New takes on classic horror monsters/villains

We've had the rebirth of the vampire (Buffy, Twilight, True Blood, etc)
We've had the rebirth of the zombie (28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Zombieland, Shawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, etc)
We're re-inventing serial killers nonstop (far too many to list)
There's even been a mini witch/wizard revamp (Harry Potter)

What is next? Where can we take other iconic horror figures, such as mummies, werewolves, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, etc?

dig this idea

i'd like to see a decent frankenstein or jekyll/hyde.

werewolves have gotten a kinda reboot tho thx to twilight and that benecio del toro movie no one saw

Also the BBC show "Being Human" (which is fucking excellent BTW)

i feel like a decent frankenstein reboot seems really hard to do for some reason. idk part of it is prob that the story itself is sorta specific vs vampires/zombies which you can pretty much place in a bazillion situations/generative backstories.

Time for a brainy, eco-aware movie reboot of Swamp Thing, à la Alan Moore.

Well really, it's back to the basic idea of man creating life, correct? So remove the specificity of the Frankenstein story and suddenly you're also encompassing the realm of stuff like Species, Mimic and Splice; it's pretty easy to do thought experiments down that axis that would improve upon/do something different with the core idea.

(was an xpost btw)

Legion took the totally awesome idea of angelic possession and made it into something really silly.

Best animating-dead-tissue movie is Re-Animator.

I dunno that Frankenstein is *that* hard to transfigure from one time to a new setting - in terms of the more general themes of reanimation of the dead, the limits of science gone wrong. It's something that still resonates, in fact possibly resonates more with the advancement of science and surgery in some ways. Though, that said, you can see parallels in movies that aren't specifically *called* Frankenstein monsters, but of course right now I'm blanking on any specific examples.

x-posts duh

who could play frankenstein?

Best animating-dead-tissue movie is Re-Animator.

I retract this fully. It's obviously Young Frankenstein. What the hell was I thinking.

frankenstein = blade runner

I was thinking things like The Fly = Dr Frankenstein merges with his monster?

frankenstein = one of the central themes of fiction, the conflict between ambition and human fallibility. One could argue that Frankenstein (the novel) contains some essentially Buddhist ideas, as well.

I was trying to bend The Fly into the Frankenstein paradigm but it doesn't quite work for me because I don't see the main hubris there tied up in creating life, rather in science in general; it's more an excuse for body horror than anything else and that phrase is so nebulous that it could describe practically anything (see for example Cabin Fever).

Ooh... Aqua Buddha, The Movie!

guys reanimated dead flesh is like a general monster fixture

i mean zombies/frankenstein/mummy/vampires are all that, the key is science reanimating dead flesh but uh 28 weeks later does exactly that and no one calls it a frankenstein movie.

apart from the serial killer ones, all of the "new takes" you list have appeal because they offer a look at a whole different parallel society, either a hidden one or ours after some disaster. that's kind of different from a one-off creature feature kind of setup that happens in "our" world

I wouldn't mind seeing a new take on some Poe stories - The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher

(Me, I'm waiting for Nu Cthulhu myself, but we've already had a thread about that recently.)

yeah creature features are kinda dead in the water at this point, were not likely to have a new blob or black lagoon anytime soon - although weirdly that shit flourished in the mid late 80's.

b-b-but, The Host?

i should clarify and say that the supernatural exception there seems to be ghost movies which are by nature small and insular in scope, and those have been pretty strong for a long long time now thx to ring/grudge/paranormal activity stuff.

also theres def lots of claustrophobic non-societal creature horror out there but almost none of it goes mainstream, which is what im thinking were talking about here.

Somebody call Del Toro! We need answers here, ppl!

would say that frankenstein-type stories are very much alive (ha) today. hi dere mentioned a few, vincenzo natali's splice being a good recent example. not really popular in the sense that vampires and zombies are, though. it's been suggested that this is because the classic frankenstein story/monster is too specific, allowing insufficient room for reinvention. perhaps, but another problem is that reinvented versions of the story don't share a core mythology or brand name. splice and the fly are of the same horror type, but there's no commonly understood set of rules for monsters of this type, and no easily-recognized name like "zombie movie" or "vampire movie". same is probably true of jeckyll/hyde stories. werewolves seem the most ripe for reinvention, but no one's made a good werewolf movie in quite some time (ginger snaps was 10 years ago).

the host is a weird case tho - it had a ton of power when it was out but there really wasnt any followup cultural vibe, maybe because cloverfield sorta stole some thunder from it.

I think if you're going to put together Splice and The Fly, the common thread goes from "man creating life" to "science is evil"

we need some big summer blockbuster style cannibal movies

Michael Bay's Cannibal Holocaust

hard to call creature features "dead" what with stuff like the mist, host, cloverfield, etc. turning decent profits. throw in sci-fi films like district 9, and i'd say they're alive and well.

i had some hope for a decent demonic possession revival for a while, but the reins seem to have been taken over by the goofy (drag me to hell) and the shitty (the last 10 movies with exorcism in the title)

it's more an excuse for body horror than anything else

Cronenberg has said that it's also a relationship metaphor. Something like, "It's about how in a relationship, one person always turns into a monster." Which is really weird and paranoid, but I can see it.

I was gonna say, Skyline looks to be a major upcoming release so I don't think you can call the creature feature DOA

the other thing that complicates things is that these are really blurry lines - Splice is a great example, because i see the creature feature argument, but its also def working on some aspects of possession mythos and at the same time working the "zombie bite u u become zombie" angle as well.

xpost skyline also looks like district 9's shittier dumber big brother to me so ehhh

xpost skyline also looks like district 9's shittier dumber big brother to me so ehhh

otm -- the commercial/trailer does not make this look interesting, but I'm probably not in the target demo, so

well, the fly inverts frankenstein. it's about an overly ambitious scientist whose reach exceeds his grasp and who winds up creating a horrible monster. that to me is the essence of the frankenstein story. sure, there's no "reanimation of dead tissue" business in it, and it's a stretch to say it's about the creation of new life, but the basic themes and mechanics are the same. reanimator is a more direct interpretation of the frankenstein story, but it's no more like shelley's frankenstein than the fly is.

frankly i blame the fact that the thing remake and alien were so influential on modern horror directors for a lot of this genre jumble - theres gold in the old body snatchers trope and these dudes know it and are working it to death

Splice is a great example, because i see the creature feature argument, but its also def working on some aspects of possession mythos and at the same time working the "zombie bite u u become zombie" angle as well.

uh, have you seen it. cuz these latter two story types aren't present in it at all. she's just a made creature, not possessed on any level, and not a carrier. unless you count biological reproduction as a version of the zombie plague story type. maybe i'm misunderstanding your point...

contenderizer and Wheal otm re: Fly/Frankenstein

Skyline actually looks like the exact opposite of District 9 from what I know of D9 (note to self: watch D9 this weekend)

creatures/people are infected with X, slowly a group of survivors realizes what is happening but is it too late and can everyone else be trusted.

where X=parasite/alien/demonic possession/rage virus/zombie bite/werewolf bite/vampire bite/etc

xpost oh hahahaha shit i said Splice and i was talking about Splinter sorry about that

i have not seen Splice and know v v little about it.

So long as it wasn't a Michael Bay joint or something, I would totally get behind a 3-D CGI update of The Blob.

and yeah HI DERE you should see D9 as soon as possible, its worth the hype for sure imo

It has been on my "must see" list since it first came out in theaters, I've just been lazy.

Something that I thought conceptually was a really interesting amalgamation of the demonic possession story and the voodoo doll idea was Mirrors, which apparently in execution was so stone stupid that everyone involved with it should be deeply embarrassed.

One word, guys:

manticore.

Stop it. You say "manticore" and I think Many Waters and I start to giggle.

(book not film, but still.)

No one in the West has really tried to do a horror film using mythology in recent times, right? (lol except "300")

Oh man if I was talking l'Engle I would have been like "is it time for a new age revival of Fantastic Voyage with shrimp-mouse mitochondria? I am thinking: yes."

notice that many of the the most popular and durable horror movie types posit that "there are monsters in the world," and concern monsters that have persisted in human imagination for quite a long time, creatures that come with a folkloric backstory: ghouls (zombies), werewolves, vampires, demons and ghosts. witches and warlocks would once have figured in, but have fallen out of favor for various reasons.

interesting that the more modern monster pantheon (monster-like human & semi-human serial killers, aliens and creatures created by science) is just as popular, but the stories involved aren't bound by mythology.

the manticore is an excellent novel by robertson davies

There are plenty of modern horror movies about demonic possession, though.

I would actually kinda LOVE to see a modern well handled CGI-based version of the Time Quintet because it's always been practically unfilmable.

But the problem would always be, the handling of the religious elements, like how to stop them turning into heavy handed morality tales because they are so much MORE than that.

But yeah, shrimp mouse mitochondria FTW. Also Cherubim. Hey! Let's not even get into the various guises of angel representations in recent films ::shudders:: (Have there been any decent angels in movies since Wings of Desire even? I suppose I should see Constantine but I've heard nothing but terrible things about it.)

re mythology: There was a moment where I thought The Last Winter was going to actually dig into the Wendigo myth but lucky for me the reveal was infinitely stupider than that.

Constantine is pretty much non-stop terribleness but Rachel Weisz and Tilda Swinton were both good in it.

No one in the West has really tried to do a horror film using mythology in recent times, right?

I didn't see Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm movie, but was that one of those?

creatures/people are infected with X, slowly a group of survivors realizes what is happening but is it too late and can everyone else be trusted.

where X=parasite/alien/demonic possession/rage virus/zombie bite/werewolf bite/vampire bite/etc

xpost oh hahahaha shit i said Splice and i was talking about Splinter sorry about that

oh, that makes more sense. just watched splinter. dug it, but it wasn't great. interesting (as you suggested earlier) that so many horror movies in the wake of romero's zombies and carpenter's the thing play on the parasitic/possession angle. which yeah, ties back to demons, vampires and werewolves - the idea that monsterism is something that's waiting to happen to you, to us. creates these paranoid stories where one must be constantly on guard against impurity or evil.

we think of monster stories as concerning creatures that are waiting to "get you," and generally imagine that the getting in question involves killing, maybe eating. but stories about monsters who want to make you one of them (perhaps in the process of trying to eat you) are just as common. and it's an illusory difference anyway. being eaten is literally how we become something other than ourselves.

xpost: oh my god that movie was dreadful. like so bad i kinda cant remember if it was mythology based or not.

there was that sigorney weaver snow white a few years ago tho right?

I would love to see a movie in the vein of Deep Blue Sea and Piranha, only instead of the fish creatures trying to eat us, have them capture us for random gross experiments and end with them climbing out of the water wearing disgusting misshapen human suits as step one of their conquest of the land.

huh the more i think about the sate of modern horror (esp in light of what contenderizer is saying right there) the more it becomes obv that we're really in a hostel vs zombie standoff - the fear of dangerous others vs the fear of dangerous self

There are plenty of modern horror movies about demonic possession, though.

oh yeah, i know. but they're not really modern stories. they're instead modern retellings of older stories, and they're bound by a clear set of folkloric/mythic rules. similar in that sense to vampire, werewolf and zombie stories.

i wanted to make a movie where a sea monster attacks an offshore oil rig, but then i thought the symbolism might be too cryptic

only instead of the fish creatures trying to eat us, have them capture us for random gross experiments and end with them climbing out of the water wearing disgusting misshapen human suits as step one of their conquest of the land.

― lol tea partiers and their fat fingers (HI DERE), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 12:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this is stuart gordon's dagon, but only sort of. lots of fish creatures in human suits, though. great movie, one of my all-time favorites.

Cronenberg has said that it's also a relationship metaphor. Something like, "It's about how in a relationship, one person always turns into a monster." Which is really weird and paranoid, but I can see it.

― kenan, Wednesday, November 3, 2010 2:40 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark

i would think it would be something more like "two people merging together into something monstrous"

huh the more i think about the sate of modern horror (esp in light of what contenderizer is saying right there) the more it becomes obv that we're really in a hostel vs zombie standoff - the fear of dangerous others vs the fear of dangerous self

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 3:13 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

also i think hostel is as much about the "dangerous self" as zombie movies. in fact you could equally say zombie movies are about "dangerous others."

which is why things like frankenstein seem a little hard to shoehorn in there to me - theres a more complicated nuanced thing going on that doesnt hit the modern horror button quite so hard

xpsots

there was that sigorney weaver snow white a few years ago tho right?

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 12:10 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

remember liking this, but also being a little disappointed in it. saw a preview on an old videotape the other day, though, and it looked marvelous. should watch it again.

i agree with you on hostel being about the dangerous self on a deeper reading of it, but i dont think that the surface level gets at that at all

I think there's room for a reboot of the spooky voodoo zombie, as opposed to the usual flesheaters.

would be cool to break monster movies down according to percentage of "killing, "eating" and "assimilating" wr2 what they want to do with you

haunted dolls FTW

another reboot thats taken place and been v v popular that HI DERE didnt mention up there is the rejuvenation of the spooky backwoods maybe mutant psycho clan.

oh right, that did completely slip my mind (because srsly fuck those movies, signed a dude who grew up in the backwoods and still has to go there to visit family)

also, ghost stories are weird in that ghosts often don't want to get you. sometimes they just want to reach you, to tell you something, to set things to right. outliers in the pantheon of monsters.

tell that to ghosts in Japan

i find the backwoods psychos thing interesting because its such a rebuttal of the cold calculating serial killer conceit that flourished for so long

like how many john doe/lecter iterations were there in a row and then blammo everybodys getting stalked by evil gangs of kids or aw shucksy torture murderers

have fucked up rednecks ever gone away as monster villains? since the era of the texas chainsaw massacre, i mean? i guess they weren't all that popular in the 90s, but they never really vanished. hostel films are of this type, but they substitute foreigners for rednecks. inhuman humans, basically.

idk, i remember that one of my first reactions to "house of 1000 corpses" other than "huh that was kind of shitty" was that i couldnt remember a mainstream horror release with the same gonzo gang o killers vibe since they stopped rebooting the TCM films

like yeah rednecks had been a default incompentent pain in the ass villain stand in in a "oh sheeeeit lets point them city folk towards the old jenson house" for a while, but effective systematic murder factories in dilapadated farmhouses had kinda gone the way of the dodo

evil children / satanic babies are something that's been played with even recently but i think there's a lot possibility there.

i would love to see a vampire reboot where they were the real deal old school inhuman monster nosferatu/vampyr style vampires - too much of modern vampire mythology is based on the vamp as stand in for forbidden love angle imo. like a really legit scary as fuck vampire with minimal humanizing but decades of getting really good at what he does to bring to bear would be pretty awes if you ask me.

i would think it would be something more like "two people merging together into something monstrous"

"The Beast With Two Backs" is better comedy than horror.

better than the fly?

What about inverse werewolves, where the human iteration is the psychotic killing machine and the monster iteration is the rational being capable of remorse?

yeah elmo 3 of my favorite recent horror films have all been based around scary kids (Ils/Eden Lake/The Children) and i think its prob something we're going to see more of - the reaction to the opening shot of The Walking Dead and the fact that its getting talked about so much is a sign of that as well. Evil kids are pretty unsettling on a lot of levels.

see also: Children of the Corn, Orphan, The Bad Seed, The Omen

environmental monsters are great (things that come up from the sewer or out of the ocean) but for my money the myth-monsters are best. there are enough awesome monsters in Japanese mythology to make a whole rad series of movies. this book should be on the shelf of all monster-interested screenwriters/directors -- if even a tenth of the unsung monsters in it got one movie apiece, movie theaters would get more money from me than they've gotten like ever

i couldnt remember a mainstream horror release with the same gonzo gang o killers vibe since they stopped rebooting the TCM films

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 12:28 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

that's a good point. you had TCM, hills have eyes, deliverance, etc. in the 70s. sequels and films like motel hell, mother's day and the people under the stairs (mutant rednecks reconsidered) in the 80s. can't think of any 90s equivalents, though. suppose it's true that the sub-genre had sort of died off prior to house of 1,000 corpses. there was that "next generation" TCM flick with zelwegger and mcconaughey in the mid 90s, but it stands alone in my memory.

dan yeah I was also thinking along the lines of rosemary's baby and even grace which as much about pregnancy / childbirth / parental attachment as about the kids themselves being monsters

Well, there was Natural Born Killers but that was going for something different from what you think of when you think "horror movie"

xp: I was thinking Rosemary's Baby too; scary kid movies are such a good idea because it completely plays against the instinctual desire to protect

also there were movies with demons in the 80s but every one of them shot the wad early (the villain is SATAN HIMSELF...while the Exorcist knew using a minor demon is way better). bring back satanic possession imo. enjoyed the end sequence of the last exorcist a lot, could go with lots more of that, but that's not really monsters

grace was pretty awful tho, despite the promising set-up (stillborn baby is actually born undead and demands blooooood!!)

I think just to skeeve HI DERE out there should be a whole subgenre of vaginas-with-teeth movies

There already is!

There are ones other than "Teeth"?

no there's just the one movie

I'm envisioning a world in which you go to see a movie you like and then you're like "fuck, god damn it, I was loving this movie until they introduced the vagina dentata character, why god why"

i'd like to see another reboot of twilight zone to fill the void left by Law and Order.
it could be ripped from the headline TZone stories with guest stars from other paranormal shows
(fringe, x-files)

they could bring the horror mannequin back to its classier roots.

yeah creature features are kinda dead in the water at this point, were not likely to have a new blob or black lagoon anytime soon - although weirdly that shit flourished in the mid late 80's.

I have a friend who was involved in a redux of Creature from the Black Lagoon, but it never got off the ground. Apparently, there was conflict over the amount of message included in the film, like was the creature going to be a monster-environmentalist, or just a monster?

I will report back when I find out more. This is the same dude who has been involved in several recent reduxs, and took me to task for knocking Twilight. Apparently, mythos is INTENDED to be warped for the teller's purposes. Is nothing sacred?

http://instructors.dwrl.utexas.edu/schneider/sites/instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu.test/files/audrey2.jpg

Too many xposts for this to be worthwhile but I'm throwing Audrey 2 up there anyway.

I haven't seen a quality ghost-ship movie in years. Also, in recent times haunted house movies have turned from the house being haunted by spirits to the house itself being possessed and having a corrupting power on its inhabitants. That kind of dynamic could work well for something like an office building, which is generally a cold and unforgiving setting, unlike -- say, a suburban house. Any movies where people slowly go crazy at work, become disconnected from their families/reality and are zombified by relentless corporate pressure into doing something secret and very evil -- like there's some secret in the basement that people keep getting sucked in to work on except for our suspicious protagonist, who is battling their own demons and attempting to maintain their sanity.

IMO, the 'demon house' trope has yet to be fully explored.

haha wait abbott -- i think there was a movie recently about murderous plants -- called 'the happening'

jk i like the idea but how do you do bloodthirsty houseplants without the giddy camp of lil shop?

do you guys consider the haunted video/cell phone a separate genre from haunted house?

how about demon-possessed Facebook user

just thinkin out loud here

For all the time they spent in Avatar talking about how hostile and murderous the environment on Pandora was, I was expecting the plants to be carnivorous attack machines and was actively pissed off that they weren't.

oh no Satan got me...by friending me

oh what was the name of that movie where ppl were getting killed by the role-playing videogame they were playing

Existenz?

I love all that kinda shit

the last starfighter

Those are 'ghost in the machine' movies, IMO. I mean, obviously similar but the fear stems from out of control technology.

maybe you could do something like "we are a cult of normal-seeming horticulturists who worship an exotic hallucinogenic plant which, btw, demands sacrifice"?

Oh man I was posting Audrey 2 as a vagina dentata but, murderous plants...yes. Frank Oz lost millions deleting the original Broadway ending where Audrey 2s took over the world. And "The Happening" sucked but that's because it wasn't direct plant murder. It was the plants making evil gas that poisoned people's thoughts, so what you had people running from was completely fucking invisible. Not smart.

I haven't seen a quality ghost-ship movie in years.

triangle. not quite a "ghost-ship movie", but damn close and worth a look.

Children of the HFCS?

I think strangling sentient vines are scary but it would be hard to make a whole movie about them.

Spores from space are always a scary plant-related thing. And spores from space can do ANYTHING.

re: ghost ships, i feel like there should be a ton of space captain goes mad and kills everyone but the only thing i can think of is ren & stimpy's space madness and maybe solaris.

Also, in recent times haunted house movies have turned from the house being haunted by spirits to the house itself being possessed and having a corrupting power on its inhabitants. That kind of dynamic could work well for something like an office building, which is generally a cold and unforgiving setting, unlike -- say, a suburban house. Any movies where people slowly go crazy at work, become disconnected from their families/reality and are zombified by relentless corporate pressure into doing something secret and very evil -- like there's some secret in the basement that people keep getting sucked in to work on except for our suspicious protagonist, who is battling their own demons and attempting to maintain their sanity.

― The Porcupine Captain With A Crew of White Rabbits (Viceroy), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 12:50 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is a great, great idea for a horror flick. write it now!

XP Well there was Pandorum recently that was basically like that but it was terrible.

i feel like there should be a ton of space captain goes mad and kills everyone but the only thing i can think of is ren & stimpy's space madness and maybe solaris.

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, November 3, 2010 1:01 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark

sunlight, pandorum...

Existenz?

more recent; ppl's characters would die in the game and then 24 hours later some force would kill them in real life in the exact same manner

STAY ALIVE

I think strangling sentient vines are scary but it would be hard to make a whole movie about them.

the ruins! everything has been done.

What about...a nutsack with teeth?

No one make this.

oh wait there was this space madness one with sam neil, too, but i keep conflating it with chronicles of riddick.

re: teethy nutsack, i was confused when there were no actual space balls in spaceballs.

um, there was the Schwarz

a nutsack with teeth

I say this too much but: new board description

you could gay it up and do a butthole with teeth

Teeth 2 should be a showdown between the toothy vagina and the toothy nutsack, ending when their braces get entangled

there's killer condom, but that's really just a variation on the old vagina dt.

did the Wm. S. Burroughs teethy butthole sketch ever make the final cut of Naked Lunch?

There have been several attempts to make a scary computer-related horror movie but all the ones I've seen have been really really bad. Its interesting that the Ring had videotape rather than a DVD. Is obsolete technology scarier than contemporary technology? Why does analog video seem to be so much more threatening than digital video?

a toothy butthole has its own horror implications: poop-flossing

XP There's also a penis monster featured in Tromeo and Julliet.

Killer trees! No, been done.
Killer clowns! No, been done.
Killer laundry press! No, been done.

I think they should remake "Blood Beach." Not a lot of killer sand monster under the beach movies, but there should be!

how about more cannibal movies?

The monster in "Alien" is sort of a killer penis. Also, "Brain Damage."

i just want a movie where a godzilla sized monster chases four dudes in a car at night for 90 mins. i dont care how it begins or ends.

oh there was a movie with this guy with a mouth growing out of his shoulder -- what was it called?
re: superiority of analog over digital horror, have you seen suicide circle?

suicide circle is weird, borderline horror, borderline incoherent, very cool. sequel's even better. and yeah, the digital world is totally ripe for horror exploitation. maybe it's too new, though, to be a locus of unease.

someone work up a treatment for a killer laserdisc movie

http://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/Movies/Features/sarlacc2.jpg

teeth vag

I think the Jekyll-Hyde thing has possibilities, especially if the protagonist doesn't realize that he's two-personalities-in-one. Incredible Hulk meets Dexter meets A Scanner Darkly.

haunted eHarmony.com matches ppl so as to encourage breeding of satanic babies imho

xp meets... identity.....

Teeth 2 should be a showdown between the toothy vagina and the toothy nutsack, ending when their braces get entangled

I love you

lol who was the other person on ILX besides me who liked Identity?

memento was a v good angle on the jekyll and hyde concept imo, tho not a horror as such

i like john cusack, and amanda peet boxes all of my ticks, but no.

trying to remember this one movie that was so scary but also had a really beautiful family-flick vibe

you know, the horror movie with the old lady pooping out of her face vagina

someone work up a treatment for a killer laserdisc movie

It should be a about an impoverished school district where they're still using laserdiscs and they can't figure out how to operate them. Teachers spend half the class trying to figure out how to operate the laserdisc player while, backs turned to the students...something bad happens. This is why I don't write horror movies.

W/R/T Cannibals -- Ravenous was a great and also very funny (but also scary) cannibal movie that set up a great mold to follow -- cannibalism is addictive and enhances your strength/senses (based on some massaging of Native American mythology)

I think the next step up though is Cannibal Farm movies where cannibals grow humans for mass consumption... perhaps in cloning facilities? Or they could create mutant human hybrids that they treat like livestock on some secluded ranch. A bit of Island of Dr. Moreau mixed with TCM.

You play the laserdisc backwards to summon proto-digital Satan.

i just want a movie where a godzilla sized monster chases four dudes in a car at night for 90 mins.

Cloverfield, essentially.

Talking mouth on shoulder was actual a boil, right? In "How to Get Ahead in Advertising?"

xp If we throw in The Island, we can get some mileage out of people being fed meat from clones of themselves.

haha brilliant!

that would be kind of great

oh that must be it! re: talking boil

then pooping themselves out their own asses, possibly directly into the mouths of their own clones

that would not be as great

Cloverfield, essentially.

nah, needs to be a road horror movie

rying to remember this one movie that was so scary but also had a really beautiful family-flick vibe

you know, the horror movie with the old lady pooping out of her face vagina

― honkin' on joey kramer (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 4:22 PM

ftr I have been laughing at this nonstop since it was posted

could be called a snack of the clones imo

Howbout laserdiscs w/serrated edges? Saw!

john woo trick imo

x-post I thought "Cloverfield" would have been great had the monster not mysteriously stuck to Manhattan and instead rampaged across the country.

They should make a movie out of the video game "Rampage." King Kong, Godzilla and, er, giant wolfman go berserker.

I think I'll write up a treatment of my haunted office idea. Tie it into sick building syndrome and job-security paranoia and you have enough to give any cubicle jockey something to shit their pants to.

will the survivors be the people who are constantly taking smoke breaks?

haha yeah and actually take lunch breaks outside of the office... basically the people who are the biggest slackers will be rewarded in the end.

W/R/T Cannibals -- Ravenous was a great and also very funny (but also scary) cannibal movie that set up a great mold to follow -- cannibalism is addictive and enhances your strength/senses (based on some massaging of Native American mythology)

yeah, love ravenous. deserves to be a lot more well-known.

I thought "Cloverfield" would have been great had the monster not mysteriously stuck to Manhattan and instead rampaged across the country.

yeah that kinda thing

will the survivors be the people who are constantly taking smoke breaks?

― Philip Nunez,

stephen king reference?

will the survivors be the people who are constantly taking smoke breaks?

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, November 3, 2010 4:37 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ten_O'Clock_People

haha xp

for a long time I thought the phrase "donor kebab" was a cannibal movie about the Donner Party, and not a delicious meal.

the twist will be that after they escape the office building, the alien spores they've been inhaling via the cigarettes will spawn creatures that will claw their way out of their rib cages

dan you just stole the plot from Scary Movie 7!

ftr I have been laughing at this nonstop since it was posted

lol, consider it a long-due repayment since I am still lol'ing over the original post

The haunted office idea is great. The only challenge is imagining just what the antagonists are up to, assuming it's not a strict haunting. Though a strict haunting could be great, too, and could be great in many different ways. The office is full of objects and tools and locations ripe for terror. They could communicate through the Xerox machine!

the ten o'clock people all murdered at 10.15 when they come back in to a mob of non-smokers that are rabid with having to do all the work

more of a social drama tho

Ken Loach's The 10 O'Clock People

read an interesting novel a couple years ago called personal days. horrorish, if not quite the sort of thing being discussed ITT, about the slow disappearance of co-workers. worth a look if you're seriously considering writing something along similar lines, viceroy (not that it has much to do with your idea).

Sorry to say, but there is a spooky office one already tho kinda! its called New Guy, and i really dug it

I was totally thinking of "Personal Days," too. Sounded intriguing at the time.

Hey, here's one: the founding fathers literally come back from the grave and wreck havoc on the Congress! It could be a supernatural slasher set in Washington DC.

XP The office would be in control of people, slowly feeding them nasty feelings and thoughts, until it possessed them entirely and they did whatever nefarious goal the demon that inhabited the building wanted done. What that would be... would be scariest if left unsaid but only lightly hinted at. But you could def. play on the idea of "human resources"...

I'll have to check out Personal Days and the New Guy...

like the idea of sick building syndrome playing into the possessed office building thing. corporate HQ moves to a new building, and things begin to go wrong. also plays into the sense of incomprehension and dread that takes over when a company begins to fail. everyone gets defensive and weird, you stop trusting management, no one has a convincing explanation for what's really going on, cuz no one wants to admit how bad things are.

its a little uh odd, and kinda sorta comedic as well, so if you are talking a balls out scare fest yer prob safe. plus no one other than me saw New Guy.

also re: killer genitals, lest we forget: Bad Biology has deadly vagina AND killer monster penis.

xposts hahaha and the founding fathres one is kinda covered by The Washingtonians, which is uh a piece of shit

THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN ALL IS FAILURE

thanks for reminding me about bad biology! why is it so hard to update netflix cue every now and then?

My favorite founding father ghost was when Benjamin Franklin's ghost smoked a bunch of weed in How High

like the idea of sick building syndrome playing into the possessed office building thing. corporate HQ moves to a new building, and things begin to go wrong. also plays into the sense of incomprehension and dread that takes over when a company begins to fail. everyone gets defensive and weird, you stop trusting management, no one has a convincing explanation for what's really going on, cuz no one wants to admit how bad things are.

OTM and I'm extremely surprised this isn't a movie already...

poltergeist/amityville horror, but at work?

" things begin to go wrong. also plays into the sense of incomprehension and dread that takes over when a company begins to fail. everyone gets defensive and weird, you stop trusting management, no one has a convincing explanation for what's really going on, cuz no one wants to admit how bad things are."

the GWBush memoirs are coming out... ZING!

xp Poltergeist III was almost that!

pretty sure Bad Biology is netflix streaming contenderizer if you need to punish yerself with it immediately. might also want to inform any others that are in your house that it is actually mostly a horror movie and only somewhat an excuse to make nonsensical softcore porn

There are all sorts of things you can do with the '80s template of the indestructible, impossible-to-kill Jason/Freddy monster.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/QTxz1PHElmohu9sjZgMgfm9qo1_500.jpg

the haunted office building is on the site of the world trade center. ghostbusters are called in to fly the marshmallow man into the tower and destroy the evil. won't be a dry eye in the house

Yeah, sort of trenchant if icky take on the classic "cursed Indian burial ground" trope. Make the protagonist a Muslim and you're golden.

on the idea of haunted locations, i'm much more unsettled with weird portals, unstable & shifting architecture, weird disturbances in the flow of time, labyrinths etc. -- all of which could pretty easily be applied to the conventional corporate office building imho.

more house of leaves, less poltergeist.

'm much more unsettled with weird portals, unstable & shifting architecture

yeah find this kid of thing really effective if done well

elmo that remind me a lot like Primer... not exactly since its not very trippy, or a horror film, but kind of on to the same ideas...

*reminds me a lot of* - me type english grate...

But office building as a contorting labyrinthine hellscape is basically how I think most people feel about them anyway so it would probably be pretty resonant with the audience.

i'm much more unsettled with weird portals, unstable & shifting architecture, weird disturbances in the flow of time, labyrinths etc. -- all of which could pretty easily be applied to the conventional corporate office building imho.

more house of leaves, less poltergeist.

― tangelo amour (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 2:19 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

streamlined version of house of leaves (concentrating more on the house itself, less on the various unreliable narrators) could be fucking ace. wish someone would do it.

primer's quite trippy, and definitely has elements of horror imo

I see Primer more as a cerebral mindfuck rather than messing around with space-time in away makes the audience uncomfortable in a viscerally, which is what I think elmo might be getting at.

primer is the most accurate portrayal of startup culture i've seen, and to the extent that startup culture is viscerally discomforting, it works on that horror level.

there are also probably more ridiculous real-life startups than the premise behind primer, which lends to the credibility.

yeah I'm angling at the uncanny weirdness & dread rather than the straight out monstrous, but that's maybe outside the thread topic?

I think the elements of Frankenstein that are ripe for revival are the ideas of an intelligent (in the book) and empathetic (in the original movie) "monster" - ie a monster that can't help being a monster. Something else that's always been scary to me is the idea of someone becoming a monster and not being able to do anything about it - The Fly kind of does this but it doesn't really work because Goldblum isn't really empathetic and he's making himself the monster, instead of it being against his will. So yeah, that's something that's scary to me. I used to have nightmares as a kid where I was turned into a turtle or sheep and couldn't tell anyone (usually my parents) that I was me because I could only make animal noises.

Also I find situations scarier than monsters. I never saw that movie where the people go deep sea diving and when they come back up and their ship is gone and so their stuck in the middle of the ocean with no boat, because the idea was too scary to me. Or the first part of The Descent, where they're just spelunking, was probably scarier than what it became when the monsters appear. So those might not qualify as "horror movie concepts" but they're more frightening to me than monsters or serial killers.

why turtle and sheep? they seem like alright critters to draw in the animal lotto.

I guess there are often elements of "someone becoming a monster and not being able to do anything about it" in standard horror movie types (especially werewolf movies) but I feel like it's an emotional factor that isn't usually exploited

blair witch and paranormal activity are very situational and effective IMO

District 9 is kinda Frankenstein-ish in some ways.

and also becoming the monster too

(the 2nd act in partic)

oh shit dude elmo, have you seen "Outer Space" by Peter Tscherkassky? its prob the closest thing to evoking that sort of feeling ive ever seen.

John Carp's The Thing is also brilliant at both.

i would probably like to see a movie about evil kids that obliquely plays into the whole vaccination / autism controversy but otoh whoever made such a film would risk being lynched by jenny mccarthy et al.

xpost jjj i have not, but i will look into it!

haha a movie about a virus that makes non-vaccinated kids into monstrous cannibals would be amazing

or y'know... carriers for the thing the vaccine vaccinates against.

its short but its pretty o_O, v v experimental - i know its on the first "experimental terror" compilation other cinema put out (along with frankly a bunch of stuff that didnt much do it for me.)

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect..

yeah dan i think diseases are another medium that could be exploited for maximum creepiness & gore! tho tbh i am not so much a fan of the zombification-as-epidemic trope, we need our diseases to do weirder, mutating shit imo

seriously. so tired of zzzzzzombies at this point.

not a few zombie and werewolf movies deal with the horror of being monsterized against your will. it is an idea that could be taken further, though.

http://www.coldfusionvideo.com/f/franzkafkasitswonderful-a.jpg
there was a TV special called franz kafka's it's a wonderful life, but i don't remember this scene being in it

"cannibal = zombie" is a very common thing nowadays but I was thinking more along the lines of what n/a was talking about re: knowingly turning into a monster and being unable to stop it; ie, the kids' immune systems stop processing anything but human flesh and they are literally starving to death until the parents discover they can digest ppl, so cue the luring and hacking and manloaf etc

metamorphosis is one of the most viscerally disturbing things i've ever read (this side of a country doctor, anyway). especially the bit where his mom throws an apple at him which breaks his exoskeleton and sinks into his back. he can feel it but can't reach it, just has to let it rot away in the hole. yeeks. still gives me the willies just thinking about it.

or maybe it was his dad. can't remember. awful either way.

it might have been sister grete, at least that's what i remember from the comic book version.
hunger artist probably could have used that apple more.

Read a story called "Blood Music" by Greg Bear this week. Didn't realise he'd turned it into a novel after. Super creepy and moving and fits right into the helpless monsterfication idea.

tbh i would probably have a virus turn the kids into creepy but seemingly benign mystics / prodigies who then start fucking shit up with telekinesis, etc etc -- tie it into the whole "indigo children" thing, too

blood music was adapted into a "new outer limits" episode I think. the novel is weirdly utopian though.

The story ends ambiguously, v. reminiscent of Cronenberg's "mutation = improvement?" musings

love blood music (the novel). and it is weirdly utopian, but also terrifying, because the dominance of anyone else's utopia is always terrifying.

oh here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-U69y7w-2o&feature=related

it's on hulu, too.

jjj it is on fucking youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTarJ0Op7W8

ok i am not watching just now but this shit is totally bookmarked for bong rips

Seen that, not sure I'd wanna see it stoned.

I get really paranoid about looking behind every door in the house in those circumstances.

I wouldn't mind seeing a new take on some Poe stories - The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher
― Darin, Wednesday, November 3, 2010 6:31 PM (4 hours ago)

david lynch's telltale heart

this is a long shot, but does anyone know of a documentary/mockumentary about a kid with psychic powers where they imply he drowned his mother using those powers? there's very ominous footage of their swimming pool. I want to say that the mother's body is floating in it, but that doesn't seem like the kind of footage either a documentary or mockumentary would show.

this is obviously more frightening if it's real...

I think the elements of Frankenstein that are ripe for revival are the ideas of an intelligent (in the book) and empathetic (in the original movie) "monster" - ie a monster that can't help being a monster.

This suddenly made me think of Ben Grimm. With Reed Richards as Dr. F -- not really the cause of Ben becoming The Thing, but they spent the first 10-15 years of the comic with Reed constantly looking for a cure for Ben and kind of treating him as a lab rat. "Here, drink this -- here, let me zap you with this raygun" etc, and it's something they still come back to every now and then, almost 50 years later.

^ the way superhero comics handle stuff like this is weird. like you have characters with absolutely astounding, universe-rending powers at their disposal, but certain things must remain unchanged, no matter what.