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

So without muddying the water with all the decades of classics - what horror movies did it for you (so far) this year? It's almost halloween, and we all need some new stuff rather than watching Suspiria for the fourteenth time, right?

the fourteenth time high? it really makes a difference

well yeah

My surprise nominee (and none of these are going to be academy greats duh) is The Haunting In Connecticut which will not go down in history or anything, but was a totally capable jump scare flick. I have no idea why they promoted the movie the way that they did, the initial theatrical release campaign made it look like some sort of slow yawn slightly creepy snoozefest, when in fact it is 100% cut from the flash of CREEPY DUDE in the mirror/corner/behind the kid school of filmmaking.

plot holes? well yeah, duh, but who cares

This is prob a good place for me to fly my challop flag and say that as great as Let the Right One In is, it isn't really a horror film IMO.

i kinda want to see paranormal activity.

yeah me too! although i fear the possibility that it might be a hype triumph and disappoint.

Drag Me to Hell!

man, still haven't seen that. or even zombieland (which doesn't sound like horror).

all i've really seen in 2009 is drag me to hell and zombieland, which isn't really a horror movie either

xpost

i just watched drag me to hell last night, and as a old school Raimi fanboy it was a ton of fun (srsly sam it is amazing how much mileage you can get out of the power of people/corpses/demonwhatevers vomiting on other people). Curious to find out how it worked for people that weren't kind of the target audience, esp the classic moments of Raimi complete set up nonsense (the best of which had to be the "well duh why not use these ice skates i was about to pawn on my suspended anvil" idiot lunacy).

anybody see any of the big remakes (last house on the left, whichever one rob zombie did this year, etc)?

drag me to hell was so great -- just rewatched but seeing it in the theatre was amazing what with everyone laughing & screaming simultaneously

i think the only nasty cut-em-up flicks i like anymore come from france or asia, though the first 'hostel' and the first 'saw' were good. i have a ton of friends who are in the horror film community and they're all pretty cynical about it these days, everyone wants to turn shit pg-13.

no desire to see the halloween remake, but the trailer was fucking terrifying (i've long held that horror movie trailers are usually way scarier than the actual movie, you just get a succession of jumps and creepy images without any context or warning).

loved drag me... anyone seen paranormal activity yet?

or left bank?

the french stuff is just brutal, but its been some of my favorite stuff as well, im sure a bunch of the usual whiners are going to lump it into the totally dumb invented "torture porn" genre but it just has such a deep sense of misanthropic malice and self-loathing xpost

i have a ton of friends who are in the horror film community and they're all pretty cynical about it these days, everyone wants to turn shit pg-13.

― access flap (omar little), Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:09 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://tcmmoviemorlocks.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/famous-monsters-speak2.jpg

^^^ omar's friends

considering using my mod cheat powers to edit the title to include 2008 because so much great unheralded stuff came out last year

'inside' was just as rough thematically as it was in terms of gore imo, i.e. it's one of my favorite films of the past few years.

id make it the whole decade but i think that the hostel/saw/ring/rob zombie non remake stuff would just take over and we've talked about that a billion times already (i love all three of the originals, and will go to bat for hostel 2 as well)

me too hostel 2 is so underrated

really felt roth didn't want to cheap out with an easy sequel on that one

the saw series has turned into a joke imo

oh yeah saw 3 was particularly awful

never seen a saw movie (i am okay w this)

I didn't really feel Hostel when I watched it - though that might've been because I'd watched Wolf Creek the night before which ten times more brutal and believable. Still haven't seen any of the Saws.

martyrs was the best horror movie I've seen in years. it's french torture porn, and then again, it's not... which is what makes it so great. it totally transcends the genre and I can guarantee you won't guess where it's going.

eden park was pretty good. not the greatest film ever made but a nice patch on the "hunted by locals in the woods" genre.

Eden Lake you mean? I liked that a lot, some bits haunted me for a few days. Such a dark ending!

duh, yeah eden lake

there are a lot of recent horror films I wanted to see that I haven't gotten around to. off the top of my head: teeth, the uninvited, embodiment of evil, dead snow... and I guess the haunting in ct now...

anybody repping for inside in this thread needs to see martyrs stat

paranormal is not that great. download it and see it at home. more of a living room thing than a theatre experience.

I wanna see nightmare, too. it's an older film that just got released on DVD, kind of low budget but looks promising.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455983/

oh hey btw for the french horror heads, if you haven't seen frontier(s), thats pretty essential

Eden Lake is british, right? some great horror coming out of britain in the past few years, esp if you like a bit of comedy mixed with your gore (top recs would be Severance and Shrooms)

paranormal is not that great. download it and see it at home. more of a living room thing than a theatre experience.

― let them eat cankles (jeff), Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:33 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really? how so? i would think it would be a quintessential movie theater movie!!

I liked Drag me to Hell. Also liked Jennifer's Body actually. I think a lot of good recent US horror has been genre pastiche/comedy (I'd include Hostel ii).
The French/Asian stuff is nice because it still does well playing the eeriness/bone-gristle straight. I've only seen the first 2 Saws but had to stop because why bother when there's stuff like Martyrs out there.

dead snow is pretty half-assed tbh

theres a foreign language film that is a great companion piece to Eden Lake that i can't remember the name of right now and it is killing me.

Eden Lake is british, right? some great horror coming out of britain in the past few years, esp if you like a bit of comedy mixed with your gore

Yep, it's British. Not many laughs though.

Just grabbed some new 80s movies to watch. Can anyone vouch for these?

Combat Shock
Demented
Don't Go In The House
Night of the Demon

oh yeah wait, Ils (or Them) is the Eden Lake parallel. creeeeepy

haha yeah Eden Lake is def not chock full o' laughs

really? how so? i would think it would be a quintessential movie theater movie!!

Because...

SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
...it is pretty much just a Blair Witch clone and more fun than scary. For me, the experience was ruining by a theatre of 500 groaning teens.
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS
SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS SPOILERSSSSSSS

*ruined

combat shock is fucked up. also pretty interesting and pretty good.

thread title edit for the purposes of why not

In light of the new title I will mention Wolf Creek again.

dead snow is pretty half-assed tbh

yeah it looks totally cheeseball but I'm a huge shock waves fan so...

speaking of which, the aussies have def had a horror boom this decade as well xpost

ppl on letterboxd are hatin' but i loooooooooooooooved maxxxine, my favorite thing ti west's ever done, glorious sleaze

looking forward to seeing.

Longlegs seems to be getting a lot of hype

I'll be seeing a screening of it in two days via Alamo, with a (I guess) slightly pretaped chat with Perkins.

The First Omen had some of the gnarliest visuals I’ve seen in a good while.

I thought Maxxxine was a step down from Pearl, too much of it was too familiar

Ned, report back on the gore level - i want to take my father in law to see this (he’s a a huge horror fan) but while I’m usually ok with ultra disturbing, I can’t do movies with the gore level of like Saw, or Terrifier. Eg I’m ok with lots of blood but I don’t want to see loose intestines or fingernails being pulled out.

Noted, noted -- will report!

Maxxxine was a blast and I'll ride for it.

kinda want Kevin Bacon and Jason Sudeikis to have a terrible cajun accent competition

So, Longlegs: I thought it was very good, a fair amount of dry humor throughout that lands but this isn't a laff fest to put it mildly (also a couple of excellent jump scares). Per just1n3's request: there's gruesome killings for sure but nothing like what you say is your limit.

Osgood Perkins was in fact at our screening speaking after! A very dry sense of humor himself, unsurprisingly. Wanted to ask in the Q&A about Alicia Witt but I wasn't chosen, alas.

Thanks, Ned!!

longlegs was remarkable in maintaining tension and atmosphere. just felt bad and creepy the whole time. i do think i preferred when the movie made less sense, but here i am still thinking about it the next morning. amazing performances from everyone, especially alicia witt

Long callback to Robert Adam Gilmour's post, but I saw Le Vourdalak last night, and I thought it was brilliant. It makes a good companion piece to You Won't Be Alone, similar themes of slavic folklore, vampires, family, patriarchy and bigotry.

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

One of the things that stuck with me most is the strange softness of the cinematography, I can't recall seeing another film using that the whole way

Yes! And it deployed this alternately with sharper visuals, which made for an interesting aesthetic choice. The soft visuals in the countryside reminded of Walerian Borowczyk's La Bete.

Loved Longlegs and its bizarre DNA. really felt like Satanic cult horror was shopworn as recently as two years ago but studios are finding ways to make them fun again by simply going as gonzo as possible while thriving off of unsettling atmosphere and good, creepy performances.

Oddity was so good. The slowest of slow burns

Had a good time at Maxxxine. I'm more a De Palma fan than a horror fan, so this worked well. Would make a good double feature with Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in terms of setting. It felt a bit...rushed? But loved the dance floor with "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" and that whole sequence.

Has The Devil's Bath been discussed? I enjoyed it and especially the bleak color palette.

ready for this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vByn352TiJc

Yeah, read some amazing reviews of that and really want to see it.

if you want to be scared out of your mind AND have fun at a horror movie this year, i recommend oddity

loved Oddity. so many great moments. particularly the home movie where dead wife shows up on second watch and PUT. THEM. BACK. NOW!

i don't generally dress up for halloween but longlegs seems like a good costume option - white layered clothes, white powder face, maybe a wig if needed, lots of fun line readings to recreate

Xps thanks again Ned - I took my FIL to see Longlegs yesterday!

It definitely wasn’t as disturbing as I thought it was going to be, and LL wasn’t as creepy looking as I expected. But I really enjoyed it. The setting really intrigued me, something about it felt off. It just didn’t look like any American movie I’ve seen, the vibe felt distinctly Scandinavian. I can’t explain why or pinpoint anything in particular, except that it sharply reminded me of some video art installation I saw 25yrs ago (which I regret not making more of an effort to retain the artist name because that imagery has stuck with me).

A couple with a girl who was maybe 5yo walked in during the scene where LL is bashing his face against the table and it took them a little too long to figure out they were in the wrong theater. A guy a few rows ahead of us spent the entire movie coughing like chunks of lung were coming out or snoring like a chainsaw.

Sounds like Longlegs should have taken out that guy. (Slightly more seriously, glad you liked it! I'm not going as far as calling it Suspiria level on this front -- and obviously radically different aesthetic goals -- but you're correct re the atmosphere as setting an overarching tone.)

I really enjoyed this piece on Longlegs. (Having read a more spoiler-y review I'm still deciding whether to actually see it or not, but that piece — from a blog I've been reading for a while — is interesting.)

idk if it requires that much thought, it's a really well-made horror movie and it's about 90 mins long

i also don't expect to see a movie with better performances this year. people can't seem to figure out whether cage is terrifying or hilarious and that's imo his sweet spot

Making T. Rex be ominous -- especially their most famous song hands down via the end credits -- is a crazy stroke of genius.

Seems like I’m the only one around here who didn’t like Longlegs? Felt too much to me like a rewrite of Silence of the Lambs that threw in occult stuff and scary dolls for good measure. I was never frightened, and Cage’s performance is waaaaay too over the top.

Obv. the Silence comparison is warranted but shortly after I saw Longlegs I read a comparison to Cure (ie, this film) and I found that way more appropriate -- Cure itself is obviously post-Silence but in its own particular zone. As for Cage, having just read Zach Schonfeld's book on his early years, that's...just what he does. And often very well when the material suggests it.

the procedural is the framework of the film, and every procedural since 1991 is indebted to silence of the lambs. but it uses that framework to enter much thornier, messier territory than lambs. like, for instance, if i were to make a direct comparison, i'd say the thomas harris novels/movies are about how being a victim of abuse turns you into a monster, and longlegs is about how the family that permits and then hides the abuse is the real monster. and in terms of atmosphere and craft, can't say i thought the movies were similar in almost any respect

also realizing i should've started a thread for longlegs at this point, plenty to chew on in it, been thinking about it for weeks, like its glued to my mind with some kind of sticky residue

thing about Longlegs I liked is, look, the satanic demon worshipper trope has been overdone to the point of monotony by now, which is funny because there really is no such thing IRL, so a lot of films made about a phenomena that only existed in the fears of conservative white people in the latter half of the 20th century.

so when you do one of these films, you have to do it in a way that's interesting aesthetically, in terms of mood, pacing, and of course you do need to go OTT as possible during the climax because grounded attempts at dealing w/ devil worship and such is always boring. I think this movie succeeded on all levels, also it captured the feeling of the 90s fairly well (was that when it took place? was guessing so basedo n the Clinton photo in the FBI head office.)

Seems like I’m the only one around here who didn’t like Longlegs?

same here, though it was pretty bland. more of a supernatural police procedural than horror too? felt kinda cheated by the marketing, those images are pretty scary! but didn't get much of that outta the movie itself, personally. all would have been forgiven (for me) if the movie went big at the end but we got a tedious explainer that squashes all ambiguity instead? ehhhhh

didn’t hate it but it’s not even in the same ballpark as cure (for me!). that one nailed the lynchian dread thing.

i liked nic cage (but could’ve used more cage!) but mandy still the modern horror nic cage mvp imo

we got a tedious explainer that squashes all ambiguity instead?

Mm, I didn't feel that, honestly. If anything it almost seemed like it was increasingly worse, like there was no bottom to where things could go.

increasingly worse *and here’s exactly how and why* was what i got out of it. maybe this is just me but the whole last act felt like the secrets of a mystery being explained and keeping things mysterious is usually always scarier!

the cabin visit sequence was much more effective than anything before or after imo

I’m not going to go beat by beat but honestly the suggestion of the very end was that there was no way out, and that wherever Longlegs himself got his power was resolutely unexplained. It just was.

*vague spoilers!*

sure. what soured me was the stuff before then. dolls delivered by nuns, possessions, and so on. don’t care, takes up precious time, not particularly interesting or scary to watch unfold, and cheapens what came before.

for me tho - i get that this could be a me thing. i love ridiculous nonsense horror that barely makes sense.

and along those lines, i’ll admit that i also wanted it to be nastier too. that’s part of the “feeling cheated by the marketing” thing i mentioned earlier, i guess.

actually felt a weird nostalgia for the torture horror era walking out. they mostly sucked but at least those movies made me squirm!

i was kinda deflated by the "here's exactly what's happening" scene too, except i agree with ned that it doesn't really explain that much. and i kinda think the film has to do that to function on the level it wants to (imo it's fine for a movie about child abuse to clearly state "this is a movie about child abuse")

i had very limited experience with the marketing of this movie. maybe watched one of the youtube clips. it was good but like i am a big fan of always putting the marketing out of your mind when you sit down to watch a film

the dolls were great too imo. that's an element of the film i could think about for days. i think ppl maybe stop at the "creepy doll" factor, thinking, oh, another horror movie with a creepy doll. but i think the scene where they surface the first doll in the barn is just like terrifyingly uncanny, like she's all bound up in there, unable to move or feel, in a way i think is supposed to mirror like... the experience of being a child growing up in a family.

and the metal sphere in their heads that makes the droning sound? god. that's what movies are all about

loved the metal sphere, felt akin to the orb inside the tulpas from twin peaks s3

the particular quality of the smoke that rose from their heads after being shot added to the tp s3 feeling

I wasn't too bothered by the whole exposition monologue, like yeah sometimes it can be disappointing in horror to get an infodump via narration as opposed to letting the revelations happen more organically over a longer period of time, but technically speaking most of the details regarding how they managed to infiltrate homes to kill victims without signs of forced entry were divulged in 15 seconds of Longlegs's interrogation, where he mentions the "you won a Bible" scheme, the weird telepathic silver ball scene during the autopsy and Longlegs asking the FBI agent to talk to her mother. perhaps there wasn't a need to actually illustrate it all on screen but it seemed more interested in explaining WHY she joined the Satanic cult rather than 'this is how the sausage was made', other than explaining the role of the dolls a little more clearly.

mostly pointing out that she was not a willing volunteer but conscripted to prevent having her daughter sacrificed. anyway for me horror is just as much style/atmosphere than anything and that sequence was creepy as Hell.

it still leaves the question to how Longlegs was managing to do his work prior to conscripting help, as he was already well into the ritual at that point.

I also liked the metal sphere! good call. it's hard to hate on ominous spheres and orbs. and that first doll scene in the barn too, yeah. reminded me a bit of sion sono's strange circus, which is a very rough one I wouldn't necessarily recommend if you haven't seen it, but anyway, kinda similar 'here's a pretty literal plot device/illustration of how children are very much trapped in traumatic situations'. y'all are bringing me back a bit...

I keep saying this but this is maybe a me thing but the teasing out of the satanic elements and the subdued horror elements in general got me amped for a big blowout ending like, say, the devil's rain as I was watching. what I got was very much not that. which I guess I should have expected/wanted since this isn't a movie starring william shatner and ernest borgnine (then again, nic cage...)