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

Horror crew who have Shudder, what do you recommend? I signed up thinking I'd watch Mandy and cancel before my free trial is over, but it's cheap enough that I might keep it for a month or two, maybe watch the Argento and Bava films.

if you like mandy and haven't seen beyond the black rainbow imo do that. also: fulci's the beyond and zombie; one of my favorite slasher sequels ever hello mary lou: prom night 2; abel ferrara's feminist masterpiece ms. 45; gaspar noe's biggest influence which is 1000x better than any gaspar noe film, angst; all the phantasm movies (they're missing phantasm 2 unfortunately); starry eyes is a body horror that freaked me out so much i never want to watch it again; everyone has to watch death bed: the bed that eats at least once

also my favorite movie the exorcist iii

and one probably not for everyone but: tense dreamy identity crisis thriller always shine is one of my favorite movies of the past few years

Thanks! I have a pretty weak constitution when it comes to horror but I want to check some things out. I watched Mandy this evening and liked it a lot.

ok then i take back starry eyes and maybe angst (less scary than stomach-churning) but the rest definitely

omg there is so much to recommend on shudder -- it would be easier to recommend if we knew what you like/are looking for?! :)

beyond mandy, i mean

oh! i really enjoyed the channel zero series -- all three seasons tbh

i've heard almost exclusively good things about channel zero, i should finally check it out

each season has its charms so far -- 2 and 3 in particular (2 thematically and 3 visually -- the Return to Oz factor is very high iirc) i guess there are two more seasons that have aired but i haven't seen. i kind of can't believe this show was on tv?

I'm more or less okay with gore, I like tension but I'm a little wary of jump scares. I'm still trying to figure out what I like after a lifetime of avoiding horror. I watched Audition many years ago and thought it was a terrific film but it left me a mess for a few days and I haven't sought out anything like it.

Things I have watched/plan to watch on Shudder, some of them familiar favorites: Bava and Argento, check; Carpenter's Halloween and The Fog; Ghostwatch; Re-Animator; Short Night of Glass Dolls; the Fulci movies BradNelson mentions; The Old Dark House; Daughters of Darkness; Lords of Salem

Shudder just added some King-related titles and I have watched/will watch Silver Bullet, Creepshow, and Salem's Lot

obv most of these are pre- rather than post-2005

Does shudder as subcomponent of Amazon Prime have all the same selections as shudder standalone?

Is that the original Old Dark House? I've probably seen 75% of the horror movies released in the '30s and that's probably top five from that decade imo.

Starry Eyes def recommended, but iirc it's more unnerving than like gory or whatever. If you can stomach Mandy, you can probably stomach that one.

yes, Shudder has the 1932 Old Dark House with Karloff ... I agree it's one of the best 1930s horror movies

recently I read the novel it's based on, J.B. Priestley's Benighted, and was surprised to discover that the movie is a faithful adaptation

Does the novel shed any light on the casting choice Whale made for the father?

no, I think that was all Whale

I didn’t think much of the Strangers sequel, unfortunately. Hendricks was wasted and it had very little of the first one’s menace and tension.

Let The Corpses Tan is on Amazon Prime Video, in the U.K. at least.

i suffered through Corpses. fun style, for a few minutes

Switched that off after twenty mins, despite liking Amer and SCOYBT

I think they’re onto an interesting thing but they’re never really pulling it off.

That’s a shame, I’ll give it a go.

Rewatching The House of the Devil (2009), looking v crisp in BluRay, and I'm loving the early Cronenberg aesthetic (def. seeing why multipele reviews mention The Brood). Good, unsettling stuff.

Also, Greta Gerwig!

And this tune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHYIGy1dyd8

The creature and the performances in Mara aren't enough to outweigh its already-seen mixture of The Grudge / Ring / The Boogeyman / etc.

Unfriended Dark Web has a decent idea and cool resolution, but the visuals (pop-up windows for actors & info with small text) quickly lost my interest. The first one - supernatural plot - I thought was decent enough to keep me engaged.

Both library borrows, so less a dissatisfied feeling, more checkboxing the genre. Besides Mandy sticking with me, the last five minutes of Kin (sci-fi, not horror) is the best thing I've seen lately.

"Revenge" is super lurid, trashy, ridiculous, OTT stylized, and OK, not really horror or even remotely suspenseful but it is pretty gory and in the end probably perfect midnight movie fare.

watching Endless and Annihilation back to back highlighted all the things the former does right and the latter does poorly.

that's rough, but i get it

rough in the sense that it's hard on Annihilation or that I'm not making my point clear?

the first. though i also think that Endless is slept on (and like Annihilation, it being a messy, imperfect but ultimately cool mystery)

I noticed there's a remake of blairw proj. Wtf. Is it as crap as I think it is?

I'm reading the Devil's Advocates series. So awesome.

xp, yeah I get it. Annihilation's gender flip of the standard "four guys confront the horror" trope seemed the only interesting twist for me. Endless is definitely messy and features an unnecessary and poorly structured first fifteen minutes or so (also, due respect, but Justin Benson shouldn't be starring in his movies)... but it is far more evocative with far less in the same general field. TBH, the Resolution callback had me bouncing off the couch so my enthusiasm is at least partially due to the stylistic approach being more wry and self-aware but hooooo boy could Annihilation have used a dose of self-awareness. Made Interstellar look carefree.

The Blair Witch remake, which I haven't seen, was directed by Adam Wingard. People were psyched about a followup to You're Next and The Guest, and it was originally called The Woods. But then it was revealed to be a secret Blair Witch reboot, and it's supposed to be terrible, so terrible that even Wingard has seemed sort of apologetic about it and almost acts like he was blackmailed into doing it. I think he did a movie after that that no one saw/liked, but then they dumped a bunch of money at his house to do Godzilla vs. King Kong, so who the fuck knows what kind of favor he did or was owed.

it's not a remake. It's a direct sequel to the first move

but it is crap, yeah

Or is it a ... soft reboot?

it's a sequel. it's not "good" but i enjoyed it in the theater regardless

not entirely sure why you keep talking about things you haven't seen as if you've seen them

Blair Witch '16 was definitely a disappointment compared to Wingard's other films. It was... OK. I suppose if you were an fan of the original you'd be even more disappointed; he had one or two interesting ideas, the rest was pretty mediocre. I still haven't seen his Death Note movie for Netflix which is also supposed to be bad, but I'll watch it someday. Surprised he got the Kong gig afterwards, but he's definitely a capable director - I still love the hell out of The Guest, and You're Next was really fun.

xpost Because it's not rocket science? Because when it came out and I saw some really negative reviews I read about the movie I was never going to see and learned why people didn't like it?

I did see Blair Witch 2, that movie absolutely sucked and I have no idea why that guy made it.

Also, the story of The Blair Witch reboot remake sequel whatever *is* the story, the movie itself came and went without a trace. It was pretty anti-climactic. But who made it and how it was made in secret is what people remember.

they put out the first trailer as "The Woods" and gave up the beans a few months later

btw - re: Endless - i was so into that, I went back to watch Resolution and was sorely disappointed; they waited WAY too long to get to the good stuff.
Endless is a rare example of something retconning the ending of the original movie and making it way better

Wingard got tabbed for G vs KK on the strength of The Guest, I think. The responsibility for helping turn Dan Stevens into a legit Hollywood contender didn't go unnoticed. And Maika Monroe, on a lesser scale.

they put out the first trailer as "The Woods" and gave up the beans a few months later

― Nhex, Thursday, January 24, 2019 9:58 AM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still really wish i could see the woods instead

Death Note on Netflix is vomit inducing. Very very bad.

Godzilla (as we all remember like it was yesterday) came out in 2014, like The Guest. So you think (xpost) maybe Wingard got picked for Godzilla back then? Hmm. (Googles some more) OK, looks like the G v KK movie got announced in 2015, even before the release of KK and (clearly) the upcoming King of the Monsters, but Wingard didn't get named until 2017. My guess is like Marvel and Star Wars and Jurassic Park they were looking for any semi-competent and cheap genre director, but I think it's still weird, given his track record, that Wingard should even be in the mix. Maybe it'll be his comeback?

I think AW's track record is that of someone who has a distinct enough visual style who works well with a cast and he's shown he can do a lot with a relatively low budget, i mean The Guest wasn't El Mariachi but it was a mere $5 million, and people really love it. Not to mention You're Next was just shy of a million (it did flop, somewhat surprisingly...)

the Blair Witch reboot was decent enough but I think got a harsher rap than it deserved due to the fact that no one ever wanted to see a BWP film ever again.

Someone I kinda sorta trust said Hagazussa was better than The Witch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_last886efA

As someone who really enjoyed the first <i>Happy Death Day</i>... I really enjoyed the new one!
Yeah, it's dumb, somewhat indefensible as a unnecessary retread, but I love time loop gimmicks and you can just see the screenwriters having fun with this damn thing. Still surprised they didn't just completely abandon the first movie, <i>Butterfly Effect</i>-style, but then I sort of admire their dedication to HOW MUCH they stuck to the characters and setting of the original. I don't feel like Jessica Roche was the main draw of the original film (enough to do a whole sequel around her - so it does kind of spread out to the other characters more) but I'll give her credit, she gives her full effort in all of the slasher/soap/farce segments. (They went even broader with the comedy, leaning way into it this time, usually it worked...)

you can just see the screenwriters having fun with this damn thing

is there info about ghostwriters out? based on the credited writer of the first one, I assumed all the good stuff came from Landon