All Saint’s Day to some, Devil’s night to others, it’s the day before Halloween, folks!
We’ve got 10 films here for you to consider enjoying this spooky season, including two that I’ve rated among the best this century, plus some explanation why Geek Graffiti loves this genre so much, and a plea for understanding of big, beautiful, bitey fish.
Hope you enjoy it – let us know either way in the comments!
Ginger Snaps (2000, Dir: John Fawcett)
Since Get Out was released (and as I’ve said before, Get Out is a fantastic film,) there’s been a lot of talk about ‘elevated’ horror. This cheapens the genre and misses the point. Yes, there are trashy horror films (I’ll be talking about one tomorrow). There are also vile, offensive films without taste, decency, or anything worthwhile to say. Sure, some of those are horror films, but many of them are tentpole blockbusters from mainstream directors.
I love films. That’s why I get so apoplectically (some would say unreasonably) angry about inept, lazy, nasty films, regardless of their genre.
Good horror has always tried to do something more than shock or disgust. At the most basic level, it builds resilience – however small – to death, loss, disease, and trauma. But there’s always been more, whether that’s imagining what new technology might mean for us, highlighting racism and prejudice (Night of the Living Dead was released the year Martin Luther King was murdered, 49 years before Get Out), satirising consumerism and capitalism, exploring generational divides, or highlighting the paranoia, fear and division that too easily creeps in between communities who love their children just as much as you do.
For every reactionary slasher movie where only the chaste survive, there’s a well-rounded Ripley or Sarah Connor (yes, the first film in the Terminator franchise is a horror). Finding evidence that horror is a more progressive and intelligent genre than many of its rivals is trivial. But why is that? Well, a lot of horror filmmakers are young; many young, cine-literate kids like the genre, and they often meet and share their passion at film schools, colleges, and universities.
All of which doesn’t change the fact that Ginger Snaps is a barnstorming blast of a movie, one of few genuinely great werewolf films. The idea of linking lycanthropy to puberty is so simple and so effective and… yes of course it’s been done before: Michael J Fox was Teen Wolf in the Eighties, but I was a Teenage Werewolf came out in 1957 (and featured in ‘It’, the book version, anyway). As far as I know, though, nobody thought to use that specific idea with women until this, though the most famous film about female puberty is also a horror: Carrie.
Horror has always loved strong women, even if, as in Psycho, it wanted to punish them for that strength. But Janet Leigh’s daughter became Laurie Strode, Sydney Prescott followed, and they are just two of an army of strong, relatable female protagonists in the genre. If nothing else, horror was putting a popular lens on women’s experience long before the Me-Too movement. The oft-quoted Atwood phrase, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them,” is written into horror DNA.
This long-term trend gains momentum every year, with more female creatives working in the genre and increasingly intelligent representation of minority groups. In a recent retrospective, the two lead sisters of Ginger Snaps were described “like the teenage Thelma and Louise.” They’re outsiders before the lycanthropy hits and this would work as a quality drama even without it. But once the fur and blood start flying, it’s funny, tragic, moving, visceral and yes, if you must, it’s elevated.
The Eye (2002 Dir: Danny and Oxide Pang)
For me, The Eye is a stone-cold horror classic, which I found after becoming obsessed with ‘J-horror’ after seeing Ring. Hong Kong twins the Pang brothers made a fantastic ghost story, which felt more personal for me this time.
The film is about a young woman, blind since the age of five, who receives a double eye transplant that restores her sight. I had a cornea transplant two years ago and some of the scenes in this had extra resonance this time around. Not long after the transplant, vision still hugely blurred, she starts seeing and hearing … things. You can explain some of that due to normal post-operative experience, trust me.
However, things get progressively more chilling. The film has some of the most effective and unforgettable scares I’ve seen in a movie. There is one in particular everyone talks about and, while I said earlier in these posts that Exorcist III had the best jump scare, there’s one in The Eye that’s very close.
I’ve said it before on the blog: avoid the remake of this like it’s that relative you can’t stand. If you seek it out, make sure it’s the original Mandarin/Cantonese/Thai version. Turn the lights out, turn the volume up, and enjoy the fear.
Life (2017, Dir: Daniel Espinosa)
Bought this on 4K for a rewatch. The best film in the Alien franchise since 1986.
Simple plot – an international group of astronauts on the International Space Station receive a craft from Mars which has picked up extra-terrestrial life. It then proceeds to eat the crew.
Yes, we’ve been here before many times, but if you’re going to watch an Alien rip off then this is one of the best and yes, I do mean it when I say it’s better than most of the films in that original franchise.
Great cast: Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya.
The weakest part of it is that there are too many characters. Sure, the wee beastie needs people to eat, and it is a big mission, but they could comfortably have lost at least one of these during the writing process and given more depth to the remaining characters.
Still, good well-made fun with a cool creature concept and at least two suitably gruey scenes which will stick in the mind for a while. Who doesn’t want to see Deadpool, Ilsa Faust and Donnie Darko take on a xenomorph?
Fallen (1998, Dir Gregory Hoblit)
I once heard that Denzel Washington told his agent to get hold of any script that Harrison Ford rejected. Given that Ford appeared in What Lies Beneath a few years after this, it’s a small leap to think he was casting around for a good supernatural thriller at the time.
Washington plays a cop sending a serial killer to the chair. Shortly after this, bodies begin turning up with eerie similarities to the serial killer’s victims, and Washington’s character finds the case begins to take a dark personal turn.
Washington, as ever, is spectacular. This is another film that falls more into ‘supernatural thriller’ territory than all-out horror. Good entertainment.
Mimic (1997, Dir Guillermo del Toro)
Always had a soft spot for this, del Toro’s first English language movie.
The one I watched this time was his director’s cut, with some added scenes and some good extras. He’s amusingly, caustically blunt about his struggles with the studio at the time, and the ending he wanted would have tipped the film into more interesting existential horror.
Still, it’s a good B-movie romp with one or two genuinely creepy scenes and as a monster movie, it works far better than ‘It’, for me.
I’m avoiding spoilers as much as possible in this marathon. Suffice to say that men with ‘funny shoes’ running around New York get up to some monstrous behaviour. You’ll know where it’s going the moment it starts, and either you’ll go with it, or you won’t. Pan’s Labyrinth it ain’t, but fun it is. And Mira Sorvino’s hairspray could be used to repair broken concrete, by the look of it.
Frozen (2010, Dir: Adam Green)
Three kids at a ski resort become trapped on a ski lift. The resort closes. For a week.
That’s it. That’s the plot. With that gloriously simple concept, everyone involved in this film craft one of the greatest horror movies of the century so far.
A few years prior, Open Water had a similar concept. I was a sucker for that film – it had sharks in it, and I bought tickets as soon as I found out it existed. Trouble is, supposedly based on a true story where two SCUBA divers were left stranded after a miscount on the dive boat, it just didn’t work for me at all. I need to give it a rewatch, but I seem to remember too many internal inconsistencies and a feeling of the old ‘God will save me’ joke (God later says, ‘I sent two boats and a bloody helicopter. What more did you want?!’).
There was at least one other stab at this concept with some folks going overboard after not putting the ladder down on the boat, but Frozen smashed the lot of them. It is a perfect, brutal, terrifying horror film. There’s no way out. The predicament the characters find themselves in is believable and genuinely scary. They’re not the stupid inhabitants of a slasher flick. Yes, they make bad choices, but when you imagine yourself in their position you struggle to find a solution. And these are well-drawn characters too, with quick, effective exposition.
I said ‘brutal’ and it really is, but that is a factor of great writing and direction, not a reliance on gore. There is gore here, yes, but the brief flashes we get are more distressing than the leering excesses of Hostel and its kin… apart from anything else, these characters are likeable. The worst thing in the film happens off-camera. The characters can’t watch, and neither can you.
If I’m making this sound like an ordeal, well… this one is for the horror junkies amongst you. But of course, this stuff is all subjective. One person’s nightmare is another’s daydream. You might find Frozen anaemic.
I frigging love it. Can’t let it go.
Jaws (1975, Dir: Steven Spielberg)
Only going to say a couple of things about this one for now but might come back to it again in a future post as it remains one of my all-time favourite films.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘horror’ as “an extremely strong feeling of fear and shock, or the frightening and shocking character of something.” Jaws meets every facet of that. Watch the opening attack or the beach scene with the Kintner boy. Both are genuinely disturbing. The film did for the ocean what Psycho did for showers. Then you have that jump scare on Ben Gardiner’s boat, among others. And in the character of the shark itself, the film most certainly evokes fright and shock, turning an animal into an object of horror. Be in no doubt, it’s a horror film. If you like the film (who doesn’t?), you like horror.
One more thing to say on this. I don’t want to preach, but this is important. It’s a great movie, great entertainment, but it’s fiction. Sharks are intelligent, they’re incredible; For heaven’s sake, they existed before trees! Peter Benchley, who wrote the book, grew to regret it and spent the last years of his life campaigning to save sharks. That’s a tough battle. It’s hard to convince people sharks are worth saving, but the simple fact is without them, the ocean would die. Without the ocean…
I love Jaws, but I love sharks more. I’ve dived with them, and dearly hope to again. Given the choice between never seeing Jaws again or never meeting a shark again, I pick the sharks every time.
Please, spend some time learning about them. This short Netflix doc is a great place to start.
If you can afford it, please consider donating to The Shark Trust.
Mama (2013, Dir: Andy Muschietti)
I sought this out after watching It Chapter Two, to learn why Andy Muschietti got that gig. His first ‘It’ had a $35 million budget. That’s a lot of trust to put in a relatively inexperienced director, so I wanted to see his interview for the job.
Well. It’s better than, er, It.
The premise is that two young girls are, through traumatic circumstances, left to fend for themselves in an isolated cabin. Except that something – Mama – is there with them. When their uncle eventually tracks them down, his girlfriend reluctantly agrees to co-parent out of love for him rather than any maternal instinct.
That’s the most interesting aspect of the film, the relationship between the woman (played by Jessica Chastain again) and her charges, especially when she’s left alone with them for an extended period.
Of course, Mama has followed them out of the woods and that story develops as the film progresses. There are some decent chills in the first hour, but as the story gathered pace to the climax in the final 20 or so minutes, I found it least engaging.
The CGI is weird too. Not poor effects, so much as a curious monster choice. It’s strikingly like the ‘painting lady’ in the first It, which was one of the more effective moments in that film, but here, where there’s a lot more of it, it falls a bit flat. I think this may be a personal fear of Muschietti’s that he’s expressing. One man’s Pennywise is another man’s Roger Moore in clown makeup, I guess.
Jessica Chastain was bloody excellent again, though.
Lights Out (2016, Dir: David F. Sandberg)
I bloody love Lights Out!
It’s such a great idea: a monster you can only see in the dark. Sandberg extends his original short movie (I’ll embed it below) to a still brisk (78 minute) feature and manages to extend the story but keep the chills.
I know for some the short will always be best, and sure, as soon as you build on the original premise you risk introducing the odd lapse in internal logic, but it’s got a cool, great looking cast, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and he has some fantastic ideas and set pieces with the concept.
Great to see the actor from the original short movie in a cameo and I’m chuffed that Sandberg has gone on to bigger success with the fun Shazam movie, the sequel to which is in post-production as I type.
Check out the three-minute original here. I dare you to watch it in bed just before you turn the lights out…
Kairo/Pulse (2001 Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Continuing my J-horror jag, I found this, having somehow missed it on release (looks like it may have been delayed coming to the West. Unfortunately, Hollywood has form for burying original films if they have an interest in a remake.)
A lot of people love this, and I can see why, though I wouldn’t put it up there with my favourite Eastern horrors like Ring, The Eye, Dark Water and Audition. It’s certainly haunting and it has stuck with me.
The main takeaway for me is its prescience, being about a supernatural plague of loneliness that exponentially infects the living as the dead seep into our world through technology – notably the web. Not bad for a film released three years before Facebook.
Different students investigate the same story from different angles; a website that promises encounters with ghosts; the unforeseen suicides of friends; mysterious ‘forbidden rooms’; ghostly shadows forming on a wall. It’s bleak, dark, and forbidding. There are classic j-horror encounters with spirits that work well every time, if only for the inherent cultural differences when viewed by a Western audience. It’s undeniably creepy. I would have liked to have found it more frightening, but maybe I’m just jaded now. I’m glad some have been so affected by it and it’s certainly worth checking out if you find the premise interesting or like J-horror.
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Come back for the final part tomorrow, I’ve saved some of the best until last:
· Julia’s Eyes
· Spoorloos/The Vanishing
· Trick ‘r Treat
· The Boys from County Hell
· The Empty Man
· Ghostwatch
· A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
· Train to Busan
· Doctor Sleep
· Oculus
· Midnight Mass
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What do you think? Did you find anything you liked? Do you have recommendations? Comment and let us know!
