| curl-6 said: The Lighthouse Excellent and unconventional horror film with top notch acting and cinematography. Very creepy and atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife. I also love the guts they had to make a movie in black and white 4:3 ration and mono sound in 2019. It wasd the right choice; wouldn't have been nearly as claustrophic and alienating in colour/widescreen/surround sound. |
Robert Eggers is IMO one of the most interesting people in the overall horror genre right now. He only has two right now, the other one is The Witch. His genre, Arthouse horror/Art horror, is probably my favourite film genre right now. It’s a genre that wasn’t terribly popular for around 30 years (from about 1980 to 2010ish), there were a few notables, mainly from David Cronenberg and Lynch, but it’s seen a come back in recent years, even pop-horror film makers like Jordan Peele are taking a stab, coming off of two highly successful conventional films (Get Out and Us) and releasing his first Arthouse horror film, Nope.
So, what happened with the horror genre before this time? Filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven struck gold with the slasher genre, and those films seemed to keep doing well through the 80, quickly established the slasher as the dominant sun genre. Dark comedy is a big part of the gen x experience, and slashers tend to be dark slap-stick comedy. Almost all horror films in the 1990s were slashers. By the 2000s they’d become more blockbusterish, and we had something more like action-slasher-thrillers.
Australian filmmaker James Wan became a popular horror film maker in the early 2000s with his film Saw. Critics were mixed on it, feeling he went too far, attributing its success with the fans to feeding into their bloodlust. James Wan felt critics weren’t giving his films a fair chance because there was a lot more psychologically going on. This led to his 2010 experimental film Insidious, no gore or violence, low budget, very scary, very successful. And he started a revolution. Many filmmakers began going in all sorts of different artistic directions with their films. While James Wan’s films are conventional (in the broad sense) they bucked the horror industry trends and opened the door to much more experimentation, and we began seeing a lot more arthouse and fewer conventional type horror films in the coming years.
Some of my favourites of the past decade and a bit:
Jennifer Kent - The Babadook - another Australian filmmaker, this one spins depression and delusion with horror.
Ari Aster - Hereditary and Midsommar. Hereditary, IMO, feels like The Shining for the current era, it is one of my favourite films of recent times—and has one of the most horrifying scenes, ever; it made me feel sick for like 20 minutes - I was not fucking prepared as I had no idea what the film was about when I walked in - only that it was kind of like The Shining. Midsommar is a film about a cult in Sweden. If you’ve seen Aster’s short films, this is more along those lines of ultra-dark comedy. I loved the weird Disney-ish singing during that one drugged out sex scene. Midsommar is the more unconventional of the two films, as I can say if you like The Shining then Hereditary is a no-brainer. Midsommar, there’s nothing quite like it out there. Midsommar is also a visually stunning film.
John Krasinski - A Quiet Place - a silent film with an explanation of why it’s silent. Making noise has a high chance of attracting something. I don’t want to spoil the film.
Mike Flanagan - Hush and Gerald’s Game - Hush is another silent film, the main character is deaf. It’s a fairly simple premise, a woman in a large house in the woods, she’s deaf, someone is out there… I enjoyed the crap out of that one. Gerald’s Game is a Stephen King adaptation, it shifts back and forth between different time periods, and nothing is quite as it seems. The premise is a couple suffering marital difficulties goes to a cabin and plays a kinky sex game where she’s cuffed to the bed, and her husband dies on top of her… then all sorts of insanity happens as she starts to hallucinate.
Jordan Peele - Get Out, Us, and Nope. Get Out is easily the most popular and also the most conventional film of everything I’ve listed, although I think it’s popularity is in spite of its conventionality and has a lot to do with sinking effectively into the political climate of its time. Us and Nope make no such attempts on politics, but I found to be more interesting films and mark substantial growth for Jordan Peele as a filmmaker. Us is the most thrilling of the three, with a lot of late Gen X feeling slasher elements and dark comedy fit into a mystery-thriller plot—and Peele keeps it fresh by making things a bit less conventional, more original feeling so it has the spirit of a late-70s and early 80s slasher with modern film tech. Nope was where he really let go of the conventions and is much more of an art house horror film, with a lot of Gen-X influences from the 70s and 90s. It follows an episodic plot that shifts sub-genre, and incidentally enough, so does the antagonist of the film. Nope also brings in 80s and 90s references from animes as Neon Genesis and Akira.
And while not Arthouse horror, I thought I’d bring up James Wan.
James Wan - Conjuring I and II. Insidious kind of felt like a jumping-off point for a deeper dive into the genre. The Conjuring films, IMO, are to this day the most thrilling horror films I’ve ever seen. James Wan uses audio, creepiness, and tension to build some really terrifying moments. My personal favourite is Conjuring 2 of his films. One of the few sequels I like better than the original… and I like the original a lot. I miss Rose Byrne from Insidious, though—she’s one of my favourite actresses.
Just some films you may or may not like, as they all are quite different from one another. I like them all, but I don’t know many others who do, but I do know people who like at least a few of them. The James Wan films and Get Out are fairly universally liked by horror fans—I mean, there will always be the contrarians who don’t like things based on the fact that they’re popular. Fear is a very subjective feeling, but I found the scariest film on the list is Conjuring 2, Get Out was the least scary (incidentally, also the most popular film), and Hereditary is the most disturbing… I find people often say The Babadook is the scariest film of all time, and I can see that as well, there’s a lot of bizarre stuff in it and I probably rank it in second as the most disturbing.
EDIT - also, check out the Charlie Brooker series Black Mirror, not all of them are horror, but it’s basically The Outer Limits/The Twilight Zone for this era.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
