All Things Horror Thread

[Panhead]

Is anyone else going to For The Love Of Horror in a few weeks? I've never been to a convention as big as it before. I'm a bit nervous but also really looking forward to it. 

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

10 hours ago, Panhead said:

Is anyone else going to For The Love Of Horror in a few weeks? I've never been to a convention as big as it before. I'm a bit nervous but also really looking forward to it. 

I’m not but I’ve heard the Horror one is good, it’s part of Monopoly Events stable of shows so they’re always fun events

[Devon Malcolm]

The Innocents (2022)

A bit too close to a superhero film for me to really love it. An interesting twist on the 'kids are evil' horror film though, but also very bleak and depressing. I liked it enough.

Hatching

Just as loony as the trailers would suggest and the ending, unusually for any horror film, is perfect. Much funnier than I was expecting too, a good satire of modern suburbia, and the practical effects are excellent.

Cold Prey

Still such a good slasher, this, looking forward to watching the sequel again too, because it's almost as good.

[Devon Malcolm]

Nosferatu the Vampyre (YouTube)

Werner Herzog's version of the classic story. Keeps things nice and unfussy, manages to keep Klaus Kinski in check, and it emerges as one of the better 'Dracula' films I've seen.

She Will (Shudder)

The usual modern indie horror - starts well, ends well, good performances, decent atmosphere, but nothing happening for about an hour in the middle. Alice Krige is awesome though.

Contamination (YouTube)

Early 80s Italian gore-fest, very silly but also really fun.

Cold Prey 2

Got to say that I possibly like this slightly more than the original now, easily one of the best horror sequels ever made.

[cobra_gordo]

Event Horizon. Feels like a film I've seen as I knew all the plot points and I've seen loads of clips but never watched it from start to finish. Sam Neil and Larry Fishburne are both great, some genuinely gross bits but found it more intense than scary.

Hush. Meh. Feels like I've seen similar concepts executed way better.

You're Next. Watched this directly after Hush as it's a similar home-invasion film but mis-remembered that it's good. It's alright, I remember the first time I saw it being really excited going in, largely because of the use of "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed on the trailer, but it's fairly plodding and predictable and doesn't get any better on a second watch. Again, a concept that's been done better and more interestingly elsewhere, Ready Or Not springs to mind.

Edited October 4, 2022 by cobra_gordo

[BomberPat]

The Others

Hadn't seen this since it came out, girlfriend never had, and it's only on Netflix for a few more days, so figured we'd give it a watch. All I really remembered about it was fog, and it seemingly passed me by that the movie had been a really big hit and quite heavily parodied, so I actually didn't remember the big twist ending and the few red herrings along the way genuinely tricked me. It's better than I thought it would be; Nicole Kidman put me in mind of Stephen King's criticism of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, that the character is meant to be an ordinary person driven mad by circumstance, but Nicholson plays him as mad from the outset, and I'd say Kidman really nails it, the sense of a repressed woman at the end of her tether, not being sure what's real or what's even happening to her, really comes across.

The only other thing I remembered is that it's set in Jersey; my family had just moved there when the movie came out, so that was quite exciting to see at the time, but then my parents were annoyed that it hadn't been filmed there (or anywhere that resembles there). On rewatching it, I'm not really sure why it's set in Jersey in 1945. There's a lot you could do with a Channel Island-set horror story; the isolation, the landscape, the folklore, the impact of the Nazi Occupation, and the Wicker Man-ish sense of being not quite familiar, and the locals knowing something you don't. It doesn't really do any of that, it just does fog. When it comes to isolation, the family are, admittedly, isolated to their house and grounds, but there's a line early on where one of the servants says of the previous occupants that they left to London, and stopped coming to the old house because "it's out of the way" - which feels appropriate for a story based in rural England, but is a bit of an understatement when it's set on an island. There's two or three references to the Occupation, but none that inform the story in any way, and at one point a character is referred to as having "left in 1940" - which would be a hell of an undertaking, considering the island was under Nazi lockdown at the time. 

It feels like nitpicking based on local knowledge, but at the same time, I'm a big believer in horror stories of the setting being almost a character in its own right, particularly one like this, where it's restricted to a single location. 

[Chris B]

3 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Nosferatu the Vampyre (YouTube)

Werner Herzog's version of the classic story. Keeps things nice and unfussy, manages to keep Klaus Kinski in check, and it emerges as one of the better 'Dracula' films I've seen.

I'm really fond of that - the way Kinski plays it as pathetic and whiny and hurt, then violent is absolutely against what you'd expect and works shockingly well.

[Keith Houchen]

49 minutes ago, Chris B said:

I'm really fond of that - the way Kinski plays it as pathetic and whiny and hurt, then violent is absolutely against what you'd expect and works shockingly well.

Apparently Herzog used to wind up Kinski so he would go off on a long tantrum, then shoot the scenes so he’d be knackered. I suspect that might be apocryphal though. 

[SuperBacon]

Watched all the Scream films as I got a free Paramount sub for a month.

I still really enjoy the first two to be honest, and then I've never seen the others.

3 is bad, but 4 is appalling. I don't know what they were thinking. 

I gave it a 5 out of 10 but those 5 marks are solely for Hayden Panettiere with that haircut. 

5 I thought was decent, good cast, but again the killers were dreadful choices and just boring when there were more interesting options. 

Code goes 12534.

I shun horror quite a bit as a genre so this thread is a good source of recommendations.

[Lorne Malvo]

I quite like Scream 4. 2 is decent too. I actually find the original to be one of the weaker entries in the series, I watched it last year and thought it had aged poorly.

[Merzbow]

I'm making my way through a bunch of edgelord East Asian horror/thriller movies this month, capturing that old feeling of getting whatever film I could from Blockbusters world cinema section.

Started with the miniseries MPD Psycho which is just Takashi Miike taking an already absurd manga about multiple personalities, murders and cults and making it even more fucked up somehow. His odd editing is all over this with effects and angles etc that could only work with him behind them.

Second came Freezer AKA Freeze Me which is a weird little revenge flick, for something that's advertised as shocking and depraved it actually had quite a bit of levity to it. Especially the murder with the PS1 playing in the background. I'd have really liked this one back when I was like 19..

Yesterday was another Miike joint in Visitor Q where he's at his most shocking for sure, if there's a taboo then it's in here all as an exploration of the Japanese family unit.

I likely won't be recommending many of these over the month, if I don't crack before it ends.

 

Edited October 4, 2022 by Merzbow

[The King Of Swing]

Visitor Q is shit imo but then again I've never really rated Miike.

[Merzbow]

100% get that, I think he's had some genuinely great films but they're not the ones that got the attention from being so extreme. Like his more down to earth Yakuza stuff, or 13 Assassins.

[Carbomb]

I enjoyed Visitor Q, but I think that was just down to how outrageous it was, and funny with some of it, rather than down to it being good. 

[cobra_gordo]

Tried to watch The Fly for the first time earlier. Another film that I feel like I know all the story of, mainly thanks to that Simpsons Tree House Of Horror episode. Managed to get about three quarters of the way through before I started gipping and turned it off. Those special effects properly turned my stomach, gooey, awful stuff. I should have known I'd struggle as The Thing has the same effect on me. I'm feeling ropey just typing this. I put National Treasure 2 on instead and felt a lot better for it.