Alright – here we are, having survived the trials and tribulations of the holidays and thankfully back to the grind of “regular” life. I had a little bit of a longer break between my last post and this, but sometimes life happens and that just can’t be avoided. Well, as we kick off a new year, whatever that means, it is often popular to do a retrospective on the last. All over the horror groups I follow on Facebook, people have been posting their lists of their favorite (or most hated) films of this last year, and it has really brought into stark contrast for me how few new movies I watch. Out of the 104 horror movies I watched last year, only eight were actually released in 2021 and three of those were the Fear Street trilogy, so I can’t feasibly do a top ten. I guess I just don’t have my finger on that particular pulse.
But I can create a list of my favorite first-time-watches of the year, the films that were new for me. And with one caveat, that is just what I will do. My one additional rule is that I’m not going to include anything on my list that I’ve already written about it on this blog, so with a shout out to the previously detailed Dark Night of the Scarecrow, The Unknown, Jakob’s Wife, and His House, among others, here, in the order I watched them, is my…
Top Ten Movies I Watched Last Year That I Haven’t Written About Yet
The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Where had this movie been all my life? Ken Russell’s take on the Bram Stoker tale is a glorious mix of ridiculous B-movie monster flick, art house pretensions, over-the-top camp, and unsettling, grotesque horror. Where else can you see a very young Peter Capaldi heroically playing the bagpipes while chasing long toothed police officers, psychedelic visions, that could have been at home in The Devils, of Jesus being attacked by a giant serpent puppet, naked snake ladies slithering out of baskets, and a mongoose released from a surprisingly spacious sporran? Really, this one has it all. Seriously, it’s a weird flick, but really fun, absurd, and somehow even a bit successful as a horror movie. I wish I remembered more details now, but its oddness defies lucid description and I think I’ll have to watch it again pretty soon.
Orphan (2009)
I hadn’t given this one a second thought when it came out. Somehow it looked like a rote, jump scare filled evil kid movie and it didn’t call out to me. It’s only thanks to a student of mine having watched it last year and singing its praises that I deigned to give it a chance and I’m so glad I did. To be fair, it is filled with jump scares and features an evil kid, but it’s anything but rote. Rather, it is deliciously excessive and delightfully sleazy, while featuring solid, impressive, earnest performances which somehow ground the whole affair. Vera Farmiga as the grieving mother starts the film off with a real emotional bang and Isabelle Furman, who was only 10 years old at the time of filming, is just amazing as the eponymous malevolent orphan, Esther – the kind of villain it’s hard not to side with as she is, while certainly evil, threatening, and unnecessarily cruel, also pretty damn awesome. No plot details as this one has twists and turns aplenty and could easily be spoiled, but I strongly recommend it.
The Woman (2011)
Far from subtle, this parable of gender dynamics and patriarchal violence from Lucky McKee, is surprisingly effective. The permutations of its plot rarely surprise, but in its moment to moment, darkly comic and frequently quite ugly presentation of the horrors of complicity, of the psychological underpinnings of reified cycles of abuse, this film manages to be totally exploitative while yielding actual emotional and social depth, before building to a satisfyingly bloody climax of great comeuppance. It’s followed by the 2019 film, Darlin’, which could be a runner up to this list. It is sometimes funny, often uncomfortable, and frequently horrific; plus, it ends on an upliftingly violent note.
Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
I had always thought that I’d seen this. It just seemed like something I would have rented as a kid or early teen, but when I sat down to watch this last spring, I was happy to discover something utterly new to me and so, so, so very weird. Nicolas Cage delivers maximum Cage in this story of a really horrible late-eighties ur-yuppie (who could give Patrick Bateman a run for his money in a surprisingly similar story) who is either in the process of becoming a vampire or is just going round the bend. Maybe both are true – it’s hard to say, but regardless of how you read it, it does feature a Cage performance for the ages – jumping on the sofa while shouting the alphabet at his beleaguered therapist, shoving cheap joke store fangs in his mouth and running around shouting “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire,” just fully capturing, in a non-naturalistic, but no less effective manner, a man’s sanity snapping quite in half. It’s hard to know what to make of it sometimes. Things that seem intended as comedy sometimes feel sad, while moments of pathos deliver laughs. It’s a really unique, kind of great, little movie.
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
When I was a kid, I loved the 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors. I played the soundtrack cassette to death, and later, once my family got a VCR, the VHS. And I remember at some point finding in a discount bin the original Roger Corman film. I brought it home and just found it unwatchable, so different was this black and white Borsch Belt cheapie from the colorful, tuneful version I adored. Thus, I am so glad that I gave it another chance this summer. What a fun, odd, idiosyncratic picture. Apparently shot in two days and one night on a leftover set, Corman’s creation really holds up as a blackly comic monster movie. I wasn’t ready to appreciate it as a kid, but this time, I found it captivating and really quite funny. Don’t feed the plants.
Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
I’d been meaning to check this out since hearing an interview about it with its star, Toby Jones, when first released, and I don’t know what took me so long. This tale (from Peter Strickland – who later did In Fabric) of a soft spoken, gentle, terribly English sound engineer brought down to Italy to lend his services to an Italian horror production of some Fulci-esque violent supernatural gore fest goes to some pretty heady, wild places. We see how appalled he is with the subject matter of his work, and follow him into a weird blurring of realities where film and life bleed into one another. By the end, I’m not even sure where we ended up, but it was a rich, peculiar, sometimes unsettling ride the whole way there. I’m sure I’m going to revisit this and maybe write further about it in these pages before too long. In the meantime, I strongly suggest grappling with this exploration of the inherent ugliness of horror, featuring some of the grossest fruit mutilations I’ve seen (that’s foley work for you).
The Lodger, a Story of the London Fog (1927)
Hitchcock’s third feature film, he reportedly described it as the first wherein he felt he had found himself as a filmmaker. This late silent era thriller is a genuinely exciting, expressionistic, and atmospheric Jack the Ripper inspired tale of murder, suspicion, threat, and revenge. A mysterious man comes to a lodging house during a spate of serial killings in foggy, spooky London. He’s got some odd hang ups about the paintings of blonde women filling his rented room and, well, all of the victims have been blonde girls (Hitchcock had “found his style”). Could he be the killer? Is the landlady’s daughter in danger? Is the local police inspector a really pushy and somehow oblivious creep? Is anything even certain by the end or are we still in doubt? This is streaming free on Youtube and is well worth the time.
Spontaneous (2020)
This blackly comic and equally tragic film featuring high schoolers inexplicably exploding was obviously made about school shootings (kids running through school hallways before a bang is heard, blood is spattered, and more young people have to reckon with horrible, senseless loss beyond understanding), but being released in 2020, and featuring quarantines and speedy pharmaceutical trials, it eerily suggested the pandemic as well. I really liked it, eliciting laughs and tears in roughly equal measure, while leaning into a romantic angle that I was willing to buy. Regardless of which contemporary issue it is mapped onto, its exploration of the mystery and horror of death without hope of explanation or meaning is moving, funny, and occasionally shocking.
Wounds (2019)
I had heard mostly not-great things about this first foray into English language film from Babak Anvari (of Under the Shadow), but I’m glad that I gave it a try. This story of a seemingly sociable enough bartender dragged down a rabbit hole of viral video violence, body horror, and nigh-Lovecraftian weirdness before ultimately confronting the absence at his core kind of rattled me. There are many moments where I’m still not sure what exactly was going on, but it got under my skin, creeped me out, and lingered in my mind well after finishing the viewing. I get how this would not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was very badly reviewed in general, but I found that it delivered a mature, uncanny, and rewardingly both fleshy and cosmic brand of horror. I’m very curious to check out some of Nathan Ballingrud’s work, the author upon whose story it was based. Added to the basket.
Godzilla (1954)
This is another film I could have sworn I’d seen on some rainy Saturday afternoon in my childhood, but having recently finally seen it, I think I must have only watched later iterations. Wow, for a fifties monster movie, featuring a guy in a rubber suit, this lands with real gravity. But, really, how could it not? Released in Japan only nine years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and focusing much less on the giant lightning breathing lizard than on the devastation of a civilian population, Godzilla features a threat beyond imagining awoken by nuclear testing and the only scientist who has found a way to stop it, unwilling to do so for fear of a new horrible weapon being unleashed on the world, having been delivered to humans who cannot be trusted with such awful power. And while it was clearly filmed on a budget, the filmmaking is totally effective and the monster can be actually scary—the sound design alone is pretty chilling—but probably nothing disturbs quite so much as the simple image of small children being scanned for radiation. Just the night before, I had watched the disappointing Godzilla vs. Kong and this was a great antidote – pretty much the opposite movie in every conceivable way, and such a rewarding watch.
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And that was 2021. Ok, there were other things too: an ongoing pandemic, family health concerns, worldwide economic issues, and all sorts of stuff that was not exactly fun. But, these ten movies were bright spots. I look forward to the new discoveries this next year holds. Happy New Year all!