Super Dark Times (2017)

November 10, 2017November 10, 2017 / swampflix / 1 Comment

One thing that hasn’t yet been fully addressed in our current crop of kids-on-bikes throwback thrillers like Stranger Things & IT is that teenagers themselves are grotesque monsters. While most Amblin-inspired nostalgia horrors are content to pit flawed, but lovable scamps against supernatural monsters, Super Dark Times instead makes the more difficult choice of presenting the teens themselves, especially teen boys, as the inhuman creatures worthy of fear. The teenagers of Super Dark Times are gross idiots whose masculine aggression & feverish libido are disturbingly typical for their hormone-addled age range . . . until they result in a very atypical body count. There’s, of course, plenty room in this world for more idyllic depictions of teenage suburbia in crisis, where everything is well-meaning & wholesome except supernatural foreign invaders. Super Dark Times messes with that formula in an interesting way, however, by being more critically honest about the evils lurking in the real life kids who bike around those neighborhoods.

Two lifelong friends fill their days with standard teen boy grotesqueries: scrambled satellite signal porn, ogling girls in their high school year book, stale weed, junk food, performative cussing, etc. There’s a detectable face/heel dynamic in their relationship, where one of the kids is frequently invited to parties & is more socially fluent, while the other is more of a bitter shut-in. Mostly, though, they’re inseparable in their suburbanite exploits, which is how they wind up sharing guilt over the accidental death of a classmate, with a little help from a dangerously sharp sword & some old-fashioned masculine aggression. Most of Super Dark Times is wrapped up in the fallout of this life-destroying tragedy, following the more agreeable of the two boys as he feebly attempts to keep their involvement in his classmate’s disappearance quiet. He’s absolutely terrible at acting normal & covering his tracks, barely containing his mounting paranoia & crippling guilt as he also has to navigate school work, home life, reciprocated advances from a romantic crush, and increasingly intense stress dreams that jumble all of these anxieties into an incoherent cerebral torture. Then things get even worse.

Because of its genre and 1990s setting, it’s near impossible to avoid comparing Super Dark Times to more hot ticket kids-on-bikes throwbacks like IT & Stranger Things, even though its sentiments are likely more in line with small budget indie outliers like Gabriel & I Am Not a Serial Killer. You can definitely find Only 90s Kids Will Understand™ details in the setting if you know where to look for them: Walkman players, bagel bites, Bill Clinton, True Lies, PM Dawn, the aforementioned scrambled porn. The closest the film ever gets to cutesy nostalgia, though, is in depicting a high school kid having a deadly serious conversation on a tennis shoe phone. Its sense of dread is much more lyrical than merely evoking a half-remembered era through pop culture touchstones. The menace of the wilderness, the memories of longingly staring at girls in class, and the anxious nightmares of jumbled-up sex, blood, and divine swords make the film feel both dangerous & subliminally disturbing. Better yet, it even has a point of view in its depictions of the grotesque, unchecked evils lurking in teen boy masculinity that’s much more meaningful than any pop culture throwback or supernatural monster could’ve been in its place. Super Dark Times might not be the most fun kids-on-bikes thriller released in 2017, but it’s impressively honest & lyrically brutal in a way more films in the genre could stand to be.

-Brandon Ledet

Jigsaw (2017)

November 9, 2017 / swampflix / 2 Comments

I never had much interest in the Saw franchise or the general torture porn subgenre it helped pioneer, even though I should have been in its exact demographic during its nu-metal heyday. The only early installment I can remember seeing is Saw 2, a mind-numbing theatrical experience due both to its for-its-own-sake gore & its entirely unjustified last second plot twist. Still, I had hope that the most recent sequel, simply titled Jigsaw, might be able to reshape the franchise into something fresh & newly interesting. Produced over a decade after its most recent predecessor & directed by the Spierig sibling duo behind the weirdo genre entries Predestination & Daybreakers, Jigsaw stood a good chance of finding a new, exciting angle on a previously unpleasant, aggressively empty franchise. Instead, it merely repeated the pattern laid out by previous Saw films: shock value torture scenarios striving to top themselves in violence & absurdity without narrative purpose, followed by a last second twist meant to fool you into thinking the previous 90min were less vapid than they first appeared to be. Jigsaw is, oddly, more of the same from a franchise that’s been laying dormant since 2006. It’s not an especially pleasant or exciting experience thanks to that trajectory, but it does offer insight into how the horror landscape has evolved (for the better) over the last eleven years.

Plot is probably an entirely irrelevant component at this point in the Saw series, except to say that Jigsaw is at it again! After being thought dead for a decade, the Rube Goldberg-inspired serial killer is apparently up to his old games, trapping seemingly ordinary, unrelated people in unnecessarily complex death traps as punishment for their moral shortcomings. In order to escape death by boobytraps, Jigsaw’s victims must mutilate themselves & confess to the world the many ways they’ve failed as human beings. Most of these scenarios are tied to guilt over selfishness & self-preservation, but none register as anything more than excuses for gore & screaming, incoherent mayhem. Meanwhile, a parallel police investigation tries to make sense of the newly surfaced “game” & its subsequent, torn-apart dead bodies. Will they discover the apparently resurrected Jigsaw (or his astute copycat) before all of the players in the latest game are killed? Will a last second twist completely undermine whether the game or Jigsaw’s current state ever really mattered? Even if you can stay awake long enough to find out, it’s doubtful you’ll leave the experience sated, unless all you really turned up for was a few stray moments of cruelty & gore.

Truly, the only reason to seek out Jigsaw is to admire how much better the horror landscape is now than it was a decade ago. The depth & range of horror titles being produced by boutique labels like Blumhouse & A24 in the modern era is an embarrassment of riches. Jigsaw returns us to a time when Lionsgate had the run of the place, torture porn was the rule of the land, and every horror movie was required to look like it was filmed in Rob Zombie’s dorm room. What’s even more interesting, though, is the way the Saw franchise’s influence has been dispersed through pop culture at large. Much like how runway fashion innovation eventually trickles down to Wal-Mart bargain racks, Saw is now a part of everyday, pedestrian #content. Jigsaw‘s morgue examinations of destroyed bodies are barely more gruesome than anything you’d see on CSI-type police procedurals. Its backstory flashback structure that adds puddle-shallow context one victim at a time to its archetype game-players recalls the storytelling format of Orange is the New Black. Even the “games” themselves have become wholesome weekend entertainment for the whole family, thanks to Escape Rooms & the like. Saw & its grimy torture porn ilk are not only creatively anemic in comparison to indie horror in the 2010s; their blades have also been dulled & diluted by pop culture at large to the point of being completely harmless.

If the Spierig brothers add anything new to the Saw franchise, it’s in Jigsaw‘s last minute shift from serial killer horror to superhero origin story. Even that territory has been thoroughly covered before in the long-deceased television series Dexter, though. It also occurs too late into the story to forgive the well-behaved franchise carbon copy that eats up the majority of the runtime anyway. The only value this film holds, then, is a reminder of how wonderful it is that this kind of bland, pointless cruelty is no longer the norm in horror circles. Jigsaw is enlightening & worth examination if you look at it as a point of contrast for how much the horror landscape has changed since the last entry in the franchise, but I doubt I’ll accept any future invitations to “play a game” all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

November 8, 2017 / swampflix / 18 Comments

Does a bad ending, or even merely an unsatisfying conclusion, ruin a movie? I go back and forth on this a lot, sometimes within works with the same creators and producers. I considered last year’s 10 Cloverfield Lane to be one of the best movies of the year, and I really love 98% of Super 8, both of which suffer the same issue of a tonally inappropriate ending for a movie that was thematically about something other than, you know, stupid Cloverfield monsters (in the case of the former, at least it was justified by the retitle). Both of them are movies that I recommend to others with the caveats that they are nearly perfect but fail in a major way that, depending upon your consideration of the subject, may ruin your overall filmic experience.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is one of these contentious films. I sat in the theater in a completely enraptured state watching the film’s first two hours, but in the film’s final moments, those joyous feelings turned to ashes in my mouth. My roommate walked out of the theater exultant, but I was underwhelmed. But before we get there, a quick synopsis.

Surgeon Stephen Murphy (Colin Farrell) has a well-ordered and successful life, as demonstrated by the sumptuous home he shares with his loving wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children, fifteen-year-old Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and elementary-aged Bob (Sunny Suljic). He also has a secret and unusual relationship with teenaged Martin (Barry Keoghan), which he keeps from his family and lies about to his anesthesiologist partner Matthew (Bill Camp). He meets with the boy clandestinely at a diner and buys him gifts, ranging from simple ice cream cones to expensive watches. Stephen eventually reveals this relationship to his family, although he lies that he met Martin when the boy’s father died suddenly; in fact, Martin’s father was a longtime patient of Stephen’s, who died under mysterious circumstances. Stephen’s family falls under the influence of Martin’s charms, especially Kim, but each member of the family begins to fall victim of an inexplicable paralysis that seems to be of Martin’s devising.

There’s a lot going on in this film, and there’s so, so much to love, especially in its small moments of subtlety and intricacy. When I told him that I had seen it, Brandon asked if the film was as Kubrickian and giallo-inspired as he had heard; although the fingerprints that underline Kubrick’s influence are all over the film, there’s no real giallo influence that I can discern. I didn’t happen to catch The Lobster, but I am told that the emotional distance evident in dialogue and the lack of inflection that the actors use in Killing is a commonality with director Yorgos Lanthimos’s previous work. I’m not sure how that stylistic choice fit with his earlier film, but it’s a resounding success here, as the cold world of surgeons and diagnoses, children getting slapped (and worse), long walks with ice cream, and even awkward sexual advances are all treated with the same clinical dispassion, instilling the film with a feeling of extreme detachment that resonates in every scene. This only increases the mood of growing tension that is intentionally invoked, as the audience feels their anxiety rising like a tide while the characters observe the changes in their world and worldview with infuriatingly cold tempers.

Beyond the overt characterizations, there’s a lot of subtlety that will no doubt provoke discussion and inspection. Kim’s recent first menstruation is mentioned on two separate occasions, including once as a point of pride for Stephen when talking to his work colleagues following a formal speech; what’s to be made of that? Early in the film, Stephen and Anna engage in some slightly kinky hanky-panky (all edited and filmed with the same dispassionate camera work as every scene) in which Anna lies down inverted on the bed (with her head at the foot of the bed and vice versa) and pretends to be a patient under anesthesia; when Kim later attempts to seduce Martin, she assumes this same position, implying that she possesses a knowledge of her parents’ sex lives that is both incomplete and inappropriate. Every relationship possesses an animalistic charge but lacks intimacy, except for Stephen’s mentorship (for lack of a better word) of Martin, which is initially framed as potentially sexual and abusive but ultimately proves to be something equally primal but much, much worse. It’s not absent from the film, however: after foiling an unsuccessful seduction attempt on the part of Martin’s mother (one scene wonder Alicia Silverstone), Stephen later returns to their home in a rage when Martin’s true intentions are revealed, and he threatens/promises to “fuck [Martin] and [his] mother, like [Martin] want[s],” so he is at the very least aware of this tension and how it could appear, but his understanding of the motives are all wrong.

It’s the small moments in which this film proves its great worth, but paradoxically that same sparsity and minimalism in its ending left me unsatisfied as the credits started to roll. Even if you don’t make the immediate connection to the myth of Iphigenia, which is mentioned overtly in a scene wherein Stephen meets his children’s principal to investigate possible causes of their bizarre malady, the phrase “sacred deer” is bound to ping some mental connections for anyone with a familiarity to Greek mythology. Even with that knowledge, there is still an expectation for some kind of explanation for Martin’s apparently supernatural abilities, which never comes. This absence is less disappointing than one would expect, but the film still feels somehow incomplete in its final moments. Perhaps that was intentional; perhaps the evocation of feelings of incompleteness (not necessarily dissatisfaction) was the point of the film as a whole. I’d have to give it another viewing before I could say for sure, but for now, I’m left as cold as the icy blues of the film’s color aesthetic and Kidman’s eyes, although the buoyancy of the film’s choices before its final frames lifts my overall estimation.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Bad Batch (2017)

November 7, 2017 / swampflix / 9 Comments

It’s insane how rapidly Ana Lily Amirpour’s public estimation has plummeted since her well-received debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night made her one of the top directors to keep an eye on in the indie scene. A couple awkward (to put it lightly) Q&A session and Halloween costume incidents later and Amirpour is sitting at the helm of one of the year’s least loved high profile horror releases. Her druggy, cannibalistic road drama The Bad Batch lacks the critical support its fellow artsy fartsy cannibal picture Raw has enjoyed in 2017, finding few fans to defend its ambling, highly stylized version of a modern horror. I honestly went into the film hoping to file a contrarian opinion and get some blood flowing back into Amirpour’s veins. The Bad Batch boasted the same visual slickness & feminist bent that I enjoyed in her debut, except maybe shifting its palette from Jim Jarmusch to Harmony Korine (particularly his best works to date, Gummo & Spring Breakers). On paper, it’s the exact brand of bright colors & pop music ultraviolence I love in my modernist schlock, but in execution I can’t quite convince myself to enjoy what’s on the screen. What’s even more surprising than the way Amirpour’s reputation has faltered so quickly is that a movie this visually & conceptually exciting can feel so punishingly dull.

In a not-too-distant future, Texas, Florida, and Burning Man have all combined forces to create film history’s tackiest dystopia. The titular “bad batch” are a community of criminal outcasts fenced in outside the rule of law in a Texan desertscape that’s “hotter than the Devil’s a-hole.” A culture of scavengers & cannibals emerges from this outlaw nation, where people fill their downtime with drugged-out raves & prison yard workouts. Suki Waterhouse stars as a fresh-faced newbie to this flesh-eating community, one who immediately loses two limbs to cannibalistic reprobates on her first day as a member of “the bad batch.” She eventually escapes their clutches and makes her way over to a more hospitable raver community, where she gets entangled in a glacial plot involving a missing child. Other recognizable faces in the cast are obscured by bizarre character choices & costuming: Keanu Reeves in Tony Clifton drag as King of the Raves; Jim Carrey as a mute, sunburnt hobo; (most disastrously) Jason Momoa as a Cuban family man. It’s mostly a Battle of the Ridiculous Accents from there, as most of the violence happens quickly & early and the two hour runtime pulls a Terry Gilliam-esque feat of feeling three times its length. For a movie so sure of itself visually & aesthetically, The Bad Batch feels oddly short on ideas to occupy its time.

The most frustrating aspect of The Bad Batch is that it has the building blocks of a much more fun, rewarding movie already in its arsenal. I have no doubt that what Amirpour filmed for the project could be re-edited into a crowd pleasing spectacle of pop horror mayhem. The bubbly soundtrack (which includes needle drops from Ace of Base, Die Antwoord, and Culture Club), Speedos & watermelon-print jorts costuming, and beached jetskis & neon lights set design all suggest a movie far more fun than The Bad Batch ever dares to be. With more energy and a shorter runtime, the film could’ve been a blast as a live action sugar rush, but as a slow-moving art film it just lays there, rotting in the sun. The best parts of the film are dialogue-free indulgences in high fructose imagery (much like A Girl Walks Home, the film’s best scene simply watches a woman enjoy solitude in her bedroom). Any instances of plot or dialogue digging for meaning beyond these surface pleasures are either cringe-worthy, blunt statements of unearned themes or laughable moments like an embarrassingly edited, never-ending acid trip or the Richard Kelly-ish line, “What if all the things that happened to us happened to us so the next things that are going to happen to us can happen to us?”. That’d be fine if the movie were about half as long & twice as fun or violent, but as is its minor pleasures are buried under a massive bore.

I’m not quite ready to give up on Ana Lily Amirpour. I doubt the movie-world at large is either. Her imagery and bloodthirsty Millennial sensibilities are too immediately interesting to abandon just yet, but I’d be a liar if I said The Bad Batch in particular is worth anyone’s time. Until I hear that the film has been trimmed down or punched up into the wild ride horror comedy free-for-all it should’ve been in the first place, this is one Texan dystopia (among many) that I plan to leave forever in the rearview. Let’s just be hopeful and chalk it up as a standard sophomore slump.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #42 of The Swampflix Podcast: Five “Final” Destinations & Valentine (2001)

October 31, 2017 / swampflix / 18 Comments

Welcome to Episode #42 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our forty-second episode, we celebrate Halloween by looking back to some post-Scream mainstream horrors from the early 00s. Brandon and Britnee dive head first into the entirety of the Final Destination franchise. Also, Britnee makes Brandon watch the Denise Richards slasher Valentine (2001) for the first time. Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet

Afflicted (2014), Unfriended (2015), and the Future of Found Footage Horror

October 30, 2017October 30, 2017 / swampflix / 3 Comments

After the success of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, the horror market was flooded with found footage echoes of that pioneer work that diluted its legacy. Titles like [Rec.], Willow Creek, Paranormal Activity, and straight-to-DVD dreck too bland to even be named exhausted the possibilities of how the found footage gimmick could be kept fresh on the horror landscape despite the limitations of its form. There’s still an occasional success that follows a traditional found footage formula (The Visit & Creep both immediately come to mind), but for the most part that subgenre still feels oddly faithful to the roadmap laid out by Blair Witch almost two decades ago. For me, the most exciting developments in found footage gimmickry have been the instances where movies leave behind the handheld camcorders of Blair Witch entirely and switch up the technology of the devices used to record their horrors. Our current Movie of the Month, Unfriended, is my go-to example of how updates in technology can keep this genre alive. Framed entirely within the POV of a laptop screen during a deadly Skype conversation, Unfriended offers a new, novel perspective on found footage storytelling. It recaptures the “It could happen to you” verisimilitude of Blair Witch’s camcorder format without merely repeating the trick. The subsequent shift to smartphone POV (via Snapchat) in Sickhouse wasn’t quite as memorable, but at least offers hope that future technology jumps can keep this genre fresh. We can’t continue to produce carbon copies of The Blair Witch Project and expect them to remain effective. Its modes of “documentation” no longer reflect the way we film our lives, in supernatural thrillers or otherwise.

I believe Unfriended is the best technology jump I’ve seen among Blair Witch descendants, but it wasn’t the first. A year before Unfriended hit wide release, a much smaller indie horror titled Afflicted offered its own Blair Witch technology advancement in what could (reductively) be described as GoPro Horror. Written, directed by, and starring Derek Lee & Chris Prowse (who use their own names & old photographs in the film), Afflicted adapts vampire transformation horror to the format of a reality show-style travelogue. Two American buddies take a break from their daily drudgery as an I.T. bro (who’s suffering an aneurysm-causing brain disorder) & a low-level documentarian (who just wants to shake his bestie out of his medically-induced rut) to backpack through Europe in search for excitement, experience, adventure, and distraction. They document their every waking moment on a shared “video travel blog” titled Ends of the Earth. Things take a bad turn when the aneurysm-suffering tech bro engages in a one night stand hookup with a French girl and is unwittingly turned into a vampire. The bubbly self-promo energy of the reality show travelogue then slips away as the focus shifts to documenting the supernatural changes in his body, which range from the ailments & abilities of a superhero to those of a bloodthirsty monster. By the end of the film he’s a fully feral Nosferatu, wreaking havoc in the streets of Paris with wild abandon. Afflicted is an exciting balance of dirt cheap, accessible technology (most notably in its use of GoPro footage) and large scale CGI horror spectacle. The tension between those two aesthetics pumps fresh blood into the veins of two over-drained horror subgenres (the found footage horror & the vampire myth) while still maintain the feeling of two normal buds making a no-budget indie together. As the technology of its camera equipment becomes more obsolete, it might stand a chance as surviving as an essential cultural document, just as Unfriended captures what life online feels like in the 2010s (except maybe with less vampirism & ghost murders, respectively).

As much as I remain impressed with Afflicted’s use of new technology to revitalize the found footage gimmick, I do have to admit that its basic accomplishment have become less novel over time. Spring offered a much better version of the supernatural European vacation from Hell narrative (sans the found footage device). They’re Watching (although total garbage) was more fully invested in the reality show turned found footage horror format (which still has more room to be fully explored). Most importantly, though, Unfriended’s commitment to framing its entire story through a single Skype session has since made Afflicted’s only occasional use of GoPros seem a little half-assed in retrospect. At this year’s New Orleans Film Fest I saw a darkly funny, merciless drama titled Damascene that proved it’s possible to film an entire movie on GoPros without it inherently feeling like a Hardcore Henry-style first person shooter. Afflicted mostly saves its GoPro sequences for its final, action-packed stretch as our vampiric antihero is being chased by Interpol for his crimes against innocent Parisians. Most of the movie is seemingly filmed on handheld digital camcorders, which makes it more a direct Blair Witch descendant than the much more fully committed Unfriended. Still, an intense focus is placed on the technology behind the documentation, even including a scene where all of the documentarian’s gear is laid out & cataloged on a hotel room bed (chest-mounts, GoPros, zoom lenses, etc.). The movie also finds the technological novelty in its attention to the two buddies’ travel blog, especially in how they crowdsource information through the comment sections. Afflicted may be slipping in my estimation in how its GoPro horror gimmick is used to revitalize the found footage format, but it’s still endlessly impressive in how it punches above its weight by playing with the latest available technological tools.

Although Afflicted is not as fully committed to its employment of GoPro technology to revitalize found footage horror as Unfriended was with Skype or Sickhouse was with Snapchat, it’s still worthy as an early signifier that the genre will only survive & remain fresh if it’s allowed to keep up with the technology of its time. I’m not convinced that Afflicted would have been half as interesting as a vampire transformation narrative or as a found footage horror piece without its GoPro technology & travel blog documentation providing modern online culture texture to its basic aesthetic. Just a year later, Unfriended did the same for the traditional ghost story within a found footage context, although admittedly with a fuller, better-realized commitment to its gimmick. It’s unclear what the next technology jump is for the found footage genre (although it’s likely a return to the Sickhouse smartphone gimmick is likely what’s next for Unfriended 2, at least), but the further the genre moves away from the handheld camcorders of The Blair Witch Project the better. There’s no reason for the genre to remain stuck in the technology of 1999 and the more it makes an effort to keep up with the gear available to its characters in the era they’re terrorized onscreen, the more effective it will remain as a mode of true-to-life horror & a cultural document.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the laptop-framed found footage horror Unfriended, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at how its committment to its gimmick distinguishes it from its German knockoff Friend Request (2017), and last week’s discussion of our hopes for it just-announced sequel.

-Brandon Ledet

From Beyond (1986)

October 29, 2017 / swampflix / 4 Comments

Despite my lifelong obsessiveness as a horror fan, I have several personal taste hang-ups with a few directors considered to be the titans of the genre that I cannot explain, but cause me great shame. I cannot put into words, for instance, why 80s splatter mayhem excites me to no end when Peter Jackson’s behind the camera, but I’m not at all amused by tonally similar work from Sam Raimi. There’s no accounting for why the works of George A. Romero tend to bore me, but I have deep love & appreciation for the gore hound & social critic devotees that followed in his footsteps. I’m not at all proud of these “I don’t get it” reactions to a select few horror greats, but I do have to admit that Stuart Gordon is among the spooky titans whose appeal escapees me. I can laugh & swoon over the misshapen oeuvre of a Brian Yuzna or a Frank Henenlotter without ever tiring of their cartoonishly juvenile sex & violence, but Gordon’s own additions to that exact aesthetic, most notably the Re-Animator series, has always left me cold (except maybe in the case of Dolls, which feels more like a Charles Band production than a standard Gordon film). As I’d obviously much rather enjoy his work than decry it, I recently sought out Gordon’s surrealist, Lovecraftian horror From Beyond (made largely with the same cast & crew as Re-Animator) in hopes of finding something that would finally clue me in on what makes him so beloved. It was only a moderate success.

Produced by Yuzna and starring returning Re-Animator players Jeffery Combs & Barbara Crampton, From Beyond follows a classic HP Lovecraft/”The King in Yellow” plot about people who get too curious about supernatural forces and are subsequently driven mad by their experiences with a realm beyond normal human comprehension. A scientist is accidentally killed and his assistant is driven mad by an invention known as The Resonator. Through a series of intense purple lights and bizarre sounds, The Resonator is a machine that “accesses the imperceptible,” syncing up what we understand to be the world with an entirely different dimension of invisible threats & dangerous sensations. The mental capacity to access this invisible world is linked to schizophrenia and the pineal gland (which protrudes & throbs at the skull walls of characters’ foreheads like a tongue pressing against the inside of a cheek), but its ramifications extend far beyond our understanding of science. Invisible sensations (later echoed in titles like Final Destination & The Happening) terrorize the film’s characters as The Resonator’s immeasurable effect introduces them to Lovecraftian tentacle monsters & increases their desire for kinky, transgressive sex. Even in scrawling this plot description at this very moment, I’m shocked that From Beyond wasn’t instantly one of my all-time favorite films. Assuming I would’ve loved this exact setup with the touch of a Cronenberg or a Ken Russell behind the camera, I have to assume it’s Stuart Gordon himself who’s holding its potential back.

The major letdown of From Beyond is that for a movie about unlocking a sinister realm of infinite possibilities, the places it chooses to go are disappointingly unimaginative. On a visual craft level, I’m wholly in love with the film’s D.I.Y. feats in practical effects mindfuckery. The soft, shifting flesh of the film’s oversexed, inhuman tentacle monsters from another dimension are deserving of audiences’ full attention & awe. The story told around those creations is disappointingly limited in its juvenile white boy masculinity, however, which makes me wonder if you have to be a preteen horror nerd when you experience Gordon’s work for the first time to fully appreciate him as an auteur. Of the four main victims to The Resonator, it’s the two white men who most fully experience its mindbending wrath and transform into surreal monstrosities. The remaining two victims, The Black Man and The Woman, are treated with a much more limited imagination. Dawn of the Dead’s Ken Foree’s character as “Bubba” Brownlee (even that name, ugh) is an ex-athlete bodyguard who throws out lines like “I know this behavior. I’ve seen it in the streets” in reference to Resonator addiction. His being locked out of the machine’s more extreme effects is disappointing, but what’s even worse is the way Barbara Crampton is immediately sexually violated in her first monster encounter, then asked to sexily model fetish gear. She also never fully devolves into the pineal gland demon her male colleagues transcend to despite her equal exposure to The Resonator. This should be a movie about an endless galaxy of cerebral terrors, but instead it’s mostly about impotence & other sexual hang-ups of white men in power, which is disappointingly reductive at best.

I can see so much DNA from some of my favorite horror titles seeping in at From Beyond’s fringes (Society, Slither, Videodrome, etc.) that it’s a huge letdown that the film is ultimately just Passably Entertaining. The feats of practical effects gore are impressive enough that I enjoyed the film more than Re-Animator’s more minor pleasures, but that isn’t saying much. There’s a violent, over-the-top goofiness to Gordon’s work that I appreciate in the abstract, but he’s so unselfaware about the unimaginative cruelty in the way he treats certain characters (especially women & PoC) that stop me short of heaping on praise. I might have been a lot less critical of it had I seen it for the first time as a kid, but I can’t help but find it a gross letdown now, especially since the infinite possibilities of its premise should have opened it up to so much more. Then again, this all might just be a matter of taste, and there’s no accounting for that.

-Brandon Ledet

Five Decades, Year by Year: Boomer’s Favorite Horror Movie of Each Year Since 1968 (Part Two: 1993-2017)

October 28, 2017September 13, 2025 / swampflix / 9 Comments

This feature is Part Two (of Two) in an extensive list of highlights and heartfelt recommendations from the last 50 years of horror cinema . . .

1993: It’s no secret that I love Needful Things. Leprechaun is a camp classic, and my dual loves of Timothy Hutton and George Romero mean that I have to take note of The Dark Half (even if I don’t love it), but the 1993 title belt goes to Guillermo del Toro for his Cronos, the most original take on a vampire film since Martin, although its internal mythology and cinematic eye far surpass that of the earlier film. The details in my mind are scant, but perhaps that’s for the best since I can’t spoil anything for you.

1994: A few years back, I would have called Cemetery Man my favorite horror film of 1994. While I do still enjoy it and find the imagery haunting (and there’s a Rupert Everett shower scene that might make everything in your house pregnant), a recent discussion with other socially progressive horror fans about the film’s admittedly questionable sexpolitick has made me want to revisit the film before I give it an unequivocal go-ahead. As such, I can’t recommend 1994’s Freddy Krueger entry Wes Craven’s New Nightmare enough. Before Craven jumped feet first into the meta-slasher genre, he tested the waters with this horror film about horror films, featuring an intriguing mythology that repositions the Krueger monster in the real world, as the embodiment of an ancient and real demonic entity that has become comfortable in Freddy’s skin. Featuring the return of Heather Langenkamp, who portrayed Nancy in the original film and Dream Warriors, this film serves as the perfect capstone to a trilogy of horror, if you watch the first film, the third, and this one, ignoring the others (except for morbid curiosity about how bad they can be). Brandon even came to a similar conclusion recently.

1995: This was a terrible year for horror cinema. If 1988 was the nadir of horror sequelitis, then 1995 is a close second. And if I told you that 1995 gave us one good thriller at least, you’d probably guess that I was talking about Se7en. But I lied; there were two good thrillers! A forgotten gem, Copycat stars Sigourney Weaver as a psychologist who studies serial killers until she is attacked by a deranged Harry Connick, Jr., leaving her mentally unwell and agoraphobic. That is, until a series of killings under investigation by detectives Dermot Mulroney and Holly Hunter force her to face her terror… before her fears can figure out where she lives.

1996: It’s The Craft. I mean, you knew that it would be, right? Obviously I love Scream, and it’s the better film objectively by a few miles, but there’s so much joy in watching the ladies of this coven succumb to their dark teenage impulses while refracting and reflecting the abuses that they have suffered back onto their teachers, bullies, parents, and other tormentors. There’s also a distinctly unusual story structure at play here that can make the film feel strange when you see if for the first time, like it’s not playing by the rules of cinema, and I love that as well. I have a friend who is working on the remake of the film, should it ever get off the ground, and when he told me about it I made sure to schedule some time to talk about what he had to get right, but the truth is, The Craft should remain untouched, unless you’re slipping it out of a DVD case (or, even better, a VHS sleeve) to watch it.

1997: This was almost the hardest year to make a choice about on this entire list. I share Brandon’s appreciation for Office Killer, and I think that Scream 2 is the rare sequel that is of equal quality to its predecessor. Guillermo del Toro gave ten-year-old Boomer nightmares for weeks from just the trailer for Mimic, and a series of sequels of diminishing quality doesn’t dull the horror of the original Wishmaster. Event Horizon is the real winner of my heart, pitting Sam Elliott and Lawrence Fishburne against each other aboard a derelict spaceship whose experimental propulsion system unwittingly opened a portal to Hell (of course, as one character says, “Hell is only a word. The reality is much worse.”). The film initially garnered an NC-17 rating for its violence, prompting some of the more truly horrifying scenes to be cut down to mere seconds of screentime and presented in flashes, which really only serves to make them subliminal and more horrifying. It’s a film that actually makes you want to reconsider the straight and narrow path.

1998: The post-Scream nineties were full of imitators. 1998’s Urban Legend has a special place in my heart because of its cast (notably future Dead Like Me actress Rebecca Gayheart, the always-amazing Alicia DeWitt, everybody’s first love Joshua Jackson, and Loretta DeVine, whose role here undoubtedly inspired Niecy Nash’s Scream Queens character Denise Hemphill). I also enjoy its attempt to compartmentalize and adopt contemporary folk tales into a basic slasher revenge narrative. Halloween H20 is also a great watch, and is (in my opinion) the best nineties sequel to a horror franchise that originated in another decade, recapturing the feeling of the first film and raising the stakes. That’s all well and good, but the best Scream imitator is undoubtedly The Faculty, which combines the classic pod people/body snatching plot with a commentary on interclique politics and general distrust of authority. It’s no surprise, then, that the script was penned by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, but he’s not the only notable name in this incredibly talented cast and crew: Josh Hartnett, pre-Fast/Furious Jordana Brewster, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris (who went on to replace the above-mentioned Gayheart on Dead Like Me), and Shawn Hatosy–and that’s just the teenagers! Rounding out the adults in the cast are Robert Patrick, Salma Hayek, a pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart, Famke Jensen, Bebe Neuwirth, and Mrs. White herself Piper Laurie. Also, Usher is there. It’s a shame that this one’s no longer on Netflix, because it’s the perfect nostalgic high school Halloween flick for the ages.

1999: On any other list, The Blair Witch Project would probably be the title you’d expect to see here. I mean, what does it have to compete with? Two dumb giant aquatic creature movies (Lake Placid and Deep Blue Sea)? A Carrie sequel that was twenty years too late and that no one wanted? Two separate remakes of black and white horror classics that should have been left alone (House on Haunted Hill and The Haunting)? The Sixth Sense? Ok, maybe that one. But as unassailable and iconoclastic as Blair Witch was, I’m throwing my weight behind The Ninth Gate, which may come as a surprise to those who are aware of my general dislike for Johnny Depp vehicles (in fact, I didn’t even hate Sleepy Hollow, which also came out this year; it’s actually quite a beautiful film and probably Tim Burton’s last great live action picture). The Ninth Gate is about a rare book dealer who becomes part of a larger conspiracy that seeks to reunite a series of woodcarving prints from various editions of an alchemical text in order to use the clues hidden therein to summon the Devil. It’s a great premise, and the film itself is eerie enough, even before the film categorically answers whether or not the horror facing the protagonist is truly supernatural or merely the manipulation of a reckless cabal of rich fools with cult-like devotion and bottomless pocketbooks.

2000: Ginger Snaps! Ginger Snaps! Katharine Isabelle is a delightful terror in this film that connects the blossoming of womanhood with a “change” of a more… lycanthropic nature. The scene in which one sister tries to help her sister through the removal of a painful and disgusting tail is a particularly nauseating treat. In this nickel-budget indie, everything is pitch perfect: the blandness of suburbia, the power of sisterhood, the uselessness of parents. Seek it out.

2001: Frailty was the directorial debut of the late Bill Paxton, and it’s an interesting experiment in determining which of your friends are purely rational and which are inclined to a more supernatural explanation. Of all the films that annoy me with their revelation that, “surprise,” the rational explanation of the film’s events is incorrect and the supernatural explanation is the correct one, Frailty toes the line with surprising subtlety and grace, never answering the question one way or the other and providing ample evidence for either viewpoint. Unusually, however, my favorite horror flick of 2001 is explicitly supernatural: The Others, in which Nicole Kidman and her poor, ill children are forced to confront the ghosts of the past (or are they?). Although a lot of the film’s surprises have been diminished by parody and overplay over the years (I think that TNT played The Others five times a week from 2003 to 2005), it still holds up, and it continues to reward with every viewing.

2002: The influence of The Ring on the horror films that followed in the next ten years is undeniable, for better or worse, and I was fortunate enough to see 28 Days Later on the big screen at a recent Terror Tuesday so that I could be reminded just how fantastic it is (I found myself listening to “In a House In a Heartbeat” for weeks after). It’s so good. But 2002 truly belongs to the beautiful oddity that is Bubba Ho-Tep, starring camp icon Bruce Campbell as an elderly Elvis Presley, whiling away his final days in an assisted living facility. You see, the “Elvis” who died in 1977 was actually an impersonator with whom the real Presley traded places in order to get some distance from his fame and all the trauma that accompanied it. He’s not the only supposed dead man there either: Ossie Davis plays a wheelchair-bound JFK, whose skin color was changed in order to hide him away from those who would do him harm after his “assassination.” Together, these two decrepit American icons have to fight off a reanimated mummy before it can suck the life out of every patient in their nursing home.

2003: When I started this list last year, I was genuinely perplexed as to what I should list as the best of this year, as virtually every film was complete garbage. Freddy vs Jason? The remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Darkness Falls and Dreamcatcher? I even went so far as to include Haute Tension on my outline with the assumption that I would find the time to watch it (I didn’t). But then a light appeared in the heavens and I saw A Tale of Two Sisters, a South Korean thriller about a young girl named Su-mi who returns to both her secluded family home after psychiatric treatment and to a dependency upon and protection of her younger sister, Su-yeon, against the apparent evils of their wicked stepmother. There’s more happening here than meets the eye, however, and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t caught this one. It’s also going to be the last legitimately good horror movie you’ll read about on this list for a while, so settle in.

2004: Yikes. Another shitty, shitty year. There were not one but two sequels to Ginger Snaps in 2004, neither of them really being worth the effort. I almost want to give the credit to Cube Zero, serving as the best sequel to 2007’s Cube, a fantastic master class in making the most of your budget and finding a way to make the most of the “characters in search of an exit” premise. But Cube Zero isn’t Cube, so hat’s off to you, Shaun of the Dead.

2005: When I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, the husband and wife team behind The Boogeyman (Snowden’s father was a professor at the college on which my boarding school’s campus was housed). It was an eye-opening experience, as the two talked about how much could change from inception to release. You got the feeling that they were embarrassed by the final product, which transposed their creepy urban horror fairy tale to a remote farmhouse, among other liberties taken with their material. Fun trivia fact for a couple of people you’ve probably never heard of and probably will never think about again: the couple first bonded over their love of Rosemary’s Baby! I’m not saying all this because their film is good, or even passable, but it is indicative of a studio push for more financially safe, viable horror fare that would haunt the 2000s with lazy special effects, tired plotlines, and actors who were moving out of their family-friendly TV programs and trying to find success in film (usually unsuccessfully; who would have thought that the person who would best survive the demise of their WB family drama would be Melissa McCarthy?). I guess I’m giving this one to Dark Water? I mean, it’s not good, but it’s always nice to see Jennifer Connelly getting work.

2006: This was the year of bad remakes. The above-cited Black Christmas and The Wicker Man got a lazy and a crazy remake, respectively, while the remake of The Omen was passable at best and the reimagined The Hills Have Eyes is utterly lacking in charm. I guess that my favorite horror movie of the year was technically Slither, helmed by future galaxy guardian herder James Gunn, but I saw it only once when it was in theaters and, though I enjoyed it at the time, I’m hesitant to throw my weight behind it. Instead, I’ll praise Pan’s Labyrinth, another Guillermo del Toro picture that I’ve always considered to be more of a “dark fantasy” along the lines of a more mature NeverEnding Story or Legend than a horror film, but I suppose its nightmarish imagery means that it falls within the purview of this list. It’s probably his most well-known film in the U.S. that doesn’t have the words “Hellboy” or “Blade” somewhere in its title, so you’re probably already well aware of it, but if you haven’t seen it before, now is the time to strike, especially as its narrative of using imagination and compassion to fight fascism is more important now than it was 11 years ago.

2007: I don’t really care for Planet Terror, but I did love Death Proof. It’s typical Quentin Tarantino: lots of talk about pop culture topics, women with their feet hanging out of car windows and over the edge of booths to be ogled, discussion of great music made by bands you’ve never heard of before, and hilariously over the top violence. But it’s also atypical in that all of the characters are women; I’m not positive, but I think this may even be the first Tarantino that passes the Bechdel Test (it’s been a minute since I saw it, but it’s possible that Kill Bill had a few lines of dialogue exchanged between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu or Thurman and Vivica A. Fox that didn’t explicitly mention Bill, but I can’t be sure). All of the characters are women, and the film also plays with convention by allowing us to slowly get to know a group that is quickly murdered by the killer before a whole car full of new Final Girls appears to make him sorry he was born. It was also the best American, studio-produced film to come along in years (and the last for a while).

2008: Speaking of which, Let the Right One In is my favorite of 2008, as we must reach beyond our domestic crop of films in 2008 to find one that is even worth mentioning. Luckily, this one’s not only passable but superb. In this creepy Swedish vampire film that was as iconoclastic of the genre as Martin and Cronos were in their respective days, the audience witnesses a bizarre (and horrifying) love emerge between a bullied prepubescent and his new neighbor, who is more than what they seem. The same rule applies here as it did with Jacob’s Ladder: if you haven’t already seen this movie, don’t read anything else about it until you get a chance to watch it for yourself. You won’t be disappointed, although you might be a little nauseated.

2009: Our cousins in the U.K. made the best horror (technically thriller) film of 2009 with Exam, a movie about eight people in a room who are competing for a single job opening in a vaguely-defined company that is situated to do important work in a bizarre world. Functioning as a kind of pre-Black Mirror surreal speculative fiction that looks at our world as it is, but slightly askew, the narrative follows the breakdown of these applicants who are faced with the titular exam. There are only a few simple rules: no talking to the Invigilator (exam proctor) or the armed guard at the door, no spoiling their paper, and no leaving the room. Failure to comply means disqualification, which is implied to be more devastating than simply not being considered for the job, but something darker. Much like Cube before it, the minimalist setting and cast allow the film to explore the darker side of human nature in a microcosm of society while standing in opposition to an unknown force.

2010: We have to cross the channel to France for my favorite horror film of 2010: Rubber, a bizarre ode to “no reason” that follows a psychopathic tire as it winds its way across a desert wasteland and encounters a variety of armchair philosophers who make muddled statements to make about the nature of man, art, and other topics. Brandon wasn’t as much of a fan as I was, but everything in his review is nonetheless accurate, so give that a read!

2011: If you go back through my old American Horror Story reviews on Tumblr or my personal blog (I’m not linking here because, like all writers, I’m a little embarrassed by my early work), you’ll find a fair amount of antipathy for Emma Roberts, whom I eventually came to accept as a passable actress about halfway through the first season of Scream Queens (perhaps because playing an unrepentant bigot with delusions of grandeur and the moneyed background to support it is squarely within her wheelhouse). As such, her presence in Scream 4 should have bothered me much more than it did at the time, but I found her portrayal of Sidney Prescott’s younger cousin to be a good role for her, and the film is great overall. Enough time had passed that the ground from which this franchise was born was fertile again (especially after the mess that was Scream 3), and the story works great within the paradigm of being a soft reboot while also bringing back the characters that we had grown to know and love over 15 years. Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courteney Cox truly feel like they’ve come home after a long time away, and the additions to the cast like Hayden Panettiere, Mary McDonnell, babealicious Nico Tortorella, and Alison Brie all contribute to a film that’s better than it has any right to be, and better than we deserve. It’s a shame that Scream 5 seems so unlikely now, but if this is where the franchise has to end, then at least it went out with style.

2012: This was the hardest decision on the list. I have nothing but love for Cabin in the Woods (see Brandon’s review here). Not only is it hilarious, scary, full of Easter Eggs, and generally perfect, it’s got many of your fave Joss Whedon collaborators (even if, understandably, your least favorite Joss Whedon collaborator these days is Whedon himself), but I also have a special fondness for it since a theatrical viewing was the first treat I gave myself after completing the grueling process that is graduate school (I was in my seat an hour after I took my last exam. Still, I’m going to have to give this year’s honors to Berberian Sound Studio, a pitch-perfect deconstruction of working behind the scenes on a giallo film, especially if you’re a timid English sound editor whose only previous experience is with tenderly shot pastoral documentaries. From the moment of his arrival, Gilderoy (Tobey Jones) is a nervous ball of anxiety, experiencing culture shock in his friction with a gaggle of aggressive Italian filmmakers (who in turn grow increasingly frustrated with his nebbishness). This only grows more potent as the film on which he is working, The Equestrian Vortex, becomes more intense. His inability to stomach the film’s subject matter becomes a liability; despite being a part of the process (and thus seeing how the metaphorical sausage is made), he descends into a kind of madness that takes him to unexpected places. Both Cabin and Studio are deconstructions of the horror genre that work perfectly as examples of the genre as well, and both are well worth your time.

2013: I didn’t see Odd Thomas, which has been sitting in my Netflix queue for nearly four years now, and although I’m super intrigued by the mechanisms of the creation of Escape from Tomorrow, I haven’t managed to catch that one either. I saw The Conjuring but wasn’t particularly impressed, and although I saw the next films by the directors of the Evil Dead remake and Mama (Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe, mentioned above and Andrés Muschietti’s recent adaptation of IT, respectively), I haven’t seen either of those. I’m going to have to give it to Oculus, strangely enough. I have no love whatsoever for professional wrestling, but I’m obligated to note that WWE films managed to put out a pretty decent horror film. It’s nothing ground-breaking, but it attracted my attention initially for having two actresses from two of my favorite sci-fi franchises, Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica) and Karen Gillam (Amy Pond, companion of the Eleventh Doctor), as well as Australian heartthrob Brenton Thwaites. The ending, and the overall plot, leave much to be desired, but I was pleasantly surprised when, sitting in the theater, I was presented with a horror film that was (a) original, (b) well produced and edited, and (c) genuinely terrifying at parts. It’s certainly nothing to write home about, but the fact that it’s a horror movie down to its bones and doesn’t rely on metatextual references to support it makes it a noteworthy experiment.

2014: While we should all hail Babadook as the ingeniously inventive (and nightmarish) metaphor for depression and loss that it is, there’s something about the feature-length music video that is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night that captured my heart from the first time that I saw it. I’m more fond of it than Brandon is, in a kind of inverse of our respective feelings about Neon Demon, another film that could be described using the words “feature length music video.” Demon and A Girl Walks are both mood pieces that rely on certain filmic techniques to tell a very short (if deceptively complex) narrative in a long form; after all, each film’s plot could be condensed into a three sentence recap apiece without excising any relevant details. But whereas I found Neon Demon to be a beautiful kaleidoscope of color that grew tiresome somewhere around the eighteenth hour of electronic musical droning, I was never bored by A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, while Brandon felt the opposite. Instead, I felt that 2017’s Raw was the spiritual successor to Suspiria that I wanted Neon Demon to be, while A Girl Walks is the timeless monochrome meditation that my life was missing. So, you know, take it from us(?) and watch neither, or both.

2015: People who know me personally are probably sick to death of hearing me talk about Queen of Earth, which I not only wrote about extensively just over two years ago, but also named my top film of 2015. I am sure that there are those who would object to my definition of this film as a “horror movie,” given that a surface viewing would show that the film lacks the normal hallmarks of that genre. What’s fascinating, though, is that this is a horror movie, with unsettling music, inexplicable and creepy appearances, a sympathetic and intertwined backstory for both our antagonist and our protagonist (if either of the main characters could be defined in such simple and straightforward terms). This is a thriller in which all of the violence is emotional, not physical, and that makes the film all the more haunting.

2016: It’s The VVitch. I mean, what else would it be? This one swept through the entire Swampflix staff like a delightfully distressing flu, earning a spot on every contributor’s list of best films of the year: Alli and Britnee both put it at number two on their respective lists, Brandon put it at number five, and it was my pick of the year. We’ve all written words upon words about it, so I don’t know what else to add to our compendium. Read Brandon’s review here.

2017: Barring the sudden and unexpected appearance of an unforeseeable dark horse candidate, Get Out is going to be my number one movie of the year, followed by the aforementioned Raw as a close second. As such, there’s no argument that it’s also my favorite horror movie of 2007 (again, with Raw as a close second), but I’ll be saving most of my thoughts for the end-of-the-year list. In the meantime, you can slake your thirst by reading Brandon’s review here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Five Decades, Year by Year: Boomer’s Favorite Horror Movie of Each Year Since 1968 (Part One: 1968-1992)

October 27, 2017October 27, 2017 / swampflix / 5 Comments

This feature is Part One (of Two) in an extensive list of highlights and heartfelt recommendations from the last 50 years of horror cinema . . .

1968: There are two truly noteworthy zombie movies that came out in 1968: the undeniable classic Night of the Living Dead and the endearingly awful Astro Zombies (some even consider it the worst film ever made!). But for my money, nothing tops Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby when it comes to existential dread and the anxieties and paranoias of urban living, as well as the socially imposed restrictions that treat women like baby machines with no agency. After fifty years, that at least still rings true, but recent right-backed legal policy coming out of this administration means that we really haven’t come as far as we would like to think.

1969: This wasn’t a great year for horror cinema; in fact, of all the frightful flicks that came out this year, the only one I consider to have much staying power is the pilot for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone follow-up Night Gallery, which aired about a week after Halloween on November 8. Although the program itself is a mixed bag that errs heavily on the side of nonsense and lacks much of the gravitas of its spiritual predecessor, this premiere consists of three shorts: “The Cemetery,” which is genuinely unsettling and cost young Boomer many a night’s sleep; “Eyes,” about a rich woman’s desire to see again, no matter the cost to others; and “The Escape Route,” in which a Nazi gets his just desserts (not to get political two entries in a row, but I have to point out that you can tell this one is fiction because the Nazi gets treated to a fate he deserves, unlike the American Nazis we see now).

1970: 1970 may have been the year that gave us Equinox, a triumph of amateur cinema and Harryhausen-esque special effects, but it also gave the world its first look into the directorial mind of Dario Argento, and longtime readers of the site know I simply can’t overlook The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. See my review of that one here for more!

1971: Argento churned out a second film in less than a year for a 1971 release date with Cat o’ Nine Tails, but I didn’t care for that one as much as Plumage. In fact, in my opinion, the best horror film of 1971 was Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, a psychological thriller that airs on local broadcast television pretty frequently, having lapsed into that gray market that’s not quite the public domain, but may as well be. Despite the fact that it was met with a lukewarm reception by critics of the time, the film is tense and serves as an interesting peek into the times in which it was made. I’m hesitant to say more for fear of spoiling it for future viewers, but it’s well worth the viewing.

1972: The late Wes Craven had a sick thing about mothers. For every Heather Langenkamp protecting her son in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (see Brandon’s revisit of the film here), there are a dozen Amanda Kruegers getting raped by countless asylum inmates in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors. Last House on the Left is a movie with a distressingly gross approach to sexpolitick, but it is nonetheless an important part of horror cinema history and demands to be seen, if you can stomach it. Acting as a kind of spiritual remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (which was itself an adaptation of a European folktale, as explored in this video by Leon Thomas), this serves as an interesting companion piece to Rosemary’s Baby but in a suburban, not urban setting, and about the other kind of horror that parents are inherently subject to: loss.

1973: The Exorcist may be the most famous horror film of 1973, and was the highest grossing horror movie of all time until its box office earnings were surpassed by IT this year, but although William Friedkin’s adaptation is an undisputed classic, I’ve always found The Wicker Man to be a creepier film with a slower build and a better ending. There’s a distinctly pagan feeling to the film that adds an air of discomfort to the proceedings that the polish on Friedkin’s film can’t match. If you’re only familiar with the title because of the terrible/campy Nic Cage remake, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not tracking down the original.

1974: Although I’ve been known to sing the praises of the late Tobe Hooper’s seminal work (and perhaps his opus, give or take however much credence you lend to the stories that Poltergeist was ghost-directed by Spielberg) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the most truly original horror film of the year was Bob Clark’s underrated holiday masterpiece Black Christmas. Years before Halloween, Clark set this proto-slasher during the winter holiday and focused on the travails of a group of sorority sisters who are at first amused by a series of dirty phone calls before they start to disappear one by one. Every character in this film feels real, from each housemate to their alcoholic house mother, and the non-ending makes the whole thing that much more terrifying. It’s a must-see.

1975: Although there’s debate over whether Profundo Rosso (Deep Red) or Suspiria is Argento’s true masterpiece, Rosso works better as a thriller while Suspiria works more as an art house nightmare. 1975 gave us the former, as well as the remarkably well-done Jaws and the frequently-cheesy-but-still-great Karen Black vehicle Trilogy of Terror, but my absolute favorite horror movie of 1975 is the fantastic The Stepford Wives. Even 40 years later, the central conceit of the film still stands the test of time. Even though a little reworking (as evidenced in this year’s Get Out) can adapt the plot to apply the timeless story of disenfranchisement, gaslighting, and the presumption of moral authority because of social power, the original remains as haunting today as it did the year it was released. The only thing scarier is how terrible the remake was.

1976: It was a tough call between The Omen and what I ultimately chose as my favorite horror movie of 1976, but as much as I love the slow burn of Damien and his various acts of evil, Richard Donner’s story of the birth and early childhood of the Antichrist simply doesn’t affect me as much as Brian DePalma’s Carrie, the first of many, many, many adaptations of Stephen King’s works to hit the big and small screens. Sissy Spacek is simply too captivating an actress to ignore here, and Piper Laurie has never been better than she is in this film as the hysterical mother of the main character. The ending is just as much a part of the public consciousness as the reveal at the end of Psycho, but the fact that the finale is a foregone conclusion makes the film that much more tragic, really.

1977: It’s no surprise that I’m picking Suspiria as my top movie for this year, but because I’ve written about it extensively both here and in other places, I want to take this opportunity to recommend the Japanese horror flick House (a.k.a. Hausu), which is similar in a lot of ways. Both films feature a cast composed almost entirely of women in their later years of schooling, visiting the unusual home of an older woman and facing apparitions and other horrors. But where Suspiria plays the haunted house concept to create a discomfiting dream, Hausu is more comedic, featuring bizarre cat monsters, seemingly hungry pianos, and various other absurdities that I won’t spoil for you here. It’s a must-see, even if you can’t get your hands on the Criterion version.

1978: What a great year for horror! In addition to cult classics like I Spit on Your Grave!, we also had John Carpenter’s undisputed masterpiece of slasher horror Halloween, which introduced the world to Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Meyers. We were also blessed to receive George Romero’s return to the world of his first masterpiece with the improved (your mileage may vary) sequel Dawn of the Dead, which is my favorite of his zombie films, not least of all because it features being barricaded in a mall against the mindless undead horde outside, which was an idle daydream of many children, myself included. But it’s actually Romero’s other 1978 release, the post-modern vampire film Martin, that’s my favorite horror film of the year. It hasn’t aged as well as others (our titular protagonist is a sexual predator in addition to his blood hunger), but it definitely holds a special place in my heart. Despite all of his problems, Martin remains sympathetic, and the film serves as an excellent companion piece to Carrie in its demonstration of the way that the cycle of psychological abuse can take root in a family and repeat over and over again. The audience is consistently confronted with its presumptions and forced to question whether or not there’s anything wrong with Martin other than being told that he is “unclean” for his whole life, and the way that this received abuse harms his psyche and makes him act out in a predictable, if horrifying, fantasy.

1979: Again, it’s no surprise that I’m picking Alien as my best horror movie of 1979, since, as has previously been noted here, it’s my favorite horror film of all time. But I also think it’s important to point out some of the other horror classics, both seminal and forgotten, that came out the same year. Five years after Black Christmas pioneered the “The call is coming from inside the house!” horror element, When a Stranger Calls perfected it. Young Carol Kane, whose career is largely comedic, plays against type as the frightened babysitter who is terrorized by a series of calls that are coming from, well, you know (all I ask is that you avoid the 2000s remake like the plague). 1979 also saw the release of the first Phantasm, a series that grew increasingly absurd as time wore on but is still surprisingly watchable and creepy, and I’m surprised that the Tall Man antagonist has never entered the mainstream horror fandom in the way that Freddy, Michael, and Jason did (although his influence on the Slenderman creepypasta can’t be denied). I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention David Cronenberg’s The Brood, which helped introduce him to a larger audience, and is one of his best works, even in comparison to more successful features that followed, like Scanners and The Dead Zone.

1980: A lot of people would immediately jump to the conclusion that The Shining is the scariest movie of 1980, and they may be right. Kubrick’s opus (give or take a 2001 or a Barry Lyndon or whatever) is probably the best remembered of his oeuvre in the mainstream, and it’s a film that has continued to terrify two successive generations, much to Stephen King’s chagrin. It’s a movie that needs no recommendation, so I won’t bother with wasting your time. However, an oft-overlooked film is Watcher in the Woods, a Halloween favorite of my childhood and beyond, and I can’t recommend it enough. Still, my favorite horror flick of 1980 has to be Altered States, starring William Hurt as a man whose experiments with hallucinogenic drugs and human psychic regression go further than he could have expected and have an effect on him that no one could have foreseen. Although silly at points, it’s a film with unforgettable imagery that will haunt you for weeks after, from multi-eyed goat creatures being crucified in Hurt’s visions to Hurt’s protohuman monster stalking about and making dangerous mischief, Altered States never gets old no matter how many times one sees it.

1981: The best horror movie of 1981 is actually a horror comedy, John Landis’s greatest creation (sorry, Max), An American Werewolf in London. I recognize this, and acknowledge that it is technically and narratively superior to Scanners, but I still find the Cronenberg flick to be more entertaining (if that’s even the word) on a personal level. The likelihood of something horrible happening to an entire generation because of poor pharmaceutical screening and a tendency to treat pregnancy as an ailment or illness has a greater verisimilitude than the possibility of lycanthropy, especially given that Thalidomide was given to pregnant women in Canada, resulting in a huge number of physical birth defects, and this was likely the inspiration for the film. If you’re only familiar with Scanners because of that one exploding head gif, then you’re missing out.

1982: When I first wrote my review of 1982’s Pieces, over two years ago, I stated that it “set the bar high as my new standard for horror comedy.” Although revisitations of the film outside of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Terror Tuesdays yielded a less exciting experience, it’s still a great film. Other films that I’ve reviewed before from this year include Basket Case and Tenebrae, which are both contenders for the best of the year, as is John Carpenter’s pinnacle creature feature The Thing, but my hands-down favorite has to be Poltergeist, which I was fortunate enough to see in 70 MM earlier this year and loved every minute of it. The hysteria of suburbia, the horror of undead meat, the premature celebration over the supposed “cleansing” of the house: this is a movie that sticks with you. No matter how many times I see it, Poltergeist never gets old.

1983: If you’re a Stephen King fan, 1983 was a good year for you, as it featured Lewis Teague’s adaptation of Cujo, the release of John Carpenter’s movie version of Christine, and David Cronenberg’s understated The Dead Zone film. But it’s Cronenberg’s other big release that year, Videodrome, that I hold in the highest regard. Few films have stayed with me as long as this one has, in all of its gruesome body horror. Few films so capture a descent into madness with such style and substance. “Long live the new flesh!” may be the film’s most well known mantra, but my personal favorite comes to my mind most often: don’t be afraid to let your body die.

1984: A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, and although the series overall is my favorite franchise to be born out of the slasher wave of the seventies and eighties (over Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Child’s Play), and the first film saved New Line Cinema from bankruptcy, it’s not my favorite horror film of that year. Nor is Silent Night, Deadly Night the top contender either, although I have a fondness for its absurdity in spite of its more troubling aspects. The year truly belongs to Night of the Comet, though: a film about two teenage sisters who survive an apocalyptic comet fly-by. Those who were not protected are atomized instantly, while those who were partially protected slowly turn into mutated zombies. Full of some of film’s best post-apocalyptic vistas, great performances from young actors, and a breakneck pace that moves from one situation to another (Mall! Radio Station! Government Bunker!), this is one to catch, even if it is no longer available with the easy access Netflix used to provide.

1985: Although Phenomena is my favorite Argento film, I have to give Fright Night the award for my favorite horror movie of 1985. It’s a film that speaks directly to the heart of every horror fan who let their imagination carry them to places outside the realm of reason, as well as all those who discovered a love of creature features with the help of a host like Elvira or Joe Bob Briggs. Despite a terrible remake featuring David Tennant and the late Anton Yelchin, the legacy of the original (starring Roddy McDowall, William Ragsdale, and Chris Sarandon at his most sultry and scary) remains untarnished–except maybe by the sequel.

1986: I have to profess a certain fondness for Slaughter High, a mediocre slasher film that relies on nerd revenge fantasies to carry what little emotional load it has. With a tagline like “Marty majored in cutting classmates,” you’d think that the film could do no wrong, but the plot meanders like a stumbling drunk and the stilted cinematography is boring. It only works as much as it does because of my association with the title (Slaughter is also the name of the town in which I grew up) and some pretty inventive (if occasionally nonsensical) kills. Instead, I’d like to highlight the refreshing Troll, a film that has been completely forgotten in lieu of the infamy of its in-name-only sequel, which has enough of a cult following that it spawned a documentary. The original film starts The Neverending Story‘s Noah Hathaway as Harry Potter Jr. (it’s a coincidence), a teen whose family moves into a new apartment in a building that is haunted by an evil troll. It’s essentially a kid flick that’s light on gore but manages to creep, while also featuring a cavalcade of burnouts, future stars, and others: June and Anne Lockhart, Sonny Bono, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Warwick Davis, and Michael Moriarty.

1987: Another great year, with the first feature to be based on a work of Clive Barker (Hellraiser), the “baby’s first horror movie” of myself and many others (The Gate), and the second film of John Carpenter’s apocalypse trilogy (Prince of Darkness), but no movie from this year captures my fancy and interest quite like Jackie Kong’s Blood Diner, a tongue-in-cheek parody of the more serious 1963 seminal splatterer Blood Feast. Despite only a few titles to her name and a depressingly short career, Kong remains one of the best examples of a successful female horror director, and Blood Diner is her masterpiece. You can read Brandon’s review of the film here.

1988: More pretentious and short-sighted critics than those of us here at Swampflix love to complain about the number of franchise entries and sequels that we’re dealing with in today’s cinemas, but the eighties, and specifically 1988 and 1989, were in many ways worse. This is the year that gave us Hellbound: Hellraiser II, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Friday the 13th Part 6, Halloween 4, Sleepaway Camp II, Return of the Living Dead Part II, Poltergeist III, Fright Night Part 2, Critters 2: The Main Course, Zombi 3 and Phantasm II. It also gave us original flicks like the oft-forgotten Pumpkinhead, Lair of the White Worm, Brain Damage, and Child’s Play, which terrified me more as a child than any other film save perhaps Puppetmaster. It’s been a long time, and the law of diminishing returns has meant that each sequel further watered down the terror of Chucky, but there’s still a lot to be frightened by here, as a child (whose doll is possessed by a murderer and no adult believes him) and as an adult (a parent whose child seems to be committing heinous acts of violence and blaming his toys). It’s a rare film that ages with you and puts you on both sides of the horrific events, and I respect that.

1989: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3! C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D.! Stepfather 2! Sleepaway Camp 3! Beyond the Door III! Howling v: The Rebirth! Amityville 4! Friday the 13th Part VIII! Nightmare on Elm Street 5! Yet another banner year for sequels, and a crop of truly terrible ones at that. It’s no surprise we have to look outside of the American studio system for my favorite horror flick of the year. Sure, Pet Sematary is decent and I think that Leviathan deserves more fond remembrance than it is usually awarded (and I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Society was made in 1989, even if it wasn’t released until 1992), but there’s nothing that came out this year that tops La chiesa. Read my review of it here.

1990: This is a tough one. Rob Reiner’s Misery is an amazing movie, and my one of the best Stephen King adaptations for the big screen, up there with Kubrick’s The Shining, Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, and DePalma’s Carrie. I also have a real fondness for Tremors, which is as pitch perfect as a deconstruction of giant monster movies as Scream is for slashers. But I have to give Jacob’s Ladder the prize here. Despite having a twist ending that has been spoiled by pop cultural osmosis (like Psycho before it and The Sixth Sense that followed), this is a film of deep sorrow, anxiety, and fear, and it will haunt your dreams for longer that you’d expect. If you haven’t seen it already, skip checking out any information about it and go straight to the video store (analog or online) and see this film before it can be ruined for you.

1991: In my review of last year’s Don’t Breathe, I noted some similarities, both superficial and not, to The People Under the Stairs, one of the oft-overlooked films of Wes Craven’s career. It’s hard to recommend this film without giving away too much of its central thesis, but it is noteworthy that the film tackles race with a surprisingly deft hand for a director who was both white and 50 years old (and thus the epitome of “The Man”) at the time of production. This isn’t even getting into the fact that Craven was never a man of great subtlety (see the above discussion of Last House on the Left). Somehow, he managed to create a film that is more complex than the larger part of his body of work while also expressing frustration at gentrification, the forced creation of urban ghettos, and the rise of the slum lord. It’s not only his most nuanced work (comparatively), it’s also his most socially relevant.

1992: And speaking of socially, relevant my favorite horror movie of 1992 is the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer! Nah, I’m just kidding, it’s Army of Darkness! Nah, still kidding, although those are both a lot of fun. No, I’m talking about Candyman, which takes the childhood game of Bloody Mary and transposes it to Chicago’s South Side, giving the title monster, played by Tony Todd, a sympathetic back story in which he was murdered by a racist mob because of his interracial marriage. That aspect of the story is mostly overlooked in order for director Bernard Rose to create some of the most enduring horror imagery of the 1990s. That rib cage covered with bees? Geesh. It’s no surprise that contemporary horror like American Horror Story continues to use elements of this film, including not only the bee imagery that is an integral part of this year’s Cult storyline, but also protagonist Helen’s leitmotif, composed by Phillip Glass, which the show uses often.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #41 of The Swampflix Podcast: NosferaToo & A Dark Song (2017)

October 26, 2017October 26, 2017 / swampflix / 15 Comments

Welcome to Episode #41 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our forty-first episode, we explore the enduring impact of the silent horror vampire classic Nosferatu (1922). James & Brandon discuss the original Nosferatu, its Herzog-directed remake, and two Hollywood productions that directly pull influence from its legacy. Also, James makes Brandon watch the occultist indie horror A Darky Song (2017) for the first time. Enjoy!

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet