Someone's going to their room without dinner.
After an extended hiatus, I'm back! It's been a very long time, and I hardly know where to begin. How about a list of the 10 best horror films from the last 10 years that I watched recently? In no particular order:
May (A)
The Woman (A)
The Descent (A+)
Sinister (A+)
The Pact (A)
The Exorcism if Emily Rose (A-)
Dread (A)
Absentia (B)
Silent Hill (A-, seriously, what the hell was that?)
V/H/S (B+, or an A for its brilliant low-budgetness)
*Spoilers Below!*
It really is The Golden Age of horror, as this guy put it. So Golden, in fact, that the bar has been raised ridiculously high. Awhile back I was watching so many high caliber scary movies in succession that I would become convinced that I had exhausted all the best, and then, low and behold, I would watch something else that surpassed the last. All the movies listed above are primarily responsible for me quitting the last season of The Walking Dead right after that zombie devoured Laurie and Rick had some stupid nervous breakdown.
What really gets me is how many of these movies revert to fascinating and archaic supernatural themes and even fairy tales to explain their dark forces. For example, Absentia, although not great, is a sophisticated movie about an insect-troll that resides in another dimension beyond the walls of a tunnel, kidnapping people ala Billy Goats Gruff. The monster in Sinister-- which is in fact great, a pitch-perfect shockingly horrifying, scream-inducing nightmare film-- is explained as a pagan deity (!) that coerces children to murder, two horrifying concepts in one. And then there's the six (count 'em six!) demons that possess poor Jennifer Carpenter in Emily Rose. And who doesn't love a good demon, let alone six?
These days, when horror isn't revolving around other-wordly folkloric beings, it's surprising us with some truly unsettling man-made monstrosities and concepts. Honestly, the word unsettling doesn't even begin to describe them. We have the innate fear of cannibalism and deafness in Dread, societal exclusion and sexual madness in May, male-dominated violent misogyny and psychopathy in The Woman, and a serial killer family member hiding in our basement and watching us through the walls in The Pact. These concepts aren't just brought about to spook us a little; they are so completely calculated and meticulously constructed to scare the living shit out of us by evoking our innermost terrors. Oh yeah, and no one cares about you and no one is coming to save you, not even your family, FYI.
What a great age to be born into! Reviews forthcoming. Welcome back.
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