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

most of the ppl i follow on letterboxd love it and i implicitly trust them

yeah seeing @d@m n@yman and j0sh lew1s both rave about it tipped me off

for me it was a five star review from albert pyun scholar and total genius sydn3y

i was so annoyed that the most popular (somewhat positive) review was by sean fennessey that i almost started a thread where ppl can post the writers they think are so bad

does anybody think that's a necessary thread or am i asking for a fight

necessary? not at all. fun and funny? probably

actually I would just love a thread about letterboxd and its weirdness

oh whoops i started the stupider thread

simon you should start a letterboxd thread so i can go on and on about the genius of nathaxnne

letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

joe bob did a valentine's day special. first film is tammy and the t-rex, which is not really a horror film. still, it's the best movie i've ever seen

oh wow paul walker is just a tiny baby boy in this!

man with a better script (a much better one) I would have loved the hell out of ready or not

The Empty Man is terrific! A strange, almost-avant cosmic horror masquerading as a conventional creepypasta flick. Really well-directed. And as someone mentioned on Letterboxd, the first movie to be set in the Twin Peaks The Return extended universe

yeah I yelped when he turned that piece of paper around

also I gotta say, I've been enjoying James Badge Dale as a low key character actor for a long time and it was nice to get to see him cut loose in this

oh, i updated this thread with a pre-2006 movie bc the other film in joe bob's marathon was the love witch, which i'd never seen. impressively crafted to the point where the aesthetic was ultimately kind of distancing, but i also spent the better part of this afternoon thinking about the depiction of gender roles in the film and feel like it was a valuable experience just for that

I liked it a lot for that reason. it could have been a legit classic with significantly tighter editing

brad u were right about thelma, although the "yass thelma slay dad" stuff I see in reviews is making me wonder if I watched the same movie

lol i mean that's letterboxd for you

what a good movie right? i have very specific qualms with it (flashback scene comes out of nowhere; overriding metaphor of the film potentially a little too neat) but they all disintegrate against its portrayal of both intense closetedness and queer desire

also it's just stupid beautiful

The underwater and dream sequences were some of the most genuinely disorienting I've seen in a long time (and also tie the movie to Let the Right One In, intentionally or not, I'm guessing not)

the fate of thelma's little brother one of the meanest fakeouts I've seen in ages as well

D@v!d 3hrl!ch wrote in IndieWire that Thelma was a "an ominous, unnerving, and strangely powerful thriller about the most devious of human desires" and "consistently keyed in to the persuasive power of the female body."

I might have never cracked it as a film critic but maybe that's fine if this is the result lol

... most devious of human desires??? the persuasive power of the female body???? men have got to be stopped

the most devious of human desires: having a huge lesbian crush on your cool friend and being unable to deal with it bc of your repressive religious upbringing

i read the full review to make sure the excerpts weren't enormous distortions bc of the nature of being excerpted

Lust is just the tip of the iceberg, though “Thelma” is consistently keyed in to the persuasive power of the female body, and how the strength of physical attraction can sometimes be complicated by its shallowness.

wHAT

lmao whyyyyy

... most devious of human desires??? the persuasive power of the female body???? men have got to be stopped

see people think thelma's dad is the bad guy but then I think "what if this is how dav1d erl1ch's dad feels"

thelma’s dad held her hand over a candle, he’s bad. but the real villain is repression

Watched Come Play, and liked it. Bloodless, jump scares, plot is divorced parents of a special needs boy whose phone brings up an app story monster who's lonely and wants a friend. Appreciated how they worked the cliche 'bully beats up challenged kid' angle, and ending was better than I expected.

Dogs Don't Wear Pants - This really isn't a horror film (but I just thought I'd follow it up here), just a slightly dark (Finnish) romantic comedy and the tooth pulling scene isn't as bad as I had heard. This isn't trying to be be realistic about the BDSM scene or convince anyone it's a healthy place, the characters cross the line into criminal territory quite regularly.
It's enjoyable and it looks good, but by the end I felt it was just a bit too simple, like surprisingly straightforward. I didn't remember Krista Kosonen in Bladerunner 2049 but she was pretty cool in this.

Watched Come Play, and liked it

Been hearing about this one since last Fantasia in July!

Has anyone else watched His House? Really liked it, it managed to avoid nearly every horror movie cliche of the last 40 years and still stay scary.

There seem to have been a few movies (relatively speaking) in the vein of "Come Play" lately, haven't there been? "The Babadook" a couple of years ago, "Z" last year or so ...

watched Errementari last night. A Basque-language fantasy-horror steeped in Catholicism. It was okay, kind of ridiculous in places. Watchable though

we watched Saint Maud last night. It was alright, not the greatest movie I've seen. I wish people would just stop using balding/bald women as shorthand for horror. Why not pick on people who need prosthetic limbs or false teeth for a change, where are the scary female characters without noses, without ears?

(i am not serious about picking on those people, just tired of lazy shorthand)

saint maud was scary at points, mostly pretty slow... idk. i didn't really get the point of it, or what it was trying to say, if anything - like, in the sense that hereditary was a meditation on trauma. it just felt like watching a superhero movie or something to me.

goodnight mommy (2014) was gruesome and gripping and rewarding

the wailing (2016) was loooong but so much fun

other favourites of the decade:
raw
swallow
host
creepy
berberian sound studio
the killing of a sacred deer

Lucky (just added to Shudder) is one of the most unique and unsettling movies I've seen since, uh, The Empty Man. what a gutsy little movie.

really? i found it extremely confused and unsure of how to clarify its story. Several great ideas floating around but none of them ever fully arrived at, muddied by poor acting and wooden dialogue imo.

I didn't have a problem with the performances or dialogue! But I'd like to rewatch before I say anything more.

i suppose i would too if i planned to rewatch it! I think there were at least three good films worth of ideas in there but this couldn't follow anything through to the point where it clarified its aims. Was it a self-reflective comment about how media terrorizes women through constant depictions of brutality? Was it a kafkaesque horror story about how capitalism and monogamy locks us into a cycle of violence against women? Was it a critique of the women's movement and the lack of common interests across generations and willingness to support one another? It felt like it was trying to do all that but it couldn't quite decide how to land a punch one way or the other so there was tons of meandering from idea to idea. Like, yeah: i see the echoes in the tableau of lovers in bed and murderer and victim splayed out on the floor. Congrats but to what end are you presenting those images? Needed more time in the oven imo.

I'm fine with presenting those ideas as an unresolved mess because that's how they feel IRL - the confusion/conflation/whatever felt like a knowing and purposeful feature rather than a bug, to me. Certain specific moments in the script gave me the distinct impression that they knew exactly what they were doing here.

there's an argument to be made there i suppose but this didn't feel to me like some sort of Lynchean fever dream where there was an underlying logic to everything. It just stacked absurdity on absurdity until it started breaking and falling apart. That they decided to make that falling apart a feature and not a bug in the final reel didn't make the intent any clearer as far as i could see.

the intent felt crystal clear to me but I'll refrain from saying any more for now. hopefully this little discussion will tempt others into checking it out!

Shudder was such utter shit for a while that I cancelled my sub. Oh well.

tbf most horror movies ARE shit. idk, lately whenever I take a chance on something new / new-to-me on there, I more often than not end up vibing with it.

yeah it's a genre with a very low hit rate for me too.

in a way that's why I like horror, cos finding a good horror film = like discovering an artifact on an archaelogical dig

I have a low base of expectation and a love for the genre which means even a half decent horror feels like a personal favourite

This is probably discussed somewhere in this thread but I’m not going to load the whole thing looking for it — last night we watched The Wailing (2016, Na Hong-jin), and it was super long for a horror film but also pretty engrossing, very vividly made and with enough twists to keep it interesting. As I often find with K- and J- horror, I’m still trying to sort out its various strands, but its quasi-incoherence didn’t detract from the experience.