sequel is about the Smurls.

I have read good reviews of the Conjuring so I'm surprised to see it get no love here.

I just went to see it today and liked it pretty well. More than Insidious, definitely.

I did some seriously embarrassing yelling and clutching of poor Je55e's arm.

Watched The Collection (sequel to the collector) on Netflix streaming last night, and lets be clear, it's a hot mess of stupid post saw dumbness, but watchable, at least if you go in brainfree or at least super drunk. Def the worst movie to feature one dude from oz and another from the wire that I have ever seen.

i have 'House at the end of the street' (HATEOTS) to watch tonight...is it any good?

I can't remember? That's probably neither a good nor a terrible sign.

I could swear I talked abt it on this thread? But I am on iPhone so can not search worth a shit

welp i'm bored so it's getting a spin

Good luck, it will either be terrible, awesome, or unmemorable

I'm starting to feel like I liked it actually? I had a crap ton of fancy infused coctails and charcuterie tonight topped with key lime pie, so I am an unreliable narrator

enough of your humblebragging, mr fancydrunk

Oh no, that's just regular bragging

HATEOTS is not bad! not v horror-y but good story

j-law is ridic gorgeous, also main boy v crushworthy

if you go in brainfree or at least super drunk

Yeah, that's a pretty low hurdle for anything, tbh.

Man, I was really let down by The Conjuring. I liked Sinister, Insidious, and others in this vein, but, I dunno, a couple good scares does not a good movie make. I saw it just a few days ago and I seriously cannot remember what happened at the end. It could be that I've just had my fill with exorcism movies. Most of them are really lazy; it doesn't require much narrative logic ("She's possessed!") and then usually just ends with some Catholicism and whatnot.

I wish this movie had been all about that demon doll. More demon doll movies!

sinister, insidious, and mama (which i just watched) are all alike in having great, creepy first hours while the bad things are happening in the background, and then going to shit once they have to actually show the bad things and they're just pathetic cgi monsters

scooby doo syndrome

watched jack ketchum's the girl next door and would now like to wipe my brain of it please. don't think it's particularly well made but the tv movie stylings make it even more disturbing if anything and if the idea is to show you just how depraved and nasty people can be and how horrifyingly easy it could be for a corrupting adult to coerce kids into such behaviour then it does its job i suppose.

xp That's why I would rate The Conjuring above Insidious, et al. It didn't get real dumb at the end. Well, obviously that's a matter of preference, but by the time the other movies had explained themselves I was like oh yeah okay ho hum but I stayed pretty tense and engaged up through the end of The Conjuring. Also: creepy basement.

Fun fact: The real demon doll on which the demon doll in the Conjuring was based was a Raggedy Ann doll. Not quite as frightening. http://www.warrens.net/Annabelle.html

xp The Girl Next Door has been in our queue forever and I don't know why because I will never ever watch it.

Thnig and I had a convo after the movie about the laziness of the scary basement in The Conjuring -- this family of 5 moves into a huge old dump, digs through a wall and finds...their surprise basement, where the furnace is! I am fully 100% aware of the suspension of disbelief required to find movies like this entertaining, but that was a poorly thought out detail that could have easily been fixed by someone knowing that there was a basement. People do not buy a house to live in with their 5 kids and not know where the furnace is (even in the 70s!).

Add the lazy Catholic stuff/witch demon (and a bunch of other stuff I thought was just kinda weak) and I just couldn't find it in my heart to like this movie. I even found it pretty scary but that's because I have glass nerves that are shattered by loud sounds, not because it was actually scaring me. I didn't have any trouble going into the basement even that same evening!

family of 7! sorry!

Your basement is decidedly not evil, though. It's not even a little creepy!

It is when I'm down there hehehe

Are you a Salem Witch?

Perhaps I'm being hard on The Conjuring because it felt like the straw that broke the back. Horror movies have grown quite adept at pulling off shock scares in the last four or five years (Mama, et al) and that has been fun but now it's starting to feel like a formula (have scenery A + silence B + camera movement C) and the weaknesses are really starting to show through. The glow is gone. We need a fresh model.

I found it scary beyond the shock scares, actually. There was a creepiness to it that really got to me, plus as Jesse and I were discussing, some of the really scary parts were longer than just a second of being startled. Like

SPOILER ALERT
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The kid looking under her bed and then insisting that she could see the thing behind the door standing right behind her sister, Jesus H. the "hide and clap" game with Lilli Taylor and the hands coming out of the wardrobe, the whole long scene starting with the pictures falling off the walls and ending with the Wicked Witch of Rhode Island jumping off the top of the wardrobe onto the eldest daughter.
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END SPOILER

What people find scary is completely subjective, and those parts contained some elements that are almost guaranteed to freak me out. But as arguably dorky as the Salem witch premise was, the fact remains that I got up to pee in the middle of the night last night, three days after seeing this movie, and while I was sitting there sleepily looking out the bathroom door, I suddenly got it in my head that said witch would be crawling past the door any second and damned if that didn't wake me up fast.

Kid looking under bed=Poltergeist, which was 100x scarier.
Clap game with ghost=The Orphanage, which was 10x better
Wicked Witch popping out=Drag Me to Hell, which was better.

And so on.

I got lots of Friday the 13th the series vibes from bits of this, from the investigators to the room full of cursed objects that LOL DOES NOT LOCK?!?! The doll in the glass was like

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

Which movie that was 100x scarier did the bit with the laundry line sheet flying into a silhouette?

My sense of exhaustion with movies like The Conjuring might be personal to me. It reminds me of The Great Re-boot Forsaking of 2010, when the Nightmare on Elm Street remake got me to swear off all such movies forever.

...OR DID IT?!?

I do like that there is a now a sub-category of "yeah the house is haunted now what movies?" Used to be lots of "is it all in her head?" Or "there must be an explanation here." But now it's all "what do we do about the demon living in your basement?"

My fave along these lines may be the guy in "Paranormal Activity." "Hmm, let's see what's going on here, usually there's a good explanation for ... oh my God, I am detecting a terrible presence here, I'm leaving, good luck!"

Man, now I'm trying to remember where the clothesline gag was from ...

Let Kevin Bacon, Andy Griffith and Cloris Leachman renew your faith in the genre...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WktVSnhdEmc&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWktVSnhdEmc

kinda feel like all those movies are the fading concentric circles of a rock thrown into the genre pool by late 90s asian horror directors. also the rock has long matted hair and moves with rapid jerks.

anybody got a line on the patient zero for this style?

it isnt the first, but wrt american directors the ring really spawned a million imitators

maybe this is selective memory but didn't ju-on: the grudge single-handedly revive the haunted house movie

anyone ever see the solid and creepy japanese haunted DJ booth film "the booth"? A robust 73 min.

obv ringu revived the moribund haunted VHS tape movie

I enjoyed The Conjuring and like carl a. said, it was nice that it wasn't scary up front and then limp and dumb in the second half.

It wasn't one of the best movies I've ever seen, but it was easy, fun, and scary, which is what I want sometimes on a summer afternoon.

The Catholic stuff was fine - I mean, it was in the context of a standard movie about possession. What I don't like, and when I think priests and crosses are lazy moves is when they show up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Christianity otherwise doesn't figure in, so they're just shorthand for "Good."

yeah i agree the catholic stuff is pretty straightforward in a context of demonology / possession and as far as this is based on an actual "case file" i guess it needed to adhere to some basic conventional tropes

also it's rhode island & you can't really escape catholicism in this place.

There were some good scares, like what carl posted about SPOILER thekidseeingthethingbehindthedoor /SPOILER, which was a nice, extended creepy moment. And a couple that could have been standard shocks: the woman on top of the wardrobe and the pictures falling. They were special b/c they extended the scare a few beats beyond the initial startling jump.

I'm sure my fear was heightened by having carl agatha shrieking and trying to duck for cover under my torso.

yea agree, the rhythm was pretty slow to start but the i thought it was to good cumulative effect. also the period costuming & set dressing was pretty well done without being overdone or distracting imho. i appreciated all of the dramatic collars of vera farmiga.

Yes, me too. Some dumb Slate writer criticized Farmiga's outfits. As if a clairvoyant working in an evil-fighting duo in the 70s wouldn't wear ruffles. and IIRC, she dressed like that IRL, too.

her outfits were great and totally reminded me of some of my earliest teachers (who weren't nuns)

Has any horror movie ever addressed what happens if you've dealing with a classic (classical?) demonic possession and you're, you know, Jewish or something? Like, do demons just go for the Catholics? If you're Jewish, do you have to worry about vampires? Can you still wield a cross against vampires if you're Jewish? Or are there different demons that prey on different religious denominations? Just the cliche of all the religious iconography and all that gets a little campy to a non-Catholic like me.

Thinking (a tiny bit) more, doesn't the presence of demons or whatever in a Catholic god vs. the devil context invalidate all the other religions in these fictional worlds?

I seem to recall the vampires in Buffy, and the demons and other stuff, being sorta of unrelated to religious stuff. They're just there, like aliens or interdimensional monsters. Because Willow was explicitly Jewish, but neither her religion nor anyone else's religion played a part in the show, iirc. And Whedon is an atheist.

That's what I was getting at - religion isn't really a part of the show, but sometimes they still casually use crosses without commentary. Or maybe that was just in the early seasons?

There have definitely been movies in which the demonically affected were atheists or nonbelievers. One of the rules in Stephen King's TV's Salem's Lot (or maybe it was the book?) was that if you didn't believe in the power of the cross, the cross had no power, which is why Barlow ate the priest.

I'm sure my fear was heightened by having carl agatha shrieking and trying to duck for cover under my torso.

Hush you screamed, too. Do you remember when we were watching I think it was Friday the 13th Part II and something scared me and I poured beer over both of us? That was funny.

also everybody OTM re: Vera Farmiga's collars.