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

re: sentitsu - i skipped straight to the hanako-san of the toilet one (i mean, how could i not??) and it was a blast. gotta get back on these.

I’ve seen three or four of them and they were all fine but nothing special. Noroi, I liked a lot though.

They’re all on YouTube, or were a few months back.

Anyone else see "Infested"? A little slick, pretty much "Arachnophobia" meets "Attack the Block." I think the director, Sébastien Vanicek, already got snagged to make another "Evil Dead" movie? Anyway, it's not bad, and may have a sneaky allegory lurking somewhere beneath the surface.

The "black metal found footage film", Invoking Yell.

Awful by every measure. Incoherent, zero atmosphere, bizarre editing.

Stacked cast, but this looks a little much?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cMIarrxLGs

Don't know anything about the writer/director.

Looking forward to that one. A24, the cast, the trailer vibe, giving me a Krampus sensibility. At the very least, a murderous parental unicorn is novel.

Thumbs up on Oddity. Slow pacing but liked it for keeping to its internal logic and sticking the ending. Felt like a complete project, versus some that have a cool premise but no idea of resolution.

Also liked Strange Darling, though mainly once it stopped playing with its non-linear structure and used natural lighting. Too much odd lighting at the start(blue, red, grindhouse, overexposed). Nice seeing Willa Fitzgerald outside her Reacher role, and was surprised by Kyle Gallner having big screen chops.

Watching Cuckoo later today.

remain blown away that anyone liked strange darling for any reason

I really liked Oddity. Has anyone seen the director's other film, Caveat?

Caveat is very good as well, similar in its mood and slow-building intensity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55pzldrBRJM
Anyone seen this?

that looks awesome

Don't know where to find it, official site looks empty right now

Smile 2 was way better than what you'd expect a sequel in a horror franchise to be imo

anyone else watch any of joe meredith’s stuff? the new one is legally up on YT and rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIYy8nnsQRU

survival horror vibes filtered through a well executed retro sov presentation plus a nice dark ambient score and cool creatures and stuff like that… a lot to like here!

it’s been a minute but i remember liking the two variant shorts just as much

watched Heretic over the weekend... all the acting was great (Hugh Grant was exceptional), the production looked good, but ultimately fell flat. It seems to me like there were script edits to sort of explain things that maybe didn't need explaining. Kind of a dud for A24, but no fault to the actors

yeah i found parts of it really impressive but the whole thing was really one-note hammered over and over again

yeah and the 'twist' or reveal was pretty meh

I thought Smile 2 was a superior franchise sequel. The car crash horror and jump scares were done ok. But the character being a doomed celebrity and surrounded by people, yet absolutely alone and living in terror and knowing she is absolutely fucked was executed very well.

Saw a trailer for The Monkey based on the Stephen King story, looks like crap, the Longlegs director decided to make it a horror comedy.

oh i really love the trailer for the monkey

I thought "Heretic" was OK, in the family of horror films where things start out tense and then take a turn toward the batshit (like "Martyrs," "Don't Breathe," "Barbarian" and "Longlegs"). It was assembled very well, and the matchbox scene would have made Hitchcock proud, but in the end it felt a little like being lectured by a Bond villain for 90 minutes.

Starve Acre - not sure I'd call it good but it was definitely compelling. Creepy British folk horror with one of those post-Annihilation blasts of electronic noise scores (I say that as praise, I will go for blasts of noise every single time over treacly fucking strings).

via Shudder

red rooms is an astonishing movie and i want to start a thread for it. never seen anything like it

verhoeven would fucking love it?

It’s so good!

Yeah that one really surprised me. Haven't seen much talk about it but would recommend it to everyone.

The Ritual - loved the atmosphere and then they decided to explain things over the last third. Boooooo.

The Rule of Jenny Pen - incredible Lithgow and Rush performances, drags on a bit dissipating the tension.

I'm intrigued by Red Rooms. A quick description I saw that didn't go into spoilers gave off a De Palma vibe.

Watched Cuckoo on Kanopy the other night when I was dog-tired after a backpacking trip... I wouldn't say it was great, but the performances were good. Half the time I had no idea what the fuck was going on, but it was interesting if a little messy. Kinda reminded me of something like Evolution or Beyond the Black Rainbow, culty science stuff

Just watched Red Rooms. It didn't once do what I thought it would. I feel churned up. Squash, anyone?

I'm going to include Clem watching the videos along with Werner Herzog listening to the tapes in Grizzly Man in my hall of horror. Devastating.

825 Forest Road - simultaneously very bad (the acting is community theater-wooden, there are multiple exposition dumps but it's still only barely coherent) and a decently spooky haunting story. Kind of a straight to Blockbuster version of a 2000s Japanese horror remake. Everybody dies, which was cool.

I thought Smile 2 was a superior franchise sequel. The car crash horror and jump scares were done ok. But the character being a doomed celebrity and surrounded by people, yet absolutely alone and living in terror and knowing she is absolutely fucked was executed very well.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino)

Really enjoyed this, at times it felt like a horror version of I Love Suzy season 2*, I liked the way her behaviour could be explained in terms of eye roll rock star behaviour by all the others around her. e.g. trashing dressing room, covering up visiting a dealer, off script awards speeches.

* in terms of 'you're having a breakdown, but there's a show to put on and you have choreography to practice...so shut up, your brand/career depends on this.'

wtf there's a Chinese remake of the Blake Lively shark movie "The Shallows"? How often does the remake train run the *other* way?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoilwIOI2Dc

Looks like shit. But the poster? Badass:

https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/7ed72e2703dcb2665628ae43d75045707e12ef2d_2_666x1000.jpeg?w=666&ssl=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chinese_remakes_of_American_films

There was an Indian remake of Collateral that also came to mind. There’s also a movie that’s basically Collateral named “One Night in Bangkok” starring Mark Dacascos that, if I remember correctly, is mostly in English and mysteriously he doesn’t do martial arts

Weapons trailer (as in the new movie from Zach Creggan who did Barbarian) out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpThntO9ixc

Dead Mail on Shudder was fun if you're good with inexplicable weirdness

xp that looks FREAKEEEE, thanks for alerting us

WB also released over two hours of "security footage" to hype people up for "Weapons"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlFuKPjc1E0

not really sure what the hell this is about, but it looks pretty freaky

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

looks like another entry in the current folk horror revival.. I'll probably check it out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbCcz0OzhtQ

Meantime, physical release up for Blood Quantum, which I'm sure is upthread somewhere -- to say it again, RIP Jeff Barnaby.

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/collections/frontpage-partner-labels/products/blood-quantum

On the folk horror theme, I thought The Moors and Starve Acre were both lousy, despite Morfydd Clark doing reliably solid work in the latter. Looking forward to seeing Frewaka, on Shudder, though.

I liked the first half of Starve Acre, good 70s 'atmosphere' but then at some point I could no longer tell what the fuck was going on

Watched Cuckoo on Kanopy the other night when I was dog-tired after a backpacking trip... I wouldn't say it was great, but the performances were good. Half the time I had no idea what the fuck was going on, but it was interesting if a little messy.

Agree on this, it was clever but not sure how realist it wanted to go... kind of both over and underexplained the premise by the end....

just my opinion, but I felt it had similarities with I saw the TV glow...the main character seems similarly 'on a spectrum'/depressed adolescent, with their sexuality being tangential to the storyline but not tangential to the subtext.

i don’t think cuckoo wanted to go realist at all. it is a deliberately bizarre altered reality experience

i sort of thought the lesbianism was unrelated to the subtext myself, but now that i think about it… it’s presented pretty directly as a relief/rescue from oppressive nuclear family structures

I enjoyed Starve Acre - ambient inexplicable horror is winning out over anything with reasons ATM. Definitely not because that mirrors the real world in any way, nope

Watched Fréwaka, a film I had never heard of, today. It’s…strange. Very reminiscent of Midsommar in its folk horror vibe but also pulls in references to Irish generational trauma, Church abuses, local mythology, how isolating tight knit rural communities can be.

The second I realised fairies were involved I was tense. There are so many myths and stories about them and their power and they’re a terrifying force. How did I explain this before? “People don’t really believe it but you’d just as soon not chance it.” The idea of the prehuman beings that hate people, that exist as purely malign beings with exceptional power, is one common across various mythoses, but I don’t know how many places will still have fairy trees or recognise/acknowledge these myths and accord them real power. You will drive through Irish countryside and see huge, ugly out of place bushes or trees taking up valuable grazing space and know them for what they are - fairy trees or forts.

The film skilfully weaves this in with rather more modern horrors - the Magdalene laundries, parental abuse, dark family secrets that don’t stay hidden. It’s a very good film and one that will stay with me a long time.