I’m about two and a half years into this blogsperiment? Blogventure? Bloject? (Ugh – I think these are just getting worse and were never necessary to begin with) And in that time, I’ve had good runs (last January – April, I managed a new post every week) and I’ve had drier spells (lately, I’ve averaged a post every two weeks). The blog has given me opportunity and impetus to finally check out loads of work I’ve been meaning to get around to, but just never had, and it’s also given me the excuse to devote some regular time to thought – what am I going to discuss this week? What did I think about this work? What, quality notwithstanding, did I find interesting in it? Why did (or didn’t) I enjoy a given moment of awfulness? What bigger topics do I have thoughts about or do I want to think about? There’s a lot of thinking about thinking about thinking. Sometimes there’s more of that than writing…
And so, at the turn of the year, as everyone is making best of lists, looking back at the year that’s passed or looking forward to the future to come, it has become my tradition (of only two and a half years – stop fiddling on my roof) to do a list as well – but it’s tricky. I can’t in good conscience do a “best of” list for 2023 releases because I’m terrible at keeping up with new stuff (out of the 123 horror movies I watched in 2023, only 11 were new releases). Past that, choosing the ten best to write about is rough because most of the best horror content I’ve watched this year, I’ve already done posts on (83 movies in 2023) – so in a way, these are all leftovers: The Ten Best Things I’ve Watched This Year That I Hadn’t Seen Before And Haven’t Written About Yet. It’s a mouthful. Also not a catchy title. Ah well…
Some of these I’d watched planning to do a full post about them but for whatever reason I just didn’t make it happen. In that case, I hereby reserve the right to return to any and all of these in the future for longer analysis (I don’t know who I’m submitting this claim to, but it is thus declared). Some of these I really enjoyed, but just didn’t feel the urge to commit three thousand words to them, and so here I can briefly sing their praises without the burden of deeper consideration. So yeah – these will be short (in some cases, I watched them once almost a year ago and we’ll see what’s stayed with me). Also, this isn’t a countdown – these are in no particular order – just that in which I think of them.
But that’s probably enough set up. Let’s get to it, shall we? For a change, as these will all be short texts, I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but I’m not exactly making any promises.
Curtains (1983)
What an absolute blast! This Canadian slasher with a troubled production history (directors coming and going and taking their names off the project – resulting in wildly divergent tones and, shall we say, odd plotting) has a bit of everything: creepy dolls; that scene on the ice with the hag masked killer, the sickle, and the slow motion skating; a head in a toilet; the total defiance of physics (how can you get knocked out of an upstairs window only to crash into the downstairs window?); some legitimately suspenseful sequences, better acting than it probably deserved (Samantha Eggar is great, John Vernon, most recently mentioned in my write up of Killer Klowns from Outer Space, has to be one of the all-time greatest portrayers of cinematic bastards, and I was so happy to see Lynne Griffin, Clare from Black Christmas), and a twist ending that for my money, really lands. And for all that it is more than a little stylistically messy, it even has strong contemporary resonance – a #MeToo movie thirty years ahead of its time.
We follow Samantha, a famous actress researching her next big role which will require her to play “crazy” so her director, Jonathan Stryker, a real prince of a guy, has her committed to an institution to “research” the role. He then abandons her there and invites a group of young ingénues to his remote house to “audition” them instead, and by audition, of course I mean psychologically torment them and try to get into their pants. What he’s looking for in the part is a bit of a mystery as the women are professionally, respectively, an actress, an ice skater, a stand-up comedian, a ballet dancer, and a musician. But maybe he’s not even casting, and he just wants a group of attractive women to sleep with and belittle while doing acting exercises. Like I said, a real prince.
Of course, everyone starts dying (I’m pretty sure only one person makes it to the end), and there is a reasonably enjoyable whodunit in puzzling out who’s actually behind all this slashing, as well as a turn at the end that took me by surprise, but I think this is a movie most enjoyed for its idiosyncratic little details rather than the big picture. Really – it’s a hoot.
Sante Sangre (1989)
I was so impressed with this one and really intended to write a full post on it and somehow failed to (I think it just felt so big and worthy that I needed to invest more thought and take the time for another couple of viewings, and that week, I just wasn’t up to the task). One day, I hope I circle back and do so because it is tremendous. In short, it’s about a young man, Fenix, who grew up in a circus where he witnessed his knife throwing father cut off his religious-cult-leading mother’s arms as revenge for her acid-poured-on-crotch revenge on his infidelity with the tattooed lady. After escaping from an asylum, Fenix becomes his mother’s new arms and is compelled by her to carry out a series of murders. In terms of plot, it’s relatively straightforward (relatively), but Alejandro Jodorowski’s carnivalesque, manic, utterly gorgeous and disturbed arthouse horror is anything but.
There is such an overwhelming sense of ritual, of devotion (religious, familial, romantic, sexual, psychotic), of the cruel compulsion to serve what and whom must be served and the nearly completely crushed spirit of an individual trying to assert itself, trying to live its own life, free from the oppression of the holy, of beauty, of family. Heady stuff – but it’s also just so full of life – weird and wild and bloody and baffling. No matter how lofty the ideas at play, this film is never ponderous or weighed down, but is rather a rollercoaster of passion and murder and absurdity and art and lived-in details. I absolutely loved it – easily one of the best films I saw last year, horror or otherwise.
The Ring (1998)
It is embarrassing that it took me so long to finally get around to watching the Japanese original, but I’m so very glad I did. I’d seen the American remake on release (on video, at home, and the moment my roommate and I finished watching, the phone rang…it was only his mom, but still creepy as all get out) and had always heard how good this was, but somehow never before pulled the trigger on it.
Wow. It’s always nice when something lives up to the hype – this really worked for me, even though the remake had been faithful enough that there weren’t too many surprises to be had – but yeah, it still creeped me out. And what’s more, it really lingered with me for a couple of days afterwards – not in the sense of being scared of video tapes (not many of those around these days), but in the mood, the feeling.
I won’t go into the plot much because a) I feel like everyone already knows the basic idea whether they’ve seen it or not (watch a cursed video and die in seven days) and also b) if you haven’t seen it, there are some twists and turns in the final act that really surprised me when I first saw the remake and still land dramatically on finally watching the original. But I will say that the film does something so interesting in combining elements that feel so richly folk horror – urban folklore, old curse, angry ghost, kids creeping each other out with scary stories – combining all that with modernity, with technology, with elements that feel utterly of the “modern world.” Although all of the tech at play here – video tapes, film cameras, and landline telephones have gone the way of the dodo, the idea of viral concepts self-perpetuating through the technology that dominates our lives, the space in which we really live, and haunting us, changing us, dooming us – that idea is as current as could be. It really holds up.
Hellraiser (2022)
This is another one that I mean to write about at greater length. I’d waited for it for quite a while as it took more than a year to finally be rentable on a streaming service where I live (Poland) and I wanted to be a good boy and pay for it. I can’t say that it’s a perfect movie and when I finally go into more detail, I’ll discuss why, but at least the first half felt so much like a Clive Barker story and it really scratched an itch for me, sending me down a rabbit hole of rewatching the first two Hellraiser movies (the only ones that really had Clive’s involvement) and re-reading “The Hellbound Heart” (the novella on which the first film was based).
The intersection of addiction and the compulsion to work the puzzle box, to keep going even if it hurts and is clearly self-destructive, really felt like something out of an early Barker short story, specifically putting me in mind of “The Inhuman Condition,” (the one with the knots) and I liked Riley as a flawed, but compelling protagonist. Furthermore, Roland Voight, the villain of the piece, is such an absolutely Barkerian figure – the hedonistic, amoral playboy art collector seeking out experience beyond limit, and I really liked the visualization of the cenobites, no longer just S&M leather demons (though that is an iconic look and really worked in its own way, bringing a fetishistic sexuality to the first and all subsequent films), but remade into monstrous puzzle boxes themselves, their bodies and souls perpetually held in extremis.
While it’s true that the story somewhat lost me in the second half once they’re all trapped in the house getting picked off one by one, on the whole, it had the right flavor. It gave me a taste of the author who first brought me to the genre, and that was more than worth the watch and the wait.
Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985)
Sometimes you just have to be in the right mood to appreciate a given film. I’d heard of this years back as a “famously bad,” “so-bad-it’s-good” B-movie, striking for being so terrible even though it’s the first sequel to a bit of a modern classic (I mean once you get to Part III: The Marsupials, you already have lowered expectations – though, to be fair, I haven’t seen that one yet). So, long ago, I gave it a try with a terrible copy available on Youtube and quickly gave up, deeming it not worth my efforts. But then sometime this year it showed up on Shudder and I’m so glad I gave it a second chance cause I absolutely ate it up!
What’s it about? Unsurprisingly, this guy discovers that his dead sister (Karen, the protagonist of the first film) was a werewolf (wouldn’t have guessed that from the title) and therefore has to travel to Transylvania to fight Stirba, the immortal werewolf queen before she can take over the world. Along the way, eyes get popped out, there’s a werewolf orgy, there’s a telepathic mind battle, and surprisingly little stuff that feels like a traditional werewolf story – but who cares? It is brash and fun and so lovably shameless in its sleazy immaturity (infamously, a moment when Stirba tears her shirt off is repeated seventeen times over the closing credits as the theme song plays one last time).
Is it actually a good movie? Maybe not, but who’s to say? Is it frequently laugh out loud absurd in surprising, delightful, cheeky ways? Absolutely! Does the soundtrack basically just feature one song that it plays on repeat constantly? Yeah – but (as I wrote about recently) it’s a banger! Has it got Christopher Lee wearing the most 80s sunglasses imaginable and uttering ridiculous expository dialogue with great, silky voiced gravitas? Oh yeah! And somehow, in spite (and because) of all of its weirdness, is it actually kind of a cool, folksy, rockin’ werewolf (though they kind of seem more like vampires sometimes) flick that, if you’re open to it, is just a party and a half? I really think it is.
Talk to Me (2023)
Hey! A new movie – look at that! I know that this Australian feature already got a lot of buzz this year, but I’ll add to it. A group of teenagers start playing a party game with this weird mummy hand that’s being passed around – you hold the hand and suddenly find yourself face to face with a dead person. It’s creepy and weird as party games go, but it’s also thrilling and wild. The plot kicks in as a girl still in mourning for her mother who’d OD’d two years earlier comes into contact with this addictively sinister item and goes down an unsurprisingly dark path.
Now, I will say that where the story ultimately went didn’t exactly blow me away, but I loved the energy of the early scenes with all of the kids basically getting high on this new party drug (of summoning the dead). As an addiction narrative, it put me in mind of the bit in Trainspotting when Renton narrates, justifying his heroin habit, “What (people) forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not fucking stupid.”
The play with this mysterious object feels like such a dangerous game – and no one understands it. We get no real lore. No exposition (so refreshing). Different kids tell different stories about its origins, but it’s obvious that no one knows anything, and there is an essential mystery which is enticing and cool and scary, and I love that the filmmakers commit to it and don’t ruin things by explaining everything (or really, explaining anything at all). As a viewer, you feel how wrong it is and at the same time how awesome it is too. In the second half, the story took some predictable turns, but the early vibes were eerie and cool enough to earn it a place on this list.
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
This is another “wow” movie that I think I watched a second time the very next day. Jodie Foster (maybe 13 at the time of filming) is captivating in her portrayal of Rynn, a precocious teenage girl, living alone in a big house, who seems beset on all sides by adult threats to her life, her freedom, and her autonomy, and who also just might be a sociopath. But even if she is, that’s no matter – I think it’s impossible not to root for her independence and self-assurance.
One could certainly quibble about the genre classification here (maybe it’s a thriller, maybe it’s a mystery, maybe it’s a drama), but there is enough of the unsettling, and the threatening, enough looming doom, for me to happily count this a horror film. Plus, it features a young Martin Sheen as the local child molester, which the town takes as a kind of open secret and does nothing about, who comes to prey on Rynn, and he feels so dangerous and scary – it gets pretty uncomfortable and he’s great in the role.
The whole film is intriguing and unnerving, as Rynn both takes on and is subjected to adult situations and dangers (the treatment of age and sexuality is more than a little disquieting and it’s hard to imagine this being made in quite this way today – but it’s also, I would argue, absolutely central to the character, to the story, to the admittedly controversial idea at the center of the film – that Rynn alone has the right to her own decisions, financial independence, and sexual agency, and that any attempt on the part of “grown-ups” to protect her amounts to a unacceptable violation of her liberty). And the whole time, while I always felt on her side, there was also a mystery at the heart of her character – there is a depth under the surface we can never see. Her clear eyed understanding of the world around her is a kind of power, as is her unbothered willingness to do what she needs to do to assert her right to self-determination. But this power is also dangerous in its way, and she is able to carry out consequential acts without moral compunctions. Still, these same qualities are magnetic; separating her from others in the ‘killer kid’ canon who might be seen as monstrous. On the contrary, she always feels like the most reasonable, mature, qualified figure in the narrative, and any threats she feels the need to dispatch, I wouldn’t begrudge her right to do so. It is a really interesting little movie.
Alligator (1980)
What “right” does any film have to be good? That’s an odd judgment to make. Nevertheless, on watching this giant-alligator-in-the-sewers movie, I immediately felt that it was so much better than it had any right to be, or perhaps simply any need to be. I mean, to be successful, so many elements could have been lacking – if there’s a big alligator eating people, that’s really enough. But this Jaws-esque romp gave me so much more.
Penned by John Sayles, and starring Robert Forster, there is a surprising depth of character and feeling in this otherwise silly but entertaining story of an alligator, brought as a baby from a vacation in Florida home to Chicago where it’s flushed down the toilet and lives in the sewer, feeding on test animals from a lab, which causes it to grow extra large and extra hungry, eventually going on a rampage wherein it eventually consumes the evil scientists inadvertently responsible for its creation as well as the corrupt politicians whose turning a blind eye to corporate malfeasance has made this all possible.
But along the way, we are treated to Forester’s genuinely grounded performance as a world weary cop whose partners keep dying in the line of duty – and who thus carries a great weight of guilt, grief, and exhaustion (we see at least one get got by the gator and it actually lands with real, effective horror notes), a hesitant, tentative romance, alternatingly tender and combative, that develops between him and Marissa, the local herpetologist, and any number of little moments of life and specificity – Marissa’s mother who just won’t stop talking and is somehow both irritating and charming, a delightful short scene in which the cocky big game hunter brought in to take down the gator is being interviewed by an attractive female reporter and flirts with her by performing alligator mating and/or distress calls (sexy, huh?), and Forster’s quiet, gently sad disdain for the scientists he talks to early in the film who are experimenting on cute dogs before furtively discarding their remains in the sewer for giant reptiles to eat.
We also get loads of big puppet work (which is pretty much ok), a small real alligator on miniature sets (which is fun), and wild shifts of tone, like when we cut between the central romance and a kids birthday party where some little boys dressed as pirates make another kid walk the plank before pushing him into a pool where he is brutally and bloodily devoured by the titular creature, or the wedding party filled with rich jerks, where the alligator invades and causes glorious, ridiculous havoc. What fun!
Scream VI (2023)
And we have one more new movie on the list. I’d enjoyed the previous year’s jumpstarting of the dormant franchise, but this entry felt more like its own thing. Sure Gale Weathers is still on the scene, but the story otherwise belongs to the new young cast, and particularly Melissa Barrera’s Sam, and her struggle with her own useful, but nonetheless concerning capability for violence, which she fears may be an inherited trait. This internal conflict has developed over the course of these last two movies and it’s a compelling story (which, sadly, may never be resolved as the next film seems to have been scuppered after Barrera was fired for social media posts about Gaza – Ortega left immediately after, as did Christopher Landon, the director of the upcoming entry).
I think the Scream movies are pretty consistent in their quality (sure, there are ups and downs, but on the whole, they’re pretty solid) and in maintaining the mystery of the identity of the killer (or, more often, killers) each time, and this is no exception (I didn’t exactly love the why this time, but the reveal of who was satisfying). Also, they allow certain characters to make it from one film to the next, such that we can become invested in their survival (of course, characters frequently die, but the others we do get to know and come to like spending time with). I think it was always a strength of the series that the final girl was the star, returning time after time, targeted by new killers, rather than “ghostface,” the voice modulated psycho of the week wearing a store bought Halloween costume. Though the mantel of final girl has changed in this new cycle, this film continues that trend, giving us more time with the new “core four,” all of whom are likeable kids that I’m not hoping to see offed.
But the highlights are clearly a few action/suspense/horror set pieces of great tension and excitement. The series of kills in the cold open kick the mystery off in a refreshing way, the final conflict in the movie theatre/shrine has its thrills and viscerally satisfying brutality, Gale’s fight is high paced and really feels like it could go either way and this could be the last we see of her, and of course, the ladder scene shines as, under attack from the masked killer, all of the kids seek egress from their apartment terrifyingly high in the air. It is tense and scary and just fun. I think the co-directing team of Radio Silence really shined in the last film and in this one with some stand out suspense scenes. It’s a shame they’re not continuing with the series (but after recent developments, one wonders if the series will even continue with itself, or maybe lie dormant for another ten years, before doing another soft-reboot in which they may actually be willing to pay Neve Campbell’s asking price for some 40th anniversary return to the endless trials and tribulations of Sydney Prescott). But whatever (if anything) comes in the future, this was a good night at the cinema and I’m glad I got to see it on the big screen.
Chucky Seasons 1 (2021) & 2 (2022)
And, finally, this one isn’t even a movie. For a while I’d been hearing how good the Chucky show is, but it just wasn’t playing anywhere I had access to, and then finally, over the course of this year, the first two seasons showed up on Shudder (who knows how long I’ll have to wait for the third, currently airing), and it kinda blew me away.
I’ve long respected Don Mancini’s Child’s Play/Chucky movie franchise. The first is a modern classic – really well made, fresh and scary. Then there is such a strong sense of continuity that runs through the rest of the movies, even as they’ve adopted wildly different tones, from straight horror to high camp and back to horror again, with many characters returning over the years, and furthermore, showing evidence of growth and change. And also, it feels special to have such a strong authorial voice that runs through it all. Mancini has only directed the last three films, but he wrote all seven of them and creatively leads the show (though both writing and directing responsibilities are shared with a team as is common on television).
And what a show – I think it manages moments that are properly scary, and it regularly surprised me or even shocked me with brutal turns. You know nobody is safe, but all the same, my jaw fell open more than once at just how willing the show was to let horrible things happen to characters you would expect, following the patterns of pop-culture entertainment, to be inviolable. And then the story really hooked me – in many ways, it follows the sort of tropes one expects of a teen coming-of-age drama: bullying, feeling isolated and weird, romance, in this case between two boys, one of whom has to deal with a homophobic home life, growing up and asserting independence from family – normal teen drama stuff…but…add a killer doll to the mix, add a real sense of constant danger, add wild turns of character carried by top notch actors (the work Jennifer Tilly gets to do in this series is really special – the same goes for Lachlan Watson, who plays Glen and Glenda, Fiona Dourif, and of course, Brad Dourif, whose been voicing Chucky since the beginning), and you get something totally new and exciting. It’s also nice how open and warm hearted the show is towards its young characters’ gender and sexuality at the same time as it can be so harsh and brutal when it feels like it – there’s a tension of tone that strengthens the whole. I also love that all of Chucky’s movement is actual puppetry – apparently digital effects are only used to remove strings or other remnants of the puppeteers from shots, but everything is done by hand – how rare and special – and it’s really well done.
Finally, I just got fully invested in the directions the story would take – it all happens against a backdrop of heartfelt teen romance and angst, but as the antagonist driving the story forward (which can be genuinely affecting), Chucky gets up to surprising plots and ploys and the show consistently kept me guessing. Really, these two seasons are the most fun I’ve had watching a TV show for a long time (it even got me listening to music from the soundtrack which hadn’t happened since I got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I laughed, I cried, I got startled, I got shocked, I had a great time. I can’t wait to see the third season someday.
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And there we have it, my ten favorite things of the year that I hadn’t yet written about. I imagine a bunch of these I might return to at greater length – lots of them deserve extra consideration. But either way, these last couple of days, I’ve had fun remembering them all – these might not have made the cut for a full post back during the year, but that is not due to any lack of affection for them on my part. There’s nothing on this list I wasn’t utterly enthusiastic about, both on first viewing and this reconsideration.
And so, that’s enough looking back. Let’s go forward and see what’s to be found in 2024.
