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

Yeah, I could never figure out why he would hate one movie for one reason and then like another for more or less the same reason, especially with horror movies. Sometimes he meets a film on its own terms, sometimes he imposes his own morality. So "Blue Velvet" get an angry pan based on its alleged mistreatment of its lead, but, say, "Devil's Rejects" doesn't, despite featuring more prolonged scenes of torture, abuse and ugliness. Sometimes gross FX are the showcase he praises ("Evil Dead 2," which I saw reviewed on his show), sometimes not ("The Thing"). Or "To Kill a Mockingbird" gets a pan, but "Driving Miss Daisy" does not, despite its equally if even less excusably shallow depiction of race decades after the former. And so on.

I watched Weapons the other night and loved it, but really don't think it needs a sequel, prequel, or any other kind of spin-off. OTOH, I am very curious to see Cregger's take on Resident Evil, given his clear talent for balancing tone

I watched Weapons the other night and loved it, but really don't think it needs a sequel, prequel, or any other kind of spin-off.

same

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

Definitely going for ... something. So we get a couple of high profile Frankensteins this year, huh. Got to play catch up, since we had a high profile Dracula the year before, two or three Draculas the year before that, Luc Besson made a Dracula this year ...

there’s also the radu jude drac, which i am extremely excited for but that’s not one i’ll be watching with my horror hat on (a ‘river city studios presents: TCM:TNG’ promotional baseball cap)

That looks great. Much more interested in that than the Del Toro thing.

I recently saw a scandalized review of Tarsem Singh's The Cell from when that came out, the reviewer went on to a write a Mortal Kombat film!

You are not my mother (2021)

Changelings, freak me out. This was quite low key, maybe understated to the point of ineffective but touches on some classic Irish horror tropes:

- the aul wan knows Things
- ignore the person who Knows at your peril
- we are all less safe for forgetting The Old Ways

Carolyn Bracken (more on her later) has a stranglehold on these kinds of roles. Something compelling about the understated “Is this actually happening” of this whole film but in the end, I thought it didn’t do quite enough.

Oddity (2024)

Spoilers:

conversation between me (Irish) and my husband (English):

Me: The husband in this film is obviously sinister
Him: are you just saying this cos he’s English

But I was right! The husband in this film is not just English, which any normal non murderous person can be, he is sinister horror film English in a very particular way:

- cut glass accent
- sinister side parting
- strangely unbothered about living in the same house his wife was brutally murdered in
- strangely unbothered about moving in his fancy woman less than a year after his wife’s death

Some more classic Irish horror tropes follow:

- ignore someone with The Touch at your peril
- seriously you are taking your life in your hands living in a haunted building
- beware the warnings of the dead!

This was a lot more fun (fun?) and did a lot with not very much: Twin sisters, one is psychic, mental hospital Sinister English Husband works at nearby, an honest to God golem. A bit predictable as I say but not much damage done despite that.

Also features Carolyn Bracken as both twins!

oddity was sooo entertaining

rewatching the first “hell house”. it owns - so creepy in places

Just watched The Innocents (2021), Norwegian film, nothing to do with the Turn of the Screw or the 1961 movie although it is about supernatural/creepy kids. It has some genuinely upsetting cruelty and violence (including against animals). Wasn't quite sure what to make of it, I felt like it raised issues that it didn't really deal with (e.g. two of the four kids are children of immigrants, and a third is autistic, all of which seems significant but I don't know how to read the film's POV on them). But the kid performers are all good, and the overall spooky vibe and atmosphere are effective. Written and directed by Eskil Vogt, who co-writes Joachim Trier's movies.

Okay so one last trailer for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwpusY785l4

Meantime, saw Good Boy last night and it's a perfectly smart little bit of exploitation filmmaking -- the dog-centered gimmick really does work (and no he doesn't die or get hurt but there's a couple of rough moments and eventually you do see the mummified remains of a different dog). While there's one part I was a little confused by in the final third, the basics of the plot are a solid riff on the house-in-the-woods/family curse tropes with a touch of modern medical angst, and if you stick around through the credits there's a nice three/four minute making-of bonus that was really fun and shows how much the film was created in the editing, digital grading etc.

Oh and the cast includes Larry Fessenden. Nice touch.

Ooohh, that looks scary!!

Was talking to some friends about Good Boy last night.. I definitely wanna check it out, but might wait for streaming

It's fun to see it with an audience! You will get lots of good 'awwws' from your fellow watchers, as Indy the dog is indeed a very good boy.

Relatedly, good read:

https://www.thedodo.com/star-of-the-horror-film-good-boy-doesnt-know-he-was-ever-in-a-movie

caught a screening of the new deathstalker movie from the the guy that did the void and worked on psycho goreman. as you might guess, the creatures and gore fx were top notch, esp for the presumably very tight budget. as for the rest, well…

I’ve been enjoying the Fake Documentary Q shorts on YouTube. More hit than miss, certainly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jiax6tpDk8
Don't know if it's a horror film but looks great

yeah, that looks pretty interesting... psychological horror I guess

I like Golshifteh Farahani a lot. Will try to remember to check that out if it pops up streaming somewhere.

I’ve been enjoying the Fake Documentary Q shorts on YouTube. More hit than miss, certainly.

Having watched all of these now, they’re really good on the whole. Nothing particularly new (found footage, mockumentary, creepypasta, etc) but very well done and rewards attention to detail, connecting dots between episodes, etc. Also free of the slightly grating humour / goofiness that a lot of other low-budget J-Horror (Senritsu Kaiki World Kowasugi, etc) can fall victim to.

Anybody here see Bone Lake? I wanted to go the one week it was in theaters around here, but it was only playing like 45 minutes away from me and I never found the time. Curious if it’s worth checking out on streaming.

it was bad. it wasn't scary, it wasn't funny, the only tension is in wondering if the main characters are going to cheat on each other. also had that annoying thing where we're supposed to believe one absurdly attractive actor is obviously less attractive than another equally absurdly attractive actor

Have you ever wanted to watch a 4-hour making-of Rob Zombie's "Halloween"? Not really, but there are really few behind the scenes docs that go into this level of start-to-finish detail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd4TYcQAQ9w

I vacillate between Zombie's giving us a Michael backstory plus Sheri Moon & her white horse versus Kills / Ends community fever and Anthony Michael Hall chewing scenery as being the worst bits. But then I remember the Cult of Thorn, so none of the series are wholly perfect.

In the end, I just love Carpenter's I - III, and enjoy the others for the pros: Zombie's casting and leaning into Michael's brutality, Curtis giving us decades of survivor PTSD.

We'll see what ILX 2045 thinks of them.

leaning into Michael's brutality

See, this is what I think he gets wrong. A lot of the hypnotic power of the first movie (and the similar unease of the first Texas Chainsaw) comes from what you *don't* see, the *implied* brutality and violence that sets your imagination and fear loose. Granted, the first Halloween and Chainsaw movies are unquestionably intense and violent, despite their relative subtlety, but most of the subsequent sequels and remakes lean into the sadism and gore and brutality to what I thought was both distracting and ultimately off-putting (which is different from unsettling) degree. Michael works best as an unknowable literal blank slate, not as a victim of abuse or druids or whatever.

ok but his remake is not the first movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRQrXmHW8p4

Agree 100% about him best being a literal blank slate, i.e. The Shape. I don't know how you have a long franchise without adding something to the mythos, though. Unless the setting becomes a character, and Michael is a manifestation of it? Or the cast/story becomes more than just a new iteration of stereotypes. Something has to evolve.

At the time of Zombie's films, I appreciated his grindhouse grimness. It's not just a knife slash and clean corpse, it's a bloody screaming victim crawling on the floor. Added to the stakes, but also accentuated the horror of the act over the fanboy "best kill".

But of the big 3 (Freddy, Jason, Michael), Halloween was the least of stunt kills, I'd say.

An university arthouse cinema here is showing knife+heart in 35mm this weekend, and a few ILX endorsements here and in year-end lists make me especially curious about it.

Watched Hell House LLC - I'm pretty anti-found footage (where I'm willing to die on the hill of Blair Witch 2 > Blair Witch) but that was effectively creepy.

Weapons is vastly overrated. Vapid and grim.

I actually don’t think I can get through “bring her back”. I’ve turned it off twice before it’s even got particularly bad - from everything I’ve read there are some really gnarly scenes

I got through the pitt eventually but struggled with the gore - from all accounts “bring her back” is one of the movies of all time for intense gore

can’t even look away apparently because the sound design is so fscked up

from all accounts “bring her back” is one of the movies of all time for intense gore

Interesting. I haven't seen it (or their other film) but my impression was people had a bigger problem with the age of the victims (a generally rare thing in horror movies, akin to killing the dog, though both have been pretty easy go-tos for wannabe shockers; I believe the new installment of V/H/S/ has a sequence with a lot of gory violence against kids).

Yeah, I struggle with this. Even a clip of the protracted death of the kid in Doctor Sleep made me think it wasn't for me.

Weapons is vastly overrated. Vapid and grim.

Tried Weapons last night; lasted about halfway through and got bored and gave up.

Watched the Bring Her Back directors' previous movie Talk To Me (which I've seen referred to as Talk To The Hand) earlier this week; it was really good, so I'm willing to give BHB a shot.

there’s a whole book about this, and yes, i went to a book release event for it paired with a run and kill screening -

https://thesweetesttaboobook.bigcartel.com/product/the-sweetest-taboo-an-unapologetic-guide-to-child-kills-in-film

Bring Her Back, fortunately, is horror with heart, i.e. the bad things that happen to kids aren't exploitative but they're necessary to the theme of toxic parenting, the failure of the foster care system, and poorly processed trauma and grief that run throughout. that makes everything much more heartbreaking in the end but it's very well done, even if it made me desperate to watch anything comedic for hours after.

I'll probably see Bring Her Back and Talk to the Hand at some point, there's a huuuuuge backlog of good-good enough looking horror movies I need to dig through!

The RLM guys, for example, brought up a couple of recent horror/thriller movies, Marshmallow, Last Straw, Restless and Cobweb. Anyone seen any of them?

I thought Talk to Me was overrated, even if I thought the ending was fantastic.

Big enjoyment leap from Talk To Me (callous, unsympathetic characters) to Bring Her Back. The gore in the latter is off-putting, but it’s a movie that’ll stick with you with its themes and characters, as mentioned above. Sally Hawkins’ gaslighting is stunningly good.

pissing someone else’s pants is diabolical

Anyone seen Jethica? From 2022. I watched it on Mubi this week. It's pretty good. Not really scary, it's a quasi-comedy about an undead stalker and the two women who have to deal with him. Nice New Mexico landscapes.

Adding to the Bring Her Back praise. It's a really sharp effort, glad I caught it in theaters.

Weapons is fucking weird, and not in the ways it intends to be. Agree it's quite hollow in a kind of bleak way. Strange tone throughout and an awkward blend with the comedy bits, though some were funny.

Weapons (2025)

Agree that this is flawed but it really stuck with me in a way that a film hasn’t since….Fréwaka, maybe? I thought the dark humour worked for it, though. The people who are just, like, sleepwalking through waking horror since the kids disappeared to staring blankly as the horde chases down Gladys in broad daylight? Very funny. Obviously there are plot holes people have flagged like this small boy constantly buying large amounts of soup and nobody doing a welfare check but I think you get a strong sense that this little town is pretty fucked up and a lot of people have checked out of reality, so I’ll allow it. Great, great villain obviously. Effective horror movie witches are so memorable, felt there were Blair Witch references (the sticks snapping! The blood magic!) and was lofi in a very effective way? I love a non linear narrative also.

28 Years Later

I enjoyed this far more than I expected. I loved the society that has emerged since the outbreak and particularly us seeing that the outside world carried on as normal. Loved that the heroic dad figure was exposed as a complete bastard. Ralph Fiennes was incredible. The ossery looked ghoulish at first look but turned out to be incredibly moving. I didn’t expect to feel meditative about mortality and remembrance in a 28… film!

The ending was like a dash of cold water across the face but thematically made sense and I can’t wait for the sequel. I can’t believe they went there, but loved that they did.