Horror Films

Amen to that.!!!.. you can’t go wrong with either ‘Amicus’, or ‘Hammer’…I’ve just spent the last few months watching on Fridays/Saturdays,‘Hammer’, and ‘Amicus’.

THE FOREST (2016, Jason Zada)

A young woman named Sara (Natalie Dormer, of Games of Thrones fame) receives the news that her twin sister Jess has disappeared in Japan; the authorities think she is dead because she visited a forest known to locals as “the suicide forest”. But Sara and Jess always had a strong bond and Sara senses that her sister is still alive. She is determined to find out what happened and travels to Japan to go looking for Jess with the help of a reporter who thinks there’s a good story in it.

The Forest was panned by most critics for being not scary enough and it was also criticized for being disrespectful to real-life victims of the forest (the Japanese believe that the Aokigahara forest is full of malevolent spirits and therefore it has become one of the country’s most popular suicide spots). There’s hardly any blood and gore, so if you’re looking for torture porn, this is not your movie. I didn’t really understand the negative reactions. No, it’s not great, there are some deficiencies on script level, but it has good atmosphere and at least this advantage (unless you read a a synopsis beforehand) that you do not know which direction the story will take. Is Jess still alive? And if so, what on earth (or in the forest) happened to her? And can we trust this reporter? Or that Japanese guide?

Seen a couple of horrors this week:

The Monster (Bertino, 2016), in which a deadbeat alcoholic mother drives her daughter to her daughter’s father (after which she might not ever see her daughter again, given how dysfunctional their relationship has become), only to be ambushed along a deserted stretch of road by a monster. Simple as that. Not a bad film - and typically downbeat from the writer/director of The Strangers (2008) - but not a particularly gripping one, either. The human tragedy of the broken mother/daughter relationship was more interesting than the monster/horror content, and the monster itself - admirably practical, man-in-a-suit style - occasionally looked phony but more unforgivably seemed to work to an inconsistent set of rules.

Patient Seven (Various, 2016), an anthology horror which links its short stories via the wraparound story of a psychiatrist (Michael Ironside) aggressively interviewing/interrogating six criminally insane patients at a hospital as research for a book he’s writing which posits the rather gormless theory that most criminally insane patients are putting on an act for the free bed and board; an idea I assume he stole wholesale from The Daily Mail or The Sun or Boris Johnson or some similar agent of evil. The six interviews are essentially the six tales, and all are linked somehow to another inmate, the mysterious “Patient Seven”. Alas, most of the segments are daft and lacking in both sense and scares (a fun segment featuring Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen as a brazen killer notwithstanding) , and whilst the wraparound plot is a rather tidy device for linking the stories it’s not executed well at all. Swerve this one, it’s a dud.

I think I’ll skip both titles …

Eastbound & Down’s Danny McBride is going to be making the next Halloween picture. No, really.

As long as its not another direct remake… I remember when David Gordon Green was going to do Suspiria but that never panned out

THE EYE (2008, David Moreau)

What a piece of shit. I had seen the original (was it Korean?) years ago, on television, and didn’t think it was a great horror movie, but it had at least a few creepy scenes. Don’t know why I decided to watch this remake. Jessica Alba maybe? She looks great, of course, but she’s still not a great actress.

1/5

Now you can try Dark Water. Also mediocre at best, but it has Jennifer Connely in almost every shot :slight_smile:

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I saw this and enjoyed it.

Intruder (1989)

Recent re-watch, I hadn’t seen this in over 15 years or so. It’s still a fun watch for me, the acting and the cast were passable for this type of film and the plot is nothing to write home about, but there’s some good (crazy shit) moments that work well on the gore department. So, with the help of a few beers in hand, i had a fun time.

The Wailing (2016)-Hong-jin Na

What a little gem this was. Probably the best Korean (Horror) film I have seen in awhile, from the same director as The Chaser and The Yellow Sea and he didn’t disappoint. I’ll say this though, the film is a slow burner and it’s quite long, but it captivates you by the mysterious (Stranger) happenings.

From Rotten Tomatoes:

http://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-horror-movies-of-all-time/

  1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) (Weine, 1920)
  2. Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu, eine symphonie des grauens) (Murnau, 1922)
  3. Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)
  4. King Kong (Schoedsack/Cooper, 1933)
  5. Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
  6. The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
  7. Alien (Scott, 1979)
  8. The Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
  9. The Invisible Man (Whale, 1933)
  10. Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968)
  11. Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
  12. Get Out (Peele, 2017)
  13. The Babadook (Kent, 2014)
  14. Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
  15. It Follows (Mitchell, 2015)
  16. Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932)
  17. Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) (Alfredson, 2008)
  18. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956)
  19. Aliens (Cameron, 1986)
  20. Freaks (Browning, 1932)
  21. Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1962)
  22. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (Raimi, 1987)
  23. Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
  24. The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)
  25. Dead of Night (Cavalcanti/Crichton/Dearden/Hamer, 1945)
  26. Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968)
  27. The Cabin in the Woods (Goddard, 2012)
  28. Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973)
  29. The Witch (Eggers, 2016)
  30. The Innocents (Clayton, 1961)
  31. The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
  32. The Wailing (Goksung) (Na, 2016)
  33. House of Wax (De Toth, 1953)
  34. The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
  35. 10 Cloverfield Lane (Trachtenberg, 2016)
  36. Drag Me to Hell (Raimi, 2009)
  37. Under the Shadow (Anvari, 2016)
  38. Cat People (Tourneur, 1942)
  39. The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)
  40. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1979)
  41. The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)
  42. Carrie (DePalma, 1976)
  43. The Loved Ones (Byrne, 2012)
  44. Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
  45. Village of the Damned (Rilla, 1960)
  46. House on Haunted Hill (Castle, 1959)
  47. Ring (Ringu) (Nakata, 1998)
  48. Nosferatu the Vampyre (Nosferatu: Phantom der nacht) (Herzog, 1979)
  49. Train to Busan (Busanhaeng) (Yeon, 2016)
  50. Re-Animator (Gordon, 1985)
  51. A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)
  52. I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943)
  53. The Mummy (Freund, 1932)
  54. Dracula (Browning, 1931)
  55. Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004)
  56. Green Room (Saulnier, 2016)
  57. Zombieland (Fleischer, 2009)
  58. Suspiria (Argento, 1977)
  59. Deep Red (Argento, 1975)
  60. Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)
  61. Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931)
  62. The Phantom of the Opera (Julian/Sedgwick, 1925)
  63. Nina Forever (Blaine/Blaine, 2016)
  64. The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
  65. Theater of Blood (Hickox, 1973)
  66. Martin (Romero, 1977)
  67. The Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo) (Del Toro, 2001)
  68. Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1979)
  69. Horror of Dracula (Fisher, 1958)
  70. The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973)
  71. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
  72. Attack the Block (Cornish, 2011)
  73. Let Me In (Reeves, 2010)
  74. Don’t Breathe (Alvarez, 2016)
  75. The Shining (Kubrick, 1980)

Funny thing is: I like horror, but only few horror movies are on my list of all time favorites

N°1 & 2 are historically influential and important movies, but I can’t say I was thrilled. Don’t know about N°3, bizarre movie. King Kong is fun, but horror? First real favorite on the list is N°7, Alien.

6 movies on the list is from 2016 which tells me that the list is probably pretty unusable :slight_smile:

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I agree with the first two but then… Films like Cabin in the Woods, that was total crap. Still haven’t seen Night of the Hunter, didn’t even know it was horror.

No Cabin in the Woods was fun :slight_smile: Still don’t know if it would quality for a Best of Horror of all time list though :slight_smile:

It Follows was very so-so movie but it’s up at number 15. A lot of the movies from the 20xx’s on this list are questionable.

Indeed.

And ‘Get Out’ (no.12) only came out last week

Films should have a certain age before becoming selectable, otherwise you get too many recent films. It’s like making a list of favorite pop songs: people are usually asked to select only tracks that are over three years old

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Absolutely. Any “All-Time” lists should exclude movies less than ten years old. If they’re really good enough to make an all-time list, people will still be considering them in a decade.