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

I thought Strange Harvest was pretty well done for a mockumentary.

I did enjoy that one.

the mockumentary horror genre has some strong entries, like Lake Mungo, Poughkeepsie Tapes (though that one is a hard watch)

noroi: the curse is a good one too

yeah I finally saw that one last year, really liked that one

"Bring Her Back" was pretty good, and a lot nastier than I expected.

I like that they went the extra mile and set up a fake occult auction site as a back story for where she got the tapes from.

https://www.blackangeltapes.net/products/b6ed3b46-0040-4d15-8f57-1dc823c9ccad

This looks exactly like "Ready or Not":

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

And as much as I welcome the return of Sam Raimi, this seems like a feature length version of the end of "Triangle of Sadness":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4wiXj9NmEE

But I will reserve judgement, both look like they could be mean-spirited fun.

Watched Weapons a little while ago. At first I thought it was... not great. All the way through I was getting these really uncanny pangs of deja vu - I mean, very literal. Perhaps it was because the premise seemed very close to Antlers, which is not a great film by any margin. It wasn't until the second half that it started to entertain me. The sleepy, grim first half giving way to something approaching black humour and then full-on hooting slapstick sealed the deal. That ending, lmao.

Did anyone watch the recent Mark Gatiss BBC Ghost Story For Christmas? An adaptation of EF Benson's "The Room In The Tower". I felt it was really quite good. Managed to be suitably eerie, although the reveal at the end was kind of daft and "show you the monster", when it would have been just fine without it.

I liked Antlers a lot and never made it to the end of Weapons.

Weapons is the flipside to Antlers in that it's ostensibly a very grim, serious horror that turns into comedy. Antlers, a film about scary mooses, should be a comedy but it's grim AF and has no laughs.

omfg primate is soooo good. didn't even know it was johannes roberts directing until the end credits, and then all the technically impressive craft put toward executing this very basic when-animals-attack horror made more contextual sense

really did not like We Bury the Dead. much praise was heaped on the film for subverting zombie tropes, but it...doesn't really! the cause of the zombification is not terribly different from Return of the Living Dead, and the humanization of the zombies, the 'they're just trying to survive like us, to them WE'RE the monsters!' angle has been done to death, particularly in Land of the Dead.

also, the central thrust of the movie rings so hollow. the film aims to dispense with lengthy exposition early, which initially feels like a good move - you have a woman seeking for closure on the whereabouts of her missing husband after a military disaster. it feels just like the setup to explain why she's in Australia, but then it inexplicably becomes the pulse of the film, despite how shallow the relationship is depicted. you get flashbacks to their wedding, then the week before he left for Australia where they're obviously fighting and on the verge of splitting, and the dialogue in these scenes is abysmal, cliched tripe. The film wants us to identity with the main character's grief but she, like her husband, is a poorly written cipher.

also for a HORROR movie, there's no actual terror, zero stakes! for fuck's sake, there's a restricted area that is forbidden and Daisy Ridley and her partner desert their post without being detected, run into only ONE military vehicle while on a stolen motorcycle over a 200 mile trip, and bike through air that is so clouded with smoke at most their visibility would be 2 millimeters in front of them with destroyed vehicles litering the street and navigate through it with ease.. The subplot with the military guy's house toys with an interesting thread - granted, one that was done better in Walking Dead and 28 Days Later, in regards to keeping reanimated corpses in a pen to study and learn from them, and then they let it go seconds later.

just left the movie wondering what the point of the whole thing was.

Wasn't there another Aussie-set zombie domestic drama relatively recently? Cargo? Also starring a Brit stranded down under.

bone temple totally ruled. I say that as a 28 years later hater

Yeah the Iron Maiden scene was all time

Interesting. I keep seeing enthusiasm, but I did not like 28 Years (or 28 Weeks, for that matter), and was not planning to see the new one. What makes it better than 28 Years?

it leans into the insanity of the world they’ve created in a way that’s equal parts brutal and fun

not trying to be snide, but you basically outlined why i don’t fuck with any newer zombie movies— most of them are shit, the genre has been over saturated for years.

xpost to neanderthal

why would you say that as a reaction to neanderthal talking about how good the scene set to iron maiden is

bc it’s really good and like nothing i’ve ever seen in a zombie movie

both years later movies are fantastic, this one is making fewer stylistic choices per second (a thing i love about danny boyle) but it has sooo much atmosphere. and the thing about this particular franchise of zombie movies is that they’re all (haven’t seen weeks) profoundly touching and humanist

Interesting. I like the first one a lot, but at least as I remember it I'm not sure I would describe it as humanist. For sure not the second one, either, and maybe not any type of horror movie that more or less posits that people are worse than the monsters. I did feel that Fiennes character introduced an emotional, even humanist quality to the last film, he's what might make me eventually see this one.

yeah, he is the emotional core of this one

ivy. i think he was referring about my review of We Bury the Dead

and the thing about this particular franchise of zombie movies is that they’re all (haven’t seen weeks) profoundly touching and humanist

― ivy., Saturday, January 17, 2026 3:14 PM bookmarkflaglink

There's a scene that made me stop sobbing in 28 Years later. Think it's obv which one

ivy. i think he was referring about my review of We Bury the Dead

― Bertolt Blecch (Neanderthal), Saturday, January 17, 2026 5:57 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

god this is sooo obvious in retrospect sorry table

all good, i realized it was confusing.

fwiw i liked the first installment of the “28” series.

Google some stills from "28 Up" and a lot look straight from this series:
https://www.documentary.org/sites/default/files/legacy_files/images/magazine/2021/63up_neil_35yrs_01.jpg

"28 Days Later" was really good. Again, thought the second one sucked, but while I did not like the third one that much I give it credit for finding a fresh way to reboot a series.

I have a long weekend to myself and I have yet to see 28 Years, so I decided to watch the older ones to catch up. The first one holds up well, especially the lo-fi camerawork.

28 Weeks starts out well enough but gets dopey
as it moves along. Disliked the notion of there being an infected that somehow seems special or extra bad: the kids father. There’s a good movie in there about military response to something like this, but there are too many kids and too many plotholes. The virus spreading through the crowd in the subway was pretty good. I had a hard time not thinking of Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye.

Will watch Years today.

Yeah the Iron Maiden scene was all time

ALL time. Might even be one of the best heavy metal soundtracked film sequences I've ever seen, honestly. Film as a whole was a real treat.

I’ve never been a metal head but that scene depicted a sort of egoless creative generosity that I think is a really admirable quality in good art

It moved me, outta nowhere

guessing bone temple would be confusing having not seen years yet? not a big on the first two or boyle in general and haven't gotten to the third but im curious about this one.

You absolutely will be lost if you don't see Years first, yeah

hmmm ok, guess i should get on that. thanks!

watched that new chain reactions texas chainsaw doc last night. not sure why this wasn’t a podcast or youtube video or whatever. just a few people talking about why they like TCM. felt fairly pointless to me but i’m also just so very burned out on “talking heads” style docs. at least dave grohl didn’t pop in.

Finally watched Weapons - excellent first half then it dissipates all of the tension and focuses on actors/characters much less interesting than Julia Garner. It's so scattered in the end that Garner having to shoot her ex-boyfriend/recent lover in the head is barely given two frames of reaction.

Another contemporary horror that would have been greatly improved by not explaining so much (or anything, given that it's a pedestrian lifeforce stealing supernatural being story). Who watches The Thing and wishes we had more info on the alien's motivation and origin?

Saw that movie "Marshmallow." Points I guess for starring and focusing on actual young summer camp kids instead of their counselors - and the kid actors are good - but I kept waiting for something to happen, some explanation, and when it does it comes as an unsatisfying hand-wavy info dump with just 20 minutes to go. There's a good idea in the movie somewhere, but the movie itself felt like a student film version of (recent) M. Night.

Finally watched Weapons - excellent first half then it dissipates all of the tension and focuses on actors/characters much less interesting than Julia Garner. It's so scattered in the end that Garner having to shoot her ex-boyfriend/recent lover in the head is barely given two frames of reaction.

Another contemporary horror that would have been greatly improved by not explaining so much (or anything, given that it's a pedestrian lifeforce stealing supernatural being story). Who watches The Thing and wishes we had more info on the alien's motivation and origin?

― Lady Sovereign (Citizen) (milo z), Thursday, 22 January 2026 06:26 (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Weapons strikes me as a divisive film in that you either liked the first half or the second half. I significantly preferred the latter.

I mean, the "monster" is so great and so well acted and so original (to me) that as soon as it makes itself known, the film went from being a grey'n'grim dullfest to a proper hoot'n'holler. But I see why people would see it the other way round.

I recall leaving a little disappointed that it was his second film in a row where he takes the terror/tension of the unknown and more or less makes it literal, to lesser/sillier effect. I suppose one can make a case for the subversiveness of that approach, relative to horror movie expectations, but in both films imo I thought the silliness of the second half, however effective one might find it, less successful or compelling than the suspense/seriousness of the first half (especially given the themes each film at least tangentially explored). It's definitely one reason I can't imagine coming back to either of his movies, as opposed to, say, Sinners, which was even richer on second viewing and probably would offer more on a third.

yeah i hear you. i think i preferred the first half of Barbarian to the second half for the reasons you say. I think he's a bit conflicted about whether he wants to make serious horror or very black comedy. It's possible to do both, but it's a fine balance.

I find Sinners hard to compare, really. I struggle to think of it as a horror movie, ridiculous as that sounds as it literally has vampires and stuff in it

I thought the vampires were a really effective metaphor that *also* managed to stay on theme. That might be why the vampires, despite being *vampires*, are sympathetic to the story being told and not merely just genre-convention distractions. They have personality and motivation and help elevate the thematic conflict(s). It also sets up the final payoff/punchline; ok, now that the vampires have been bested, let's finish off the *real* enemies.

Yeah. I dunno. It didn't really work for me because I did feel that the *real* enemies would have been more important to the themes of the plot than these wan Irish folk singing types, you know? But then maybe the metaphor might have gone over my head as a Britisher, I dunno? Something about Sinners didn't 100% fully work for me either as a horror movie (I felt it retrod a lot of well-worn tropes) or necessarily as a metaphor. Viewed through the lenses of an historic action film with musical numbers, then yes - it was fun and dandy

Watched the Making Of Bring Her Back and the special effects dummies are incredible, it's kind of sad to see there is this level of skill that hardly anyone seeks to employ

Finally watched 'Bring Her Back' this weekend! my friend kept hiding her eyes from the gore, but I really enjoyed it... Sally Hawkins was amazing

Directors said they want to keep all their films in that side of Australia

The Monkey - not as bad as expected, some quality comedy splatter but I strongly suspect the production team got bored after writing a third of the script and just gave up