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Fright Club: Best Cosmic Horror

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Author Hailey Piper joins the club this week to tear through about 25 different cosmic horror movies, eventually landing on some fuzzy math favorites. Join us, won’t you?

6. Hellraiser

“The box…you opened it. We came.”

Man, those cenobites were scary cool, weren’t they?

Hellraiser, Clive Barker’s feature directing debut, worked not only as a grisly splatterfest suited to the Eighties horror landscape. It’s easy to see the film as an occult or supernatural horror, but it’s just as likely a cosmic tale of a dimension you could open without even trying, another reality on the other side of an afternoon’s puzzle past time.

5. Spiral (Uzumaki) (2000)

Higuchinsky’s mind bending 2000 Japanese horror went underappreciated upon release – likely because of the interest in ghosts and digital horror during that period. That’s too bad, because his adaptation of the not-yet-released Manga Uzumaki is a delight.

It starts with a snail shell. It ends with a town in chaos. If you missed it, you should remedy that now.

4. In the Mouth of Madness

Sutter Cane may be awfully close to Stephen King, but John Carpenter’s cosmic horror is even more preoccupied by Lovecraft. The great Sam Neill leads a fun cast in a tale of madness as created by the written world.

What if those horror novels you read became reality? What if that sketchy writer with the maybe-too-vivid imagination was not just got to his own page, but god for real? This movie tackles that ripe premise while ladling love for both of the horror novelists who made New England the creepiest section of America.

3. The Endless

There is something very clever about the way Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s movies sneak up on you. Always creepy, still they defy genre expectations even as they play with them.

Camp Arcadia offers the rustic backdrop for their latest, The Endless. A clever bit of SciFi misdirection, the film follows two brothers as they return to the cult they’d escaped a decade earlier.

It is this story and the pair’s storytelling skill that continues to impress. Their looping timelines provide fertile ground for clever turns that fans of the filmmakers will find delightful, but the uninitiated will appreciate as well.

2. Annihilation

Alex Garland’s work as both a writer (28 Days Later…, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go) and a writer/director (Ex Machina) has shown a visionary talent for molding the other-worldly and the familiar. Annihilation unveils Garland at his most existential, becoming an utterly absorbing sci-fi thriller where each answer begs more questions.

Taking root as a strange mystery, it offers satisfying surprises amid an ambitious narrative flow full of intermittent tension, scares, and blood—and a constant sense of wonder.

Just his second feature as a director, Annihilation proves Ex Machina was no fluke. Garland is pondering similar themes—creation, self-destruction, extinction—on an even deeper level, streamlining the source material into an Earthbound cousin to 2001.

1. The Mist

David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his young son head to town for some groceries. Meanwhile, a tear in the space/time continuum opens a doorway to alien monsters. So he, his boy, and a dozen or so other shoppers are all trapped inside this glass-fronted store just waiting for rescue or death.

Marcia Gay Harden is characteristically brilliant as the religious zealot who turns survival inside the store into something less likely than survival out with the monsters, but the whole cast offers surprisingly restrained but emotional turns.

The FX look amazing, too, but it’s the provocative ending that guarantees this one will sear itself into your memory.

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Fright Club: Best Animated Horror

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Cartoons can be scary. Scooby Doo knew it. You can paint a nightmare in a way that no amount of CGI or practical effects can really execute. Animation frees a filmmaker from the constraints of the concrete world, allowing for more imaginative storytelling. Here are our favorite animated horror gems.

5. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

Feature length, R-rated anime is so often a simple excuse for fantasy fulfillment aimed at stunted adolescents of all ages. Director Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s 1987 film Wicked City certainly is that.

But in 2000, working from a story based on Hideyuki Kikuchi’s novel, Kawajiri executed the near-impossible. He made a sequel that was better than its much beloved predecessor (1985’s Vampire Hunter D).

Gothic and futuristic, beautifully drawn and nicely paced without losing the energy of the genre, Bloodlust delivers a gorgeous, bloody time.

4. Perfect Blue (1997)

This psychosexual thriller might feel garden variety if it had been made into a live action film. A young woman trades in her innocent image to take on more suggestive roles as an actress, only to find her fans turning on her in violent ways. Or is it an internal conflict over the way men and the media need to sexualize her that’s fragmenting her own mind?

In director Satoshi Kon’s anime vision, those familiar thriller tropes take on an unseemly dreamy quality. The animation style suggests more about the way mass media consumes a sexualized idea of innocence than any live action film could muster, and the hallucinatory quality achieved in the film would never have played this well in any other style.

3. Seoul Station (2016)

An animated side story to writer/director Sang-ho Yeon’s blistering zombie flick Train to Busan, Seoul Station gives us a chance to see what’s happening in other parts of Korea while Soo-an and her dad try to make it off the train alive.

A gripping story of people on the fringe, Seoul Station also boasts some incredibly imaginative animation. Scenes teem with slaughter, salvation, and social anxiety in a film that takes anime into reaches unsought before.

2. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Tim Burton penned and produced, directed by Henry Selick (Coraline), this tale of the Halloweentown/Christmastown mash up became an instant and unbreakable Goth favorite. Jack Skellington (“What’s happenin’, bone daddy?”) just doesn’t feel the same kind of love for Halloween that’s kept him motivated lo these many years. A little melancholy, he heads into the woods, only to take a wrong turn and find himself in the land of Christmas. Naturally, he and his fellow ghouls – meaning no real harm, you see – decide to kidnap Santa and run Christmas themselves… just this once.

The story, the music (by Danny Elfman, natch), the inspired stop-action style animation, and that sweetly macabre sensibility that Burton brings to every project spoke to the Nineties generation and continues to speak to outsiders, monsters, and lovers of animation everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3xTgBED5cQ

1. Fear(s) of the Dark (2007)

A French import perfectly suited to a dark and stormy Halloween night, the film brings together some of the top graphic artists in Europe and America to present six animated vignettes that showcase some of the mind’s deepest fears.

The human mind is always more capable of true horror than any teenage slasher movie, and that is what this film is interested in exploring. shorts delve into social anxiety, sexual insecurity, sociopathic tendencies, needles, dismemberment and the good old fashioned fear of the dark to achieve an overall feel of impending doom. You’ll get goosebumps without really knowing why.

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Fright Club: Best Reboots

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What were we looking for? Reboots/remakes that are superior to the original. There are more than you think. In the podcast, we run through eight horror reboots that are superior to the original, kick around another handful that are Even Stevens, and argue about several that could maybe go either way (depending on which one of us you’re talking to). So, you know, have a listen.

5. Dawn of the Dead

Zack Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.

The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley). Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.

In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed, and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity, and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.

4. Suspiria

Luca Guadagnino continues to be a master film craftsman. Much as he draped Call Me by Your Name in waves of dreamy romance, here he establishes a consistent mood of nightmarish goth. Macabre visions dart in and out like a video that will kill you in 7 days while sudden, extreme zooms, precise sound design and a vivid score from Thom Yorke help cement the homage to another era.

But even when this new Suspiria—a “cover version” of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic—is tipping its hat, Guadagnino leaves no doubt he is making his own confident statement. The color scheme is intentionally muted, and you’ll find no men in this dance troupe, serving immediate notice that superficialities are not the endgame here.

3. The Ring/Ringu

Gore Verbinski’s film The Ring – thanks in large part to the creepy clever premise created by Koji Suzuki, who wrote the novel Ringu – is superior to its source material principally due to the imagination and edge of the fledgling director. Verbinski’s film is visually arresting, quietly atmospheric, and creepy as hell.

From cherubic image of plump cheeked innocence to a mess of ghastly flesh and disjointed bones climbing out of the well and into your life, the character of Samara is brilliantly created.

Hideo Nakata’s original was saddled with an unlikeable ex-husband and a screechy supernatural/psychic storyline that didn’t travel well. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger did a nice job of re-focusing the mystery.

Sure, it amounts to an immediately dated musing on technology. (VHS? They went out with the powdered wig!) But still, there’s that last moment when wee Aidan (a weirdly perfect David Dorfman) asks his mom, “What about the people we show it to? What happens to them?”

At this point we realize he means us, the audience.

We watched the tape! We’re screwed!

2. The Thing/The Thing From Another World

The 1951 original The Thing From Another World is a scifi classic, and every inch of it screams 1950s. The good guys are good, the monsters are monsters. Everything has its place. It’s reassuring.

John Carpenter’s remake upends all that with a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.

A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.

This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.

The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.

1. The Fly

As endearing and fascinating as we find Kurt Neumann’s 1958 Vincent Price vehicle, it just doesn’t quite have the same impact once you’ve seen Jeff Goldblum peel off his fingernails.

Not because it’s gross—and it is gross AF—but because he’s fascinated by the process itself. It’s the scientist in him.

David Cronenberg knows how to properly make a mad scientist film, especially if that madness wreaks corporeal havoc. But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Goldblum.

Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.

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Fright Club: Best Sound Design in Horror

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Aside from maybe the musical, there is no genre in film more dependent on sound for audience response. From the creaks, groans and jangling chains of old fashioned haunted house pics to the hiss and slither of modern monster movies, things can hardly go bump in the night if you can’t hear the bump. So George sat down and determined the best examples of sound design in horror.

That’s right, George is driving. Did Hope recommend any movies to consider when thinking through the best use of sound in horror? She did. Did any make the list?

They did not.

Well, turnabout is fair play and sound is definitely George’s jam. So here, friends and Fright Clubbers, are George’s picks for the best sound design in horrorl

5. It Follows (2014)

Like A Quiet Place and Us, It Follows is a perfect example of how modern filmmakers are molding the soundtrack with sound effects and even score to create the sound experience.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell, working with Disasterpeace on a score that incorporated music, ambient sound and sound effects, develops an immersive, nightmarish environment for the imagination to flourish. The synths reflect the film’s difficult-to-pin-down time period, simultaneously reflecting a recent past as well as a currency. Meanwhile, creaky doors and blowing wind call to mind old fashioned scares.

The score almost doesn’t sound like a score, and the sound sets a different mood every time the different demon appears. Few films are this masterful in the way it brings together sound track and sound effects. Together they create an inescapable mood.

4. The Haunting (1963)

Director Robert Wise obviously knew the importance of sound coming into this film, sitting, as it does, between his two biggest efforts, West Side Story and The Sound of Music. But musicals are not the only films that really deserve close attention to sound. What you hear is even more important than what you see in a good old fashioned ghost story.

We wanted to make sure the list included at least one example of old school Foley-style sound. Wise worked with AW Watkins, 4-time Oscar nominee for sound design (Doctor Zhivago, Libel, Knights of the Round Table, Goodbye Mr. Chips).

This is a great example of old time Foley sound effects used to create the mood, making things you can’t see scary.

3. The Lighthouse (2019)

The atmosphere is thick and brisk as sea fog, immersing you early with Jarin Blasche’s chilly black and white cinematography and a Damian Volpe sound design echoing of loss and one persistent, ominous foghorn.

For everything Eggers brings to bear, from the Bergmanesque lighting and spiritual undertones to the haunting score to the scrupulous set design to images suitable for framing in a maritime museum – not to mention the script itself – The Lighthouse works because of two breathtaking performances.

But what a world Eggers and crew create for Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.

2. Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Madman Peter Strickland (In Fabric) made an entire film about sound, and it gets so much right. Not just about sound—about the era, the equipment, giallo sensibilities and moviemaking.

Strickland, working with a sound department of 34, creates a psychological experience through sound almost exclusively. The amazing Toby Jones plays Gilderoy, flown in specifically to helm the sound in a horror movie.

“This isn’t a horror movie. This is a Santini movie!”

Gilderoy’s arc is profound, and sound is our only window into what is changing him. We don’t see what he sees, only his reaction to it and the sound of it that makes his psychological breakdown believable.

1. Alien (1979)

The great soundman Ben Burtt, with an impressive team and the direction of Ridley Scott, uses silence as another instrument in the terrifying sound design for this film.

Given the tag line, that powerful use of silence is more than evocative, it’s required. But layered in, Burtt offers plenty of aural evidence that this spaceship is not like those we were used to seeing onscreen. The Nostromo is no sleek vehicle. Creeks and chains, water leaks and thudding echoes depict a dilapidated bucket of bolts, giving Alien a creaky old house atmosphere.

From the chest bursting, Ash’s unattached vocal cord gurgling to the hissing sound the creature makes as he announces his presence, the sounds in this film have been copied and retooled as often as its storyline and look. But there is only one first time.

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Fright Club: Blond(e)s in Horror

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We want to thank Cati Glidewell, also know as The Blonde in Front, for joining us to talk through some of the best blond(e)s in horror. There’s a lot of names here, but I think we may have proved that—with a few really bloody exceptions—blondes do seem to have more fun in these movies.

The Dudes

6. Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), Manhunter (1986)

Tom Noonan’s entire career is defined by a mixture of tenderness and menace. It begins with his unusual physical appearance, including his almost colorless locks, and ends with performances that realize everything broken and horrifying about a character—especially Francis Dollarhyde. The terrifying chemistry between Dollarhyde and a blind Joan Allen’s is heartbreaking perfection.

5. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), Peeping Tom (1960)

Like Norman Bates across the pond, England’s Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) is an innocent. Boehm’s blank stare, his frightened mouse reflexes, his blond locks all contribute to a character so tender you can’t help but root for him—although it would be great if he’d stop murdering women.

4. Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), Ichi the Killer (2001)

A bleach blond in a Japanese film will automatically draw the eye, but Kakihara’s not just here to catch your attention. Genius filmmaker Takashi Miike and Tadanobu Asano created this badass to upend your expectations. He’s the baddie, right? And man-child Ichi is the innocent? Or is Miike toying with you?

3. Gage (Miko Hughs), Pet Sematary (1989)

Get the Kleenex ready because the ridiculously cute Mike Hughs has a date with a semi. A toddler when he filmed this movie, Hughs really turns in a remarkable performance, whether he’s tugging your heart strings or slicing through Fred Gwynne’s Achilles tendon.

2. David (Keiffer Sutherland), The Lost Boys (1987)

Hubba hubba. The rock star duds. The homoerotic relationship with Jason Patrick. The mullett! Keiffer Sutherland’s bad boy David was so cool you couldn’t help wanting to hang out with him. Eating maggots seems like a small price to pay, really. Nobody said the cool kids’ table would be tasty.

1. John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), The Hitcher (1986)

There are those with a thing for bad boys, and then there are those with a thing for Rutger Hauer. He’s not a bad boy—he’s not even in the same zip code. His John Ryder will make you feel all kinds of weird things because he’s not your garden variety dangerous character. What he will do to you, to that nice family in the station wagon, to your new girlfriend, is more awful than anything you can think of.

The Women

6. Chris Hargeson (Nancy Allen), Carrie (1976)

When De Palma launched the ultimate in mean girl cinema, Nancy Allen delivered the ultimate mean girl. Chris Hargeson’s bloodthirsty princess energy has to convey something horrifying if she is to properly offset what poor Carrie White has to content with at home. Luckily for us (not so much for Carrie), she does.

5. Tomasin (Anya Taylor Joy), The Witch (2015)

Watching The Witch, you realize that writer/director Robert Eggers chose everything: every sound, every image, every color. And while Tomasin’s family looked like gaunt, hard working, colorless cogs in God’s wilderness wheel, Thomasin did not. Even as we open on Anya Taylor Joy, confessing her sins and begging forgiveness, she is lit from within. A beacon. It’s just that her light has caught the wrong kind of attention.

4. Casey (Drew Barrymore), Scream (1996)

The genius Wes Craven and his producer Drew Barrymore pulled an incredible and soon-to-be endlessly copied sleight of hand with Casey—the spunky female played by the biggest star in the cast. With this character, Craven introduces the meta-movie-commentary that defines this film while simultaneously upending our own unconscious investment in those tropes by killing Casey off in Act 1.

3. Carol (Catherine Deneuve), Repulsion (1965)

We went back and forth. Would it be Deneuve as gorgeous seductress Miriam in Tony Scott’s 1983 vampire film The Hunger, or innocent driven to madness Carol in Polanski’s Repulsion? (He does know how to torture innocent young women, doesn’t he?) Deneuve’s performance in Repulsion is so compelling and difficult—playing primarily alone for about half the film—that it won out, but either way, she’s a blonde to be reckoned with.

2. Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), Friday the 13th (1980)

The OG Karen (to steal a phrase from this episode’s co-host The Blonde in Front), Pamela Voorhees has a plan and she’s sticking to it. This funny business among the camp counselors needs to be addressed, corrected. Enough is enough. Betsy Palmer’s performance is spot-on, so comforting and in control before it goes completely batshit. Jason may get all the love, but Mrs. Voorhees took care of business first.

1. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), Carrie (1976)

Like his idol Hitchcock, Brian De Palma had a thing about blondes—what that fair hair represented, what it could mean. For De Palma, it might be the bombshell of Angie Dickson’s character in Dressed to Kill, or the innocence of Carrie White. Of course, Sissy Spacek’s Oscar nominated performance in the film was what really sold this sheltered, shell-shocked little lamb, but you can’t deny she had that look.

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Fright Club: Best First Half of 2020

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You know what, 2020 is just going to be remembered as its own horror story. I mean, filmmakers have a lot of competition if they think they can scare us more than real life right now. Still, we’ve seen a decent batch of horror: Blood Quantum, The Droving, Time Out of Space, The Hunt and more. What more, you ask? Well, we’ll tell you. Here are our favorite horror films of the first half of 2020.

5. The Invisible Man

Instead of the existential ponderings that generally underscore cinematic Invisible Man retellings, writer/director Leigh Whannell uses this story to examine sexual politics, abuse, control and agency.

It’s a laudable aim, but the reason it works is casting.

Whannell’s script is smart, with much needed upgrades to the invisibility formula as well as the havoc wrought. But the success of The Invisible Man is almost entirely shouldered by Elisabeth Moss, who nails every moment of oppressed Cecilia Kass’s arc.

At its core, The Invisible Man is an entertaining B-movie horror propped up by contrivance. Whannell’s aim is to give the story new relevance, and thanks to Moss, his aim is true.

4. The Other Lamb

The first step toward freedom is telling your own story.

Writer C.S. McMullen and director Malgorzata Szumowska tell this one really well. Between McMullen’s outrage and the macabre lyricism of Szumowska’s camera, The Other Lamb offers a dark, angry and satisfying coming-of-age tale.

Selah’s (Raffey Cassity) first period and her commune’s migration to a new and more isolated Eden offer the tale some structure. Like many a horror film, The Other Lamb occupies itself with burgeoning womanhood, the end of innocence. Unlike most others in the genre, Szumowska’s film depicts this as a time of finding your own power.

The Other Lamb does not simply suggest you question authority. It demands that you do far more than that, and do it for your own good.

3. Gretel & Hansel

Sophia Lillis (IT) narrates and stars as Gretel, the center of this coming of age story—reasonable, given the change of billing suggested by the film’s title. The witch may still have a tasty meal on her mind, but this is less a cautionary tale than it is a metaphor for agency over obligation.

Alice Krige and her cheekbones strike the perfect mixture of menace and mentorship, while Sammy Leakey’s little Hansel manages to be both adorable and tiresome, as is required for the story to work.

Perkins continues to impress with his talent for visual storytelling and Galo Olivares’s cinematography heightens the film’s folkloric atmosphere.

There’s no escaping this spell. The whole affair feels like an intriguing dream.

2. The Lodge

Several Fiala and Veronika Franz follow up their creepy Goodnight Mommy with this “white death” horror that sees a future stepmom having a tough time getting to know the kids during a weeklong, snowbound cabin retreat. Riley Keough is riding an impressive run of performances and her work here is slippery and wonderful. As the unwanted new member in the family, she’s sympathetic but also brittle.

Jaeden Martell, a kid who has yet to deliver a less than impressive turn, is the human heartbeat at the center of the mystery in the cabin. His tenderness gives the film a quiet, pleading tragedy. Whether he’s comforting his grieving little sister or begging Grace (Keough) to come in from the snow, his performance aches and you ache with him.

There’s no denying the mounting dread the filmmakers create, and the three central performances are uniquely effective. Thanks to the actors’ commitment and the filmmakers’ skill in atmospheric horror, the movie grips you, makes you cold and uncomfortable, and ends with a memorable slap.

1. Swallow

Putting a relevant twist on the classic “horrific mother” trope, writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis uses the rare eating disorder pica to anchor his exploration of gender dynamics and, in particular, control.

Where Mirabella-Davis’s talent for building tension and framing scenes drive the narrative, it’s Bennett’s performance that elevates the film. Serving as executive producer as well as star, Haley Bennett transforms over the course of the film.

When things finally burst, director and star shake off the traditional storytelling, the Yellow Wallpaper or Awakening or even Safe. The filmmaker’s vision and imagery come full circle with a bold conclusion worthy of Bennett’s performance.

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Fright Club: Dark Ages Horror

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Witches, starvation, ghouls, oppression, Church and governmental oppression—there’s a reason they call them the Dark Ages! Filmmaker George Popov (Hex, The Droving) joins us to discuss the best horror movies about the Dark Ages.

6. Black Death (2010)

What Christopher Smith (Severance) delivers with Black Death that few if any horror filmmakers tackling the same themes match is a clear eye as to the flaws and merits on both sides of the witch hunt.

Eddie Redmayne is an innocent and a believer; Sean Bean is no innocent, but he does believe. Both are part of a Christian army who get word of a village untouched by pestilence—a village where some say the dead have been raised.

What follows is a punishingly human drama about using religion to suit your own ends, about what evil we are and are not willing to accept, and about the end of innocence.

5. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The sixth of seven Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe films—and maybe the best—sees Price in a role that delights in its own evil.

No Corman film has ever used color to such glorious extreme, a tactic absolutely in keeping with Poe’s text. The film works from a short story, padding with subplots (one from Poe, one from elsewhere) that work well within the story and generate a little emotional depth beneath the lurid color and debauchery.

Stay through to the end, whatever you do, but do give this one a chance.

4. Hex (2017)

Two soldiers separated from their companies during England’s Civil War chase each other into a deep forest. The rebel Thomas (William Young) is young, soft and open to the dark poetry and doom of witchcraft. He’s not long in the woods before he sees his true enemy is not the countryman behind him with his sword drawn.

Richard (Daniel Oldroyd) fights for King and Country, strident and single-minded, logic keeps him from believing until he has little choice.

There is more happening here than you realize, and it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that you only recognize the film’s purpose when they are ready for you to do so. The result is a satisfying tale with more power than just magic.

3. Army of Darkness (1992)

Easily the most fun you’ll have with a Dark Ages film, Army of Darkness is Sam Raimi’s third and silliest installment in his Evil Dead trilogy. In it, like a Connecticut Yankee, hero Ash (Bruce Campbell at his buffest) finds himself transported to dark times.

You know what he finds. Deadites.

Ash must woo the girl (and then maybe accidentally get her changed into a deadite, which will necessitate killing her), say the spell (which he may or may not entirely screw up, inadvertently raising an army of darkness), and save the day.

Endlessly quotable, utterly bananas, and just a thrill ride of Monty Python meets Three Stooges meets Ray Harryhausen fun, Army of Darkness is a treasure.

2. The Head Hunter (2018)

In a land of yore, the geography forbidding, a far off trumpet calls for the hardiest of warriors—those equipped to fight beasts.

Director Jordan Downey shows much and tells little in his nearly wordless medieval fantasy, The Head Hunter. The filmmaker parses out all the information you’ll need to follow this simple vengeance myth, but pay attention. Very little in this film is without meaning—no creepy image, no creak or slam.

In what is essentially a one man show, Christopher Rygh delivers a quiet, brooding performance for a quiet, brooding film. He cuts an impressive figure as the Vikingesque warrior at the center of this adventure and his work speaks of joyless endurance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZqtRbifT6Q

1.Hagazussa (2017)

Making a remarkably assured feature debut as director, Lukas Feigelfeld mesmerizes with his German Gothic poetry, Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse.

Settled somewhere in the 15th Century Alps, the film shadows lonely, ostracized women struggling against a period where plague, paranoia and superstition reigned.

It would be easy to mistake the story Feigelfeld (who also writes) develops as a take on horror’s common “is she crazy or is there malevolence afoot?” theme. But the filmmaker’s hallucinatory tone and Aleksandra Cwen’s grounded performance allow Hagazussa to straddle that line and perhaps introduce a third option—maybe both are true.

The film lends itself to a reading more lyrical than literal. Feigelfeld’s influences from Murnau to Lynch show themselves in his deliberate pacing and the sheer beauty of his delusional segments. He’s captured this moment in time, this draining and ugly paranoia that caused women such misery, with imagery that is perplexingly beautiful.

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Fright Club: Best College Horror

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We’d like to thank Gordon Maples—blogger, horror fan and all around smarty pants—for joining us to count down the best college-themed horror movies. (We might talk about some of the worst, too.)

5. Night of the Creeps (1986)

B-movie heaven, writer/director Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps embraces—nay, bear hugs—what has come before. With the help of Tom Atkins (at the top of his game), this alien invasion/zombie/frat movie is a hoot.

This film about alien slugs that enter the human body, nest in the brain, and reanimate the corpse looks like a lot we’ve seen before (mainly Cronenberg’s Shivers) and a lot we’d see later (mainly James Gunn’s Slither). The fact that it can be so genre-referential and still become a touchstone for other filmmakers speaks volumes about Dekker’s grasp of the genre.

4. Pledge (2018)

On its surface, Pledge may appear to be little more than a competently made fraternity horror in the tradition of Skulls. It is a cautionary tale about hazing taken to its sadistic (if likely logical) extreme.

But director Daniel Robbins’s latest horror show, from a tight script by co-star Zack Weiner, digs into issues bigger than tribe mentality. Pledge is not just about how far you’d go to belong. It asks about compliance, cowardice, and the cost and definition of success.

Where Weiner’s savvy script and Robbins’s sly direction really excel is in digging into this predictable plot to find an ugly picture of American privilege.

3. Scream 2 (1997)

Just one year after director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson struck gold with their meta-horror Scream, the survivors are off to college. Too bad the horror—and the rules—follow Sidney to campus.

The film picks up on its predecessor’s infatuation with genre tropes, this time trying to apply the rules of the sequel to what’s happening, giving characters the chance to figure their own plot out in an attempt to survive this sequel.

Fun return performances and excellent newcomers (Hello Laurie Metcalf! Good to see you Liev Schreiber and Timothy Olyphant!) keep this one fresh and fun.

2. Black Christmas (1974)

Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority stereotypes; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.

Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling.

Why the girls remain in the sorority house (if only they’d had an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle!), or why campus police are so baffled remains a mystery, but director Bob Clark was onto something with the phone calls, as evidenced by the number of films that ripped off this original convention.

1.Raw (2016)

A college freshman and vegetarian from a meat-free family, Justine (Garance Marillier) objects to the hazing ritual of eating a piece of raw meat. But once she submits to peer pressure and tastes that taboo, her appetite is awakened and it will take more and more dangerous, self-destructive acts to indulge her blood lust.

The film often feels like a cross between Trouble Every Day and Anatomy. The latter, a German film from 2000, follows a prudish med student dealing with carnage and peer pressure. In the former, France’s Claire Denis directs a troubling parable combining sexual desire and cannibalism.

Writer/director Julia Ducournau has her cagey way with the same themes that populate any coming-of-age story – pressure to conform, societal order and sexual hysteria. Here all take on a sly, macabre humor that’s both refreshing and unsettling.

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Masks in Horror

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It is creepy when you can’t see someone’s face, unless it’s hidden behind one of those big horse masks, which forever tickle George. But whether the voice on the other side of that mask is asking if Tamra’s home or is telling you where to find your missing daughter, whether that mask is made of burlap, human flesh or the NHL standard fiberglass/Kevlar mix, murder is highly likely.

Here are our favorite masks in horror.

6. The Wicker Man (1973)

There are so many reasons to love this movie, but the fact that it started that incredibly effective trend in horror movies: the anonymity of the group mask.

It was done again and to magnificent effect in The Purge films, Strangers, and You’re Next. But what Robin Hardy does with it gooses the macabre, medieval nuttiness of his story. A bunny has rarely looked so menacing.

5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

What made Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic the unnerving, even scarring, savage film that it was? The meat hook? The slam of that heavy metal door? The sound of the chainsaw?

There are so very many moments of terror, so many reasons to scream, you can almost overlook the fact that the main character, though he delivers no lines at all, is wearing somebody else’s face. In fact, depending on the scene (or his mood? his outfit?) he could be wearing any one of three different faces.

How messed up and genius is that?

4. Eyes without a Face (1960)

Director Georges Franju casts a spell with the haunting Christiane (Edith Scob). Graceful and lifeless, the mask hides Christiane’s flaws and her humanity. She is otherworldly.

Unlike the grotesque image often drawn by a mask in a horror film, Christiane’s smooth, colorless visage is as lovely and melancholy as it is terrifying.

3. Halloween (1979)

Thematically, it makes sense. Young Michael Myers is wearing a mask, looking through those little false eye holes, when he commits his first, soul-deadening murder. So when he comes home to pick up where he left off, naturally he’d need another costume.

But what John Carpenter created with his altered William Shatner mask was the prototypical boogeyman for all slashers to follow and for all retro horror after that. The soulless, colorless, unmoving face perfectly matched the lifeless killing machine, transforming Michael Myers into The Shape and changing the shape of horror as it did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKvxAvkJkac

2. Friday the 13th, Part 3

First of all, the sack head Jason from Part 2 is so much creepier than the hockey mask Jason of Parts 3 – X and beyond. That burlap sack has been a terrifying look in horror movies (from The Town that Dreaded Sundown to Nightbreed to The Orphanage to Trick or Treat).

But it’s the hockey mask you remember. That’s the image that became iconic. Hell, it even made goalies seem cool. (Yes, they stole the idea from the old Martin Landau/Jack Palance/Donald Pleasance film Alone in the Dark, released earlier the same year), but still, who wore it better?

Jason did.

1. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

The original Phantom’s mask may not be the coolest. In fact, his mask has evolved over the decades and iterations into something way, way cooler looking. But back in 1925, it was the mask and its removal that made this film a heart attack in the making.

Director Rupert Julian and star Lon Chaney used that mask and its removal to deliver one of cinemas first great scares.

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Fright Club: Bad Doctors in Horror

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As we salute the tireless work of our great doctors and health care workers during this uneasy time, Fright Club looks at our favorite “bad doctors” in horror!

5. Herbert West, Re-Animator (1985)

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator reinvigorated the Frankenstein storyline in a decade glutted with vampire films. Based, as so many fantasy/horror films are, on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator boasts a good mix of comedy and horror, some highly subversive ideas, and one really outstanding villain.

Jeffrey Combs, with his intense gaze and pout, his ability to mix comic timing with epic self righteousness without turning to caricature, carries the film beginning to end. His Dr. Herbert West has developed a day-glo serum that reanimates dead tissue, but a minor foul up with his experimentations – some might call it murder – sees him taking his studies to the New England medical school Miskatonic University. There he rents a room and basement laboratory from handsome med student Dan Caine (Bruce Abbott).

They’re not just evil scientists. They’re also really bad doctors.

Re-Animator is fresh. It’s funny and shocking, and though most performances are flat at best, those that are strong more than make up for it. First-time director Gordon’s effort is superb. He glories in the macabre fun of his scenes, pushing envelopes and dumping gallons of blood and gore. He balances anxiety with comedy, mines scenes for all they have to give, and takes you places you haven’t been.

4. Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Dead Ringers, (1988)

This film is about separation anxiety, with the effortlessly melancholy Jeremy Irons playing a set of gynecologist twins on a downward spiral. Writer/director David Cronenberg doesn’t consider this a horror film at all. Truth is, because the twin brothers facing emotional and mental collapse are gynecologists, Cronenberg is wrong.

Take, for instance, the scene with the middle aged woman in stirrups, camera on her face, which is distorted with discomfort. Irons’s back is to the screen, her bare foot to his left side. Clicking noises distract you as the doctor works away. We pan right to a tray displaying the now-clearly-unstable doctor’s set of hand-fashioned medical instruments. Yikes.

Irons is brilliant, bringing such flair and, eventually, childlike charm to the performances you feel almost grateful. The film’s pace is slow and its horror subtle, but the uncomfortable moments are peculiarly, artfully Cronenberg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPeVnz0NvI

2. Dr. Heiter, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

After a handful of middling Dutch comedies, Tom Six stumbled upon inspiration – 100% medically accurate inspiration. Yes, we mean the Human Centipede. Just the First Sequence makes the list, though.

For a lot of viewers, the Human Centipede films are needlessly gory and over-the-top with no real merit. But for some, Six is onto something. His first effort uses a very traditional horror storyline – two pretty American girls have a vehicular break down and find peril – and takes that plot in an unusual direction. But where most horror filmmakers would finish their work as the victims wake up and find themselves sewn together, mouth to anus, this is actually where Six almost begins.

Although the film mines something primal about being helpless in the hands of surgeons and doctors, it’s Dieter Laser and his committed, insane performance that elevates this film. That and your own unholy desire to see what happens to the newly conjoined tourists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPBdEa5tjR4

2. Dr. Genessier, Eyes Without a Face (1960)

The formula behind this film has been stolen and reformulated for dozens of lurid, low-brow exploitation films since 1960. In each, there is a mad doctor who sees his experiments as being of a higher order than the lowly lives they ruin; the doctor is assisted by a loyal, often non-traditionally attractive (some might say handsome) nurse; there are nubile young women who will soon be victimized, as well as a cellar full of the already victimized. But somehow, in this originator of that particular line of horror, the plot works seamlessly.

An awful lot of that success lies in the remarkable performances. Pierre Brasseur, as the stoic surgeon torn by guilt and weighed down by insecurities about his particular genius, brings a believable, subtle egomania to the part seldom seen in a mad scientist role.

Still, the power in the film is in the striking visuals that are the trademark of giant French filmmaker Georges Franju. His particular genius in this film gave us the elegantly haunting image of Dr. Genessier’s daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Her graceful, waiflike presence haunts the entire film and elevates those final scenes to something wickedly sublime.

1. Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Who else but Hannibal the Cannibal?

Anthony Hopkins’s eerie calm, his measured speaking, his superior grin give Lecter power. Everything about his performance reminds the viewer that this man is smarter than you and he’ll use that for dangerous ends. He’s toying with you. You’re a fly in his web – and what he will do to you hits at our most primal fear, because we are, after all, all part of a food chain.