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

Thanks! OK, what rhymes with hug me?

Ibra scores after five minutes. PSG looking good vs Monaco.

Wrong thread, obviously.

Alright, fine, like the glutton for punishment I am, just started Apollo 18 after fleeing the first terrible 5 minutes of Silent Hill: Revelations

It's definitely not an improvement on Silent Hill.

I loved Apollo 18. I am literally the only person on the planet who did. I can't explain it. I am sorry.

I thought it was alright! People who like to nitpick logic jumps and anachronisms are going to find it a little challenging however.

The fact that silent hill STARTS with a dream within a dream jump scare = no thanks no way

Really?!? You though it was all right!? You are my new friend!!!

INSIDIOUS 2: It's like INSIDIOUS 1, plus a little POLTERGEIST 2, plus a little NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3. Not bad, but I'm really okay if there's not an INSIDIOUS 3.

I can barely remember anything about Insidious the first, except the bit where they're all "and some ghosts come for... ... ... INSIDIOUS reasons". Dun dun duuuuuhhhhhhh.

I saw the first Insidious the other week. As soon as they started going on about astral traveling I was having doubts, then Darth Maul turned up

That's pretty much when it went off the rails, IMO. But I have said before, perhaps in this thread, that the movie prior to that point seriously scared the hell out of me so I was actually glad that it got dumb so I could mentally regroup and not spend the next three days jumping at shadows.

I have decided to participate in this little Twitter project of watching 31 horror movies in 31 days so there's a decent chance I will see Insidious II before the month's end.

Insidious 2 was way better than The Conjuring even though it had all of the same elements. Angry woman ghosts, goofy ghost hunters, ghost sniffing clairvoyants, big old houses. I2 had one of my favorite male stock characters too, the Donald Sutherland-style sensitive man. I liked it!

even secret rooms!

Favorable comparisons to The Conjuring almost guarantee that I will see this movie!

agree that it was at points unnerving, but i really disliked insidious. couldn't hack the cornball, almost aggressively cliched obviousness of everything, wan's debt to formulaic storytelling and conventional depiction pushed almost into surrealism (a quality i liked, for whatever reason, in dead silence). didn't care for paranormal activity, either, so maybe i'm just hostile to new school haunted house movies.

haven't seen a really (really) good recent horror movie in months, maybe since berberian sound studio, nor have i been following this thread. halloween season suggestions appreciated, hint hint..

We also learn that Rose Byrne's character's name is spelled Renai, which is kind of weird imo but hey -- at least we know. I think her sad eyed blank-facedness works for her in this role really well.

I have to give Insidious credit for its effective use of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."

Paranormal Activity I finally saw recently. Thought it was boring as hell, you could tell what the ending would be from a mile off and nothing in the build-up to that was compelling or interesting.

I think I say this every year, but Paranormal Activities films only work in theaters. This seems counter-intuitive--they're handicam movies, shouldn't they be ideal for home viewing? But no! 90% of the scare of those films is in the humming, almost Lynchian soundtrack, which totally envelopes you in suffocating white noise in a theater, but virtually vanishes at home. That is the result of my scientific experiment, anyway.

Huh. I've only seen the the first two, and both at home. I found them enjoyable and sufficiently creepy (the bit where the wife stands stock still at bedside for six hours or whatever is extremely effective IMO) but not as frightening as advertised. Maybe that's why.

How was the score for Insidious 2? Pt 1 was mostly memorable because of it.

Hmmm...not overwhelming? I don't remember much about it aside from the fact that I didn't find it distractingly melodramatic.

rats....distractingly melodramatic is what I was hoping for. the last one was deliriously OTT.

It was basically a replay iirc.

Tho I wasn't a major fan of the score the first time around.

based on someone's advice (itt?) I watched paranormal activity 3 first and found it pretty enjoyable, it reminded me of a 70s TV horror movie, no stunning masterpiece of craft but creepy in a low-budget quotidian way

haven't gone back and watched the first two tho

I did watch the evil dead remake unfortunately, that was some terrible shit

wasn't even measuring it against the original, went in w/ an open mind and blecch

some of the attack scenes were creepy but every other part of the movie was a terrible slog, super serious + stupid is a terrible combination, the bar is pretty f'kn low if this is what passes for quality horror in 2013

That thought did go through my mind during You're Next once or twice.

It might have been me who suggest Paranormal Activity 3 -- it's my favorite of the series, and I like all of them.

Saw "Scream 4" last night. (Yeah, I'd forgotten that it existed, too.) It, y'know, felt like a Scream movie.

The weird ending of Paranormal Activity 3 keeps popping in my head, and every time I do I confuse it with the weird ending to "Insidious," and then I think, wow, no, that was "Paranormal Activity 3."

The oscillating fan stuff was a masterstroke, even if the movies themselves are the feature equivalent of those screen pranks where someone stares at a rocking chair until Regan from "the Exorcist" suddenly pops up.

Just watched The Possession. I get that The Exorcist casts a long shadow, but there are ways to make a possession movie stand out a little and other than having the demon be a dybbuk, this one didn't. It wasn't bad, per se, just not very exciting.

There's something to be said about supernatural events excusing/erasing bad fathering in this movie, but I'm struggling to make coherent thoughts. It's most out there when the father is accused of abusing his daughter and cut off from seeing them, when it's really that the daughter is possessed (so he's just misunderstood all along) but also in the way that the father is the only one who can fix the possessed daughter/broken family even though his absence/disengagement was presented as the (invalid, apparently) reason that the family was broken up in the first place.

Another thing about SCREAM 4. The amount of white girls viciously stabbed in this thing was out of control. Just one after another, pretty bad stabbings too, without camp, and with very few interruptions of males or minorities. It was kind of overwhelming.

Also saw Rob Zombie's THE LORDS OF SALEM, which I highly recommend. It's not scary in the slightest, but there is still much to recommend. The lead character is very different than your typical female lead and the whole mood of the thing is fantastic. The final 20 minutes are really wonderful--just a satantic freakout that makes little sense and is all the better for it. And it doesn't wimp out at the end either.

The only thing that keeps the movie from being a minor classic is the cliche of the filthy, writhing witches. Very little in this movie feels cliche, so that was a significant fly in the ointment.

i liked it too, but think it could have used a stronger lead. smz was fine (surprisingly decent, really), but never all that interesting or compelling. and the final shots were kind of horrid, casting a slight pall on what came before.

agree that the mood & atmosphere are wonderful, and i loved the more offhand moments of interaction between smz & her strikingly rob-like costar, esp the bit where he puts on "venus in furs" and isn't sure that it's the right choice.

great third act and lots of memorable incidents along the way. easily my favorite r-zom film this side of house of 1,000 corpses, but still just a solid 'B'.

is 'dark skies' any good? it got mailed to us by mistake, not sure whether to bother with it or not

American Mary!!!

Slight spoiler: if you make rape a part of your plot, this is how to do it. Also rape revenge is sooooooo not my genre but I loved just about everything about this movie.

Something about the sensibility reminded me of May in a really good way.

sold

! yeah I'm in

We finally watched Snowtown Murders and it was waaay better than I anticipated. I say that because we tried to watch Beyond the Black Rainbow the night before and I was so severely bored/irritated at the plot-artsy shit ratio that I refused to watch more than an hour of it. Snowtown was really well done for a movie about such gruesome stuff. I mean y'all already know that but I had to chime in since that's the sort of irritating person I am.

Love black rainbow but yeah it is all vibe no plot

Hilarious ending too

i still think about snowtown - def straddled the line really well between artistic movie & a true crime movie

Totally. Also I thought the casting/acting in Snowtown was top notch. The roo scenes were a bit tough to stomach, but nowhere near what I expected.

the killer & the main kid were ridiculously convincing

cannot get over how the rest of the cast/extras were locals

skipped snowtown cuz i guessed it'd be pointlessly nasty & depressing. maybe i'll give it a shot after all...

it's really not
it's depressing, but not pointlessly

otm