So, any good horror flicks lately?
Just saw this other thread about the FNaF movie actually doing quite well at the box office, which apperently is much newsworthy and something I should care about. This here thing is popular, this and that is trending, read all about it. Yay. Well sure, it's quite nice they made their money back, but I felt it looked a bit overproduced and cookie-cutter like. Okay, haven't actually seen the blessed movie, but I've decided to hate it, so there!
I know about David Lynch, I know about Cronenberg, I know about J-horror, all that old stuff, but are there any contemporary horror movies which will screw me over? Something a bit more art-house and crazy? I've been a bit away from movie for the last decades, but I'm unsure if I'm out of the loop, or if there is anything to be out of the loop about.
A few!
One which I recommend a lot is Skinamarink, which is about two like 4-year-old kids that wake up and all the windows and doors in their house have disappeared. It's shot on something with the quality of a 90s home camcorder, very off-kilter camerawork, almost no real dialouge. It really brings out that childhood horror and fear of the dark, but as you can tell from the IMDB score it's not everyone's thing. I watch a ton of stuff and I really appreciate it for it's originality and sheer scare factor. Just make sure you watch it without distractions with no lights on!
2019's The Lighthouse is something I found pretty disturbing when it first came out, and it's one of my all-time favorite movies now. Great performances, unbeatable pace, very visceral camera and soundwork. Will leave you emotionally exhausted by the end.
2021's We're All Going to the Worlds Fair is pretty fantastic. It's a covid-era horror movie about a girl that gets involved in this sort of online horror game, sorta like an ARG if I'm using that correctly? It's got music by Alex G (which is fantastic) and the director is probably my favorite up-and-coming artist. Highly recommend! Again review aggregates don't love it lol, but I don't really trust those sites anyways.
Titane and Raw, both directed by Julia Ducournau, are great. Titane especially if you're a Cronenburg fan. In general if you're looking for some fucked up arthouse shit, look to French Horror. Early 2000's France has some great stuff that came out of the New French Extremity movement (Inside, and Martyrs I can personally recommend, they're both fantastic films) which also have good artistic merit.
2008's Let the Right One In. No further explanation needed.
I did just see like, 15 new horror features at a festival, some of which were fantastic, but none of them have a wide release yet. But if you want to look out for a few, then set up an RSS feed for Plantasma directed by Jacob Cohen, The Once and Future Smash which is a hilarious mockumentary about the classic horror film that inspired every late-70s and 80s slasher flick that came after it (End Zone 2, if you somehow haven't heard of it.), and Agatha which I personally have mixed feelings on, but is nevertheless very original and creative in it's presentation.
In general, Horror is in a pretty good place right now, especially for "art-house and crazy" like you describe... as long as you look a little outside the bounds of popular theatrical US releases. There have been some A24 projects I've liked, Pearl, it's sequel X, Bodies Bodies Bodies, but I tried to keep my list to the lesser-known and unique stuff. Keep an eye on the festival circuit for the good shit!
I never really felt like Let the Right One In was horror so much as a horror-themed-adjacent story. A beautiful story, but if anything it felt more like a mix of romantic and tragedy themes.
My category opinions on the movie aside, very much worth watching.
For me, the real horror came from pondering the movie after I finished watching it, and I realized that her old caretaker is exactly how the main character was bound to end up. I can imagine there being a long string of tragically lonely people just like them, going back centuries.
That's part of what I thought of as the tragedy. For him, but even more so for her.
Not a movie, but I've very much been enjoying The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix. Great modern adaptation of several Poe works into one overarching story, excellent actors putting out excellent performances. It's got a fantastic creepy vibe, and prefers to make you dread what you know is coming rather than surprise you with the unexpected.
I really enjoyed it as well as Midnight Mass
Oh my Carla Gugino is absolutely perfect. She can take my soul any day.
I had mentioned this elsewhere, but thought I would do so again here: I recently watched Beyond the Black Rainbow and it was, in a word, brilliant!
Although, an excellent subtitle for this film might be Answer to Carrie, in precisely the Jungian sense. The style is art-house grotesque, with critical themes being mirroring, pattern disruption, and the conflict between the synthetic and the natural. This can be observed almost immediately in shots of characters placed to the side of reflective walls, or the occasional abrupt turns in the soundtrack, even the implication of a great garden only to reveal a sterile environment moments later — all of which coalesce into unnerving the viewer.
Probable spoilers below.
Click to Expand
The opening sequence establishes the film's setting as retro-futurist, again playing into ideas of non-chiral or disrupted patterns. We see an advertisement for a psychological retreat center called the Arboria Institute, supposedly shot in 1966 (if the roman numerals next to it's copyright are to be believed), but done in the style of the Heaven's Gate recruitment video. Black Rainbow, while taking place in 1983, was released in 2010. If we the viewers place ourselves back in that time, the film is drawing upon feelings and nostalgia of fifteen to twenty years prior to the then present, using 1990s utopianism to make relatable the same grasps a generation earlier in the 1960s.
A pair of 1971 dystopian films are vital watches to both understand and anticipate the direction that the off-narrative is heading: A Clockwork Orange and THX 1138. The style of the music hearkens to John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream, while the coloring and texture of the scenes evoke Carpenter as well as Michael Mann. If you saw the fourth season of Stranger Things, you may likely be familiar with the influence that Mann's The Keep had over parts of the plot and antagonist. While the Duffer brothers have denied and partially admitted to having seen Black Rainbow, this film's influence on the Netflix series appears to me to be patently obvious. Of course, both are drawing from Akira, Scanners, and ultimately SLAN. Similarly, the exposure of the "man behind the curtain" — now in '83 shown withered and senile — draws upon the exchanges between Vader and Palpatine, again thematic of the conflict between Black Rainbow's antagonists and their chosen savior.
This midpoint of the film could be misunderstood as falling into the nonsensical. In reality, the depiction of the mind-trip clarifies the director's criticisms of synthetic attempts at insight and preservation, right down to the depiction of the divine spark petering out within the skull, leading the (seemingly) awakened Anthropos to emerge from darkness and consume the mother of God in a violent fit of sexual conquest. This is not literally but impressionistically depicted, however it is nonetheless obviously graphic and visceral while it compounds on the growing understanding of the eugenic nature of the protagonist Elena's captivity. From then on out, we are shown more discretely the way that people are being rendered into automatons, zombies, and ultimately less capable beings for the sake of the Institute's dark goals of "happiness" and "selfness."
Returning to the Jungian aspect, astute viewers may notice that at no point is the symbol of the pyramid ever shown completely from the side, but always at an angle as though having four corners. This is an emblem of Answer to Job's point about the quadrinity of God — the fourth member of the godhead being lost femininity and/or the unrealized evil aspect poured out over Job, which necessitated the Incarnation to forgive God of His own continuing sins. So, while Dr. Nyle (nihil) is the paragon of the Institute and becomes the adoptionist Christ, he fails to instigate redemption, insight, and utopia for others. His own individuation reaches an extreme point and splits, necessitating another incarnation in the anti-Christ Elena ("the Devil's Teardrop").
Nyle's understanding of himself as Avatara is synthetically induced and ultimately predatory. We see him take on the form of the immortal Michael Myers in brandishing the long knife that he carries to the end of the film. The conflict between sexuality and brutality are once again at play in his intense gratification wrought through controlling and ending life. These scenes are contrasted by Elena's emergence, passing through the industrial airways (with their colored pipes), to the nostalgic and cultured work room, through the contained and artificial garden, and ultimately into the cool night. Her first steps in the mud are deep and soulful, in sharp contrast to Nyle's heaving piquerism.
Why is this an answer to Carrie? Without giving away too much, in the eponymous story, Carrie is unfairly punished for the nature of her birth and sex. Unlike Job, she retaliates and is implied to have been sent to Hell for doing so, but alike Job, God incurs no explicit blame for having arranged this. For society, Carrie is the scapegoat (and Sue Snell is the only survivor to maintain pity for her). Elena passing through the red-tinted darkness of the Arboria evokes images of the blood-soaked Carrie, and Elena's willful escape and ascent to the surface is synonymous with the idea of Carrie escaping such a hell through virtue of her self-identity. Elena's natural telekinesis is made explicit by the film, but Nyle is never shown to be anything more than a self-aggrandized Dr. Jekyl. He claims to know Elena and himself, but eventually loses himself to drug-induced self-messianism. His Myers-like pattern is ultimately disrupted while the innocent product of the Devil remains, overlooking a new and foreign world in what are several inversions that mirror the conclusion to THX. Alike Job, these two characters are archetypes that represent a narrative dialectic within the collective unconscious.
The follies of the Institute are more direct criticisms of Learyianism and the aforementioned utopianism. The Institute as we find it in 1983 represents the product of Enantiodromia — a principle of extremity inversion (alike fǎn [ 反 ] ). The idea is that its leaders have artificially pushed into a place beyond the bounds ( [ 烏肝光 ] wū gān guāng: black liver light) of natural experience before they are really ready or capable of doing so. In skipping ahead to the finish-line to induce altered states, they miss the profound insight ( [ 玄學 ] xuánxué: deep-red learning) of natural processes, virtuelessly toppling instead into extremity and madness ( [ 走火入魔 ] zǒuhuǒ rù mó: exit fire, enter demons). To clarify, I don't think the film is necessarily against medicinal innovation; it merely attempts to address the psychiatric conflict between Jungian spiritualism and Freudian scientism still unresolved in society. Thus, along with the warning against rushing into utopia, a point of the film is not to throw Rosemary's baby out with the bathwater.
It's on the pretty extreme end of "out there," but don't let my amateurish explanation sour your impression; the film is quite a good thinker.
Will take this opportunity to also recommend Panos Cosmatos' follow up film, Mandy. Both are great and have a very unique style. Can't wait for his next project
Last year's Barbarian was a solid effort.
As for art house horror goes, I think Midsommar would be the most famous within the last five years.
I'll give you a list of some of the most acclaimed horror films of the 2010s, linked with their trailers:
The Witch
Hereditary
Midsommar
Under the Skin
It Follows
The Lighthouse
The Babadook
Raw
And, not art-house, but acclaimed nonetheless: Get Out and A Quiet Place. Get Out is probably the horror film from that decade.
All of this and also Night House (2020).
Depending on how you view zombie films, Train to Busan is a great one to watch. And arguably (in my opinion, yes I have seen Guardian and Coffee Prince) the main actor's only good role that actually gets a character arc. There was talks that there was going to be an American remake of this film, but (thankfully) fell through.
This was going to be my suggestion, so very glad to have found it already suggested. It's not very 'art-house' or anything, but it is by far my favourite film in the zombie genre. I'd actually be open to suggestions for similar films, because I've actually found the genre to be pretty poor outside this one and 28-days (and of course, Sean of the Dead if we're to include comedies).
I'd recommend Brandon Cronenberg's work. He definitely shares some elements of his father's work but still has his own voice. I really enjoyed both Infinity Pool, which came out this year, and Possessor from a few years ago.
Here's a few I've seen recently that were incredible:
The Innocents 2021
The Empty Man
The Long Walk
A Dark Song
You Won't Be Alone
A Wounded Fawn
I really liked His House (2020). It’s the only recent horror movie I can think of where I thought “this is a good movie!” and didn’t have to delineate between a “good movie” and a “good horror movie,” which i often do.
Ooh! I saw Talk to Me recently and it was genuinely creepy. I definitely recommend it.
Probably a bit off of what you're looking for, as it's a short instead of a feature, but I recently watched Curve and quite enjoyed it.
It's only about ten minutes, so I won't say much about it to avoid anything that might be a spoiler.
There are some very good suggestions in the comments. I'm going to bookmark this post for the future reference
And to contribute, these haven't been mentioned yet (Sorted by arthousenes) with links to trailers on Youtube:
Possession - Oldie goodie, nice weird horror, supper good actor play. Probably will have to watch it couple of times, to appreciate it.
Climax - Gaspar Noe. Urban legend. Things get progressively f-ed. Definitely leaves the taste after watching. Good to watch on weed.
The Medium - Possession story, but it comes from Thailand, so it is different story telling.
Tumbbad - Unusual Indian horror tale, no dancing and singing.
The Ritual - Nice nordic horror.
Color Out of Space - One of successful screenings of Lovecraft stories. Also good to watch on weed.
Just watched the new movie by the same director from Aterrados: When Evil Lurks
Highly recommend. When Evil Lurks is the best horror movie of 2023 so far.
Just beware, it is bleak and hits hard.
If you like it, be sure to check Aterrados too.
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
It's not a scary movie but has body horror and some violence, and I can guarantee you haven't seen anything quite like it.