You see the title Daddy’s Head and you might expect a bit of grind house fun, full of schlock and awe and signifying little. But this Shudder original has higher aspirations, as writer/director Benjamin Barfoot pulls off a nifty creature feature steeped in the psychology of grief.
Young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) lives with his father James (Charles Aitken) and stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) in the English countryside. Life has already dealt the boy a terrible blow with the death of his mother, so James’s fatal car accident weighs heavy with cruel trauma.
Isaac is left with no next of kin, and officials from social services favor Laura taking over as legal guardian, if she is agreeable.
But while Laura is sorting through the legalities, days and nights begin to get bumpy.
Isaac insists that his father has returned. Something breaks through a picture window and attacks the family dog.** A kitchen knife turns up missing. And James’s divorced friend Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White) is always finding reasons to drop by.
As Isaac becomes convinced that is father is calling to him from the nearby woods, Barfoot punctures the questionable realities with some well-crafted jump scares and satisfying practical effects. The frights that come in the third act succeed because of the character dynamics that Barfoot and his talented cast build in the first two. The child-centered mystery and sleek, imposing aesthetics will likely call Goodnight Mommy to mind early on, before giving way to a Babadook-styled struggle with a monster.
But Daddy’sHead tripping is committed to upping the ante, and the escalation ultimately delivers enough to satisfy fans of both blood and metaphors.
What is it about a deep hole that is so profoundly terrifying? Is it the worry about what could be down there, waiting? Is it the claustrophobic terror of falling into the pit without hope of escape? Horror writers and filmmakers have exploited this particular primal dread for centuries. How many versions of The Pit and the Pendulum do we need to see to know Poe had struck a chord? There are two different (very worthy) films called The Hole, plus the lunatic horror The Pit, as well as John and the Hole, and of course, all the “buried alive” terror, like Ryan Reynolds’s Buried.
We want to peer way down in the hole to dig up our five favorite films from down in the pit.
5. The Hole in the Ground (2019)
Sara (Seána Kerslake), along with her bib overalls and young son Chris (James Quinn Markey), are finding it a little tough to settle into their new home in a very rural town. Chris misses his dad. Sara is having some life-at-the-crossroads anxiety.
Then a creepy neighbor, a massive sink hole (looks a bit like the sarlacc pit) and Ireland’s incredibly creepy folk music get inside her head and things really fall apart.
Writer/director Lee Cronin’s subtext never threatens his story, but instead informs the dread and guilt that pervade every scene. You look at your child one day and don’t recognize him or her. It’s a natural internal tension and a scab horror movies like to pick. Kids go through phases, your anxiety is reflected in their behavior, and suddenly you don’t really like what you see. You miss the cuter, littler version. Or in this case, you fear that inside your beautiful, sweet son lurks the same abusive monster as his father.
4. Jug Face (2013)
Writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle brings together a fine cast including The Woman’s Sean Bridgers and Lauren Ashley Carter, as well as genre favorite Larry Fessenden and Sean Young to spin a backwoods yarn about incest, premonitions, kiln work, and a monster in a pit.
As a change of pace, Bridgers plays a wholly sympathetic character as Dawai, village simpleton and jug artist. On occasion, a spell comes over Dawai, and when he wakes, there’s a new jug on the kiln that bears the likeness of someone else in the village. That lucky soul must be fed to the monster in the pit so life can be as blessed and peaceful as before.
Kinkle mines for more than urban prejudice in his horror show about religious isolationists out in them woods. Young is particularly effective as an embittered wife, while Carter, playing a pregnant little sister trying to hide her bump, a jug, and an assortment of other secrets, steals the show.
3. I’m Not Scared (2003)
Director Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) crafts a perfect, gripping, breathless thriller with his Italian period piece. In a tiny Southern Italian town, kids run through lushly photographed fields on the hottest day of the year. They’re playing, and also establishing a hierarchy, and with their game Salvatores introduces a tension that will not let up until the last gasping breaths of his film.
Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) sees a boy down a deep hole on a neighboring farm. The boy, Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), believes he is dead and Michele is an angel. But the truth is far more sinister. I’m Not Scared is a masterpiece of a thriller.
2. Onibaba (1964)
Lush and gorgeous, frenzied and primal, spooky and poetic, Kaneto Shindô’s folktale of medieval Japan scores on every level, and Hiraku Hayashi’s manic score keeps you dizzy and on edge.
An older woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) survive by murdering lost samurai and looting their goods.
Passions and jealousy, a deep pit and a dangerous mask, some of the most glorious cinematography you’ll see all combine with brooding performances to create a remarkable nightmare.
1. The Descent (2005)
A bunch of buddies get together for a spelunking adventure. One is still grieving a loss – actually, maybe more than one – but everybody’s ready for one of their outdoorsy group trip.
Writer/director Neil Marshall begins his film with an emotionally jolting shock, quickly followed by some awfully unsettling cave crawling and squeezing and generally hyperventilating, before turning dizzyingly panicky before snapping a bone right in two.
And then we find out there are monsters.
Long before the first drop of blood is drawn by the monsters – which are surprisingly well-conceived and tremendously creepy – the audience has already been wrung out emotionally.
The grislier the film gets, the more primal the tone becomes, eventually taking on a tenor as much like a war movie as a horror film. This is not surprising from the director that unleashed Dog Soldiers – a gory, fun werewolf adventure. But Marshall’s second attempt is far scarier. For full-on horror, this is one hell of a monster movie.
Speak No Evil is in a tough spot. Essentially, you’re either a moviegoer who will breathe easier this weekend knowing you’ll never again have to sit through the excruciating trailer, you’re a potentially interested horror fan, or you’re a horror fanatic wary that director James Watkins will pull punches landed by Christian Tafdrup’s almost unwatchably grim but genuinely terrifying 2022 original.
Well, Watkins does not pull those punches, but they do land differently.
Louise and Ben Dalton (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) are vacationing blandly in Italy with their 11-year-old, Agnes (Alix West Lefler) when a louder, more alive family catches Ben’s attention.
Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their quiet lad Ant (Dan Hough) seem to be living life large, and Ben can’t help but envy that. So, after the Daltons are tucked blandly back into their London flat and he receives a postcard from their vacation pals inviting them out to the countryside, how can he say no?
We all know he should have said no, but that’s not how horror movies happen.
What follows is a horror of manners, and very few genres are more agonizing than that. Little by little by little, alone and very far from civilization, the Daltons’ polite respectability is jostled and clawed and eventually, of course, gutted.
Those familiar with Watkins’s work, especially his remarkable and remarkably unpleasant Eden Lake, needn’t worry that he’ll let you off the hook. This is not the sanitized English language version fans of the original feared.
Indeed, Watkins and a game cast highlighted by a feral McAvoy stick to Tafdrup’s script for better than half of the film. Watkins, who adapted the original script, complicates relationships and gives the visiting Dalton parents more backbone, but he doesn’t neuter the grim story being told. Instead, he ratches up tension, provides a more coherent backstory, and pulls out the big guns in Act 3.
If you’ve seen the original, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the direction the remake takes. Though it can feel like a correction aimed at pleasing a wider audience, it also makes for a more satisfying film.
Fanciosi is carving out a career of wonderfully nuanced genre performances (Nightingale, Stopmotion). We learned in 2017 with Split that McAvoy can do anything. Anything at all. He proves that here with a ferocious turn, evoking vulnerability and contempt sometimes in the same moment. It’s a compelling beast he creates, and no wonder weary travelers fall under his spell.
Watkins doesn’t make enough movies. For his latest he’s chosen a project with the narrowest chance of success. But here’s hoping he finds it.
Violence and cameos. It’s not a bad business model – just ask Deadpool & Wolverine.
Stream offers a steady stream of both, inside a rollicking blend of familiar tropes and beloved icons that should make Gen X horror fans positively giddy .
Linda Spring (the legendary Dee Wallace) owns a cozy hotel in the Pennsylvania countryside, and it’s finally ready for the big reopening. Perfect timing, because Roy and Elaine Keenan (Charles Edwin Powell, scream queen Danielle Harris) need a vacation. So they round up their gaming-obsessed son (Wesley Holloway) and boundary-testing daughter (Sydney Malakeh) and head for the hills.
But not long after checking in with Mr. Lockwood (Re-Animator‘s Jeffrey Combs), the Keenan family finds themselves in danger of checking out permanently. Four masked murderers are gleefully hunting the hotel guests, and competing for creative kill points in a sadistic competition that’s being streamed for wagering.
Director and co-writer Michael Leavy (a producer on Terrifier 2) keeps the body count high and the welcome practical effects in focus, with obvious nods to The Purge, Cabin in the Woods and more as the hotel guest list reveals more fan favorites from horror and beyond.
There’s Tony Todd, Bill Moseley and Felissa Rose! Plus, Tim Reid (WKRP), Terry Kiser (Weekend at Bernie‘s), Mark Holton (Francis from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure) and more to keep you pointing at the screen like DiCaprio in that one meme.
None of this is very original or profound, and the two-hour running time would definitely benefit from a more firm editing hand. But if you’d gladly trade all that for more cameos and bloody, nostalgic fun, Stream delivers a satisfying getaway.
2013’s Evil Dead proved that director Fede Alvarez could honor what made a franchise iconic, and still blast it with some new vitality. For me, his is the best in the deadite series.
No, I’m not saying Romulus is the new king of the Alien mountain, but it sits pretty comfortably at number three, right after the first two.
And it’s between those first two films that Alvarez, co-writing again with Rodo Sayagues, carves out a memorable place in the franchise timeline, two decades after the Nostromo crew answered what they thought was a distress signal.
We still fall in with a group of weary contractors from the Weyland-Yutani Corp., but this time they are twentysomethings who have grown up on a grim mining colony and never seen the sunlight. Rain (Cailee Spaeny, solid) and her brother Andy (a terrific David Jonsson) lost their parents “three cycles ago,” and it’s become clear that the chances of ever earning their release from Weyland-Yutani are slim to none.
But her friends Tyler (Archie Senaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) have a plan.
They steal the decommissioned Weyland ship that’s docked on the Romulus space station, reboot its hyper sleep program, and set off on a nine-year journey to a new life on a planet with sunshine.
But there’s something else waiting on Romulus. You know.
And Alvarez taps into what we know early and often, creating that instant layer of tension that comes from new characters discovering the “perfect organism” we’re already plenty familiar with. That familiarity also means there’s no need to spare the monster rum, so prepare for plenty of brutal alien action that harkens back to the glorious sci-fi horror of Ridley Scott’s original 1979 film.
The technical craftsmanship (save for one curiously shaky effect I won’t spoil) is stellar, as well. Alvarez leans on the expertise of cinematographer Galo Olivares (Roma) and sound designer Lee Gilmore (Prey, Dune: Part One) to create another gritty, foreboding aesthetic that reeks of desperation and terrifying breaks of silence.
As Rain and her crew start learning what they’re up against, Alvarez shifts gears to mirror the clock-ticking adventure thrills that James Cameron wowed us with in 1986’s Aliens. So yes, you will be reminded of past glory, but Romulus also has some clever and refreshing ideas of its own.
One of those is an ingenious twist on Alien lore that is so tense and visually compelling it is hard to believe we haven’t seen it before. Bravo. On a more philosophical level, the script is able to develop a fascinating contrast between humans and their “synthetic” counterparts, exploring how quickly some acid blood can change the nature of expendability.
But this is not another rumination on the Engineers and why they engineered. Romulus is back-to-franchise-basics, giving us a little more insight into the Corporation’s endgame with a reveal that leads to one humdinger of an Act Three.
And it’s how you accept what is waiting there, along with the film’s amount of fan service (for me, it’s one callback too many), that should cement your feelings about Romulus.
Credit Alvarez for another win. He knows what made this franchise work, and how to make it work again. Alien: Romulus is relentlessly tense, consistently thrilling, and one thoroughly crowd-pleasing ride.
The Wendigo is a presence that has proven hard to create on film. Ravenous—Antonia Bird’s 1999 small miracle of Western horror—conjures the spirit of the beast and comes off best. In her hands, the flesh consuming monster equates to the horrors of war.
For director Michael Altieri, working from a script by David Calbert, the mythical creature is a stand-in for cancer. It’s a great conceit, honestly, and one I wish had been executed a little more successfully.
Courtney Halverson plays Beth, who heads into the deep woods with her husband, Jay (Mark Famiglietti) to celebrate one year of remission. But the two are stalked by something terrifying and eventually fall into the hands of another person (Devon Sawa)—friend or foe, they can’t quite tell—as they plot their escape from the forest.
Altieri—formerly half of the Butcher Brothers (The Hamiltons, A Beginner’s Guide to Snuff, The Violent Kind), this time directing solo—soaks much production value from his two or three locations. A clear pro with limited means, Altieri makes the most of just three performers, generating dread and analogizing well.
The performers range in skill. Genre veteran Sawa convinces as the hunter with a past and an agenda and Famiglietti fares well enough as the supportive husband, although there’s not a lot to the role.
Most of the weight of the film lands on Halverson’s shoulders and she struggles early on, the layers of her conflicted emotions never taking authentic shape. She’s on more solid ground once Beth goes full badass, but without an early emotional hook for her character and relationship with her husband, you’re less invested in their survival.
More problematic is the presentation of the beast itself. Here the budget really makes itself known. Altieri oscillates between smoky swirls of digital FX and the shadowy presence of practical FX, but the combination is far from seamless. The film would have benefitted from sticking with practical and taking a less-is-more approach to what it showed.
It doesn’t entirely sink the production, but it does slow whatever momentum Consumed builds every time the beast arrives. Given its other setbacks, that’s enough to lessen the overall satisfaction the movie offers.
Very few 2024 films have been more eagerly anticipated by horror fans than Oz Perkins’s Longlegs. For some, it’s the filmmaker’s criminally underappreciated features The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Gretel & Hansel, and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House that compel interest in his latest effort.
For others, it’s lead Maika Monroe, a tremendous talent who routinely chooses challenging, satisfying horror, including It Follows, Watcher, The Guest and more. But for most people, let’s be honest, it’s the chance to see Nic Cage play a deeply deranged serial killer. (We are not made of stone!)
Cage excels, as does Monroe—both aided immeasurably by memorable support work from Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt. Monroe is Agent Lee Harker whose “hyper intuitive” nature has her assigned to a confounding case of whole families murdering one another, the only sign of an outside presence being an encoded note left at the scenes.
Monroe’s green FBI agent is as stiff and awkwardly internal as Cage’s psycho is theatrical. Her terror is as authentic as his lunacy.
Perkins shines as bright as ever, too. As always, his shot selection and framing evoke dark poetry. His use of light and shadow, architecture and space is like no one else’s.
His Longlegs direction and writing contain provocative notes of his own Blackcoat’s Daughter, but the plotting here is anchored by something slightly more predictable. I defy you to watch Blackcoat’s Daughter and figure out where it’s going, and yet it ends up exactly where it needs to be. For all the many fascinating flourishes and unsettling performances in Longlegs, there is something here that feels more obvious than any of the filmmaker’s previous films. Maybe it’s the clear influence of 90s thrillers: The Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, maybe even a little bit of Se7en.
It is nagging—the sense, for the first time in any of his films, of recognizability. But don’t let that deter you. In many ways, it’s Perkins’s sleight of hand, his way of suggesting one thing while saying something else, of rooting audiences in something familiar expressly to pull that comfy rug away.
Longlegs is strangely beautiful, deeply unnerving, and a fine reason to be a horror fan.
Mia Goth and Ti West had both existed successfully separately in moviedom for years, West having become an indie horror filmmaking darling with his third feature, 2009’s The House of the Devil. Goth’s unique beauty and malleable ennui made her a showstopper as early as her 2013 feature debut, Nymphomaniac: Vol. II.
But, appropriately enough, it was with their collaboration that they both became stars.
Their 2022 feature X delivered a magnificent mashup of Boogie Nights and A Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a late Seventies grindhouse ode with style for miles. Easily the best film of West’s career, it was followed quickly with a prequel, the absolute lunatic genius of 2023’s Pearl.
If X articulated just how much skill West brought to a feature, Pearl declared Goth a talent to be reckoned with. She deserved an Oscar nomination. She was breathtaking.
And so, obviously, horror fans have been giddy since the trailer for the third film in the trilogy, Maxxxine, dropped. We circle back to Goth’s X character some years since the incident in Texas. A popular porn star, Maxine Minx is about to make the leap to legit films with a starring turn in a horror sequel.
The popularity of West’s series means a boost in both budget and cast. Elizabeth Debicki, Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, Halsey, Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale class up the ensemble this go-round in a film that feels more apiece with late 70s/early 80s urban thrillers a la Eyes Of Laura Mars.
As warnings about California’s “Night Stalker” plead with women to be careful, Maxine asserts her ability to take care of herself, even as it becomes clear that she is being stalked. Maxine’s director (Debicki) warns her to eliminate the distractions in life, and Maxine makes a promise to do just that.
Okay, then, here we go!
But though blood does flow around West’s pastiche of 80s pop and fashion, nothing here pops like the uniquely stylized timestamps that helped make the first two horrors so memorable. Much of the film begins to feel like a series of setups in search of that elusive, satisfying payoff.
There’s no doubt Goth still commands attention, but West’s foray into the 80s seems less edgy, less ambitious, and just less horrific. The comments on fame and excess become broadly generic, and somehow Maxine herself becomes a little less interesting.
On its own, the film fits nicely into the role of a competent urban thriller. But when cast as the final piece of a potentially iconic horror trilogy, MaXXXine ends up limping to the finish.
Nightmares may be the source of all horror. There’s a theory that sleep paralysis may be to blame for history’s waking nightmares: ghosts, demons, specters. We dive into this horrifying complex and the horror films it has inspired.
5. The Night House (2020)
Director David Bruckner’s The Night House rests on a trusted horror foundation that’s adorned with several stylishly creepy fixtures. A remarkable as always Rebecca Hall plays the recently, startlingly widowed Beth whose grief combines with nightmares, sleuthing with doubt.
Though Beth’s neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall, always a pleasure) and best friend (Sarah Goldberg) both warn her not to fill the void in her life with “something dark,” the dark keeps calling. The more Beth digs into things Owen left behind, the more signs point to an unsettling secret life, and to the possibility that Owen may not have entirely moved on.
Beth’s sustained grief, and her indignation toward everyone who’s not Owen, carries an authenticity that gets us squarely behind Beth’s personal journey. And that pays dividends once the film relies on our belief in what Beth believes. Thanks to Hall, we end up buying in.
4. Insidious (2010)
Director James Wan and writer (and co-star) Leigh Whannell launched a second franchise with this clever, creepy, star-studded flick about a haunted family.
Patrick Wilson (who would become a Wan/Whannell staple) and Rose Byrne anchor the film as a married couple dealing with the peculiar coma-like state affecting their son, not to mention the weird noises affecting their house. The catch in this sleep paralysis film is that we are not with the dreamer. Instead, the dreamer is an innocent, helpless child, combining the hallucinatory imagery with child-in-peril tension.
But what makes this particular film so effective is that we get to go into The Further to reclaim the lost soul. It’s a risky move, but these filmmakers do what few are able to: they show us what we are afraid of.
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Teens on suburban Elm St. share nightmares, and one by one, these teens are not waking up. Not that their disbelieving parents care. When Tina woke one night, her nightgown shredded by Freddie’s razor fingers, her super-classy mother admonished, “Tina, hon, you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin’. One or the other.”
Depositing a boogieman in your dreams to create nightmares that will truly kill you was a genius concept by writer/director Craven because you can only stay awake for so long. It took everyone’s fear of nightmares to a more concrete level.
The film was sequeled to death, it suffers slightly from a low budget and even more from a synth-heavy score and weak FX that date it, but it’s still an effective shocker. That face that stretches through the wall is cool, the stretched out arms behind Tina are still scary. The nightmare images are apt, and the hopscotch chant and the vision of Freddie himself were not only refreshingly original but wildly creepy.
2. Borgman (2013)
Writer/director Alex van Warmerdam delivers a surreal, nightmarish, sometimes darkly comical fable guaranteed to keep you off balance. It is meticulously crafted and deliberately paced, a minefield of psychological torment.
van Warmerdam offsets his mysterious script with assured, thoughtful direction, buoyed by a fine ensemble cast and crisp, sometimes remarkable cinematography.
Like its title character, Borgman is unique and hypnotic, leaving you with so many different feelings you won’t be quite sure which one is right.
1. The Nightmare (2015)
An effective scary movie is one that haunts your dreams long after the credits roll. It’s that kind of impact that most horror buffs are seeking, but even the most ardent genre fan will hope out loud that Rodney Ascher’s documentary The Nightmare doesn’t follow them to sleep.
Sleep paralysis is the phenomenon that inspired Wes Craven to write A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a clear creative root for Insidious, Borgman, and scores of other horror movies. But it isn’t fiction. It’s a sometimes nightly horror show real people have to live with. And dig this – it sounds like it might be contagious.
We spend a great deal of time watching horror movies, and we cannot remember an instance in our lives that we considered turning off a film for fear that we would dream about it later. Until now.
With his source novel and screenplay for Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist mixed vampire bloodlust and emotional bonds. Handling the Undead (Håndtering av udøde) finds Lindqyist turning similar attention to zombies, teaming with director/co-writer Thea Hvistendahl for a deeply atmospheric tale of grief, longing, and dread-filled reunions.
We follow three families in Norway, each one dealing with tragedy. An old man and his daughter (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) have lost their young son/grandson; an elderly woman still grieves for her lifelong partner; while a man (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Worst Person in the World and Personal Shopper) and his children struggle to accept that the wife and mother they depend on (Bahar Pars) may now be gone.
Hvistendahl sets the stakes with minimal dialog and maximum sorrow. Characters move through sweaty summer days in a fog of grief that’s expertly defined by cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth. They grasp at memories and battle regret over feelings left unexpressed.
And then an unexplained electro-magnetic event hits Oslo…and the dead aren’t so dead anymore.
In the film’s first two acts, Hvistendahl unveils these awakenings with a barren and foreboding tenderness. Everyone knows this can’t end well, but the tears of joy that come from seemingly answered prayers create moments that straddle a fascinating line between touching and horrifying.
How much of our grief is defined by selfishness? And how far could it push us before we finally let go?
Those may not be new themes for the zombie landscape, but the way Hvistendahl frames the inevitable bloodshed goes a long way toward making her shift of focus less jarring. While so much time is spent exploring the pain of those left behind, we know that eventually zombies gonna zombie.
And indeed they do, but Hvistendahl sidesteps excess carnage for a more subtle form of gruesome. The interactions between the living and the undead take on a surreal, experimental quality that seems plenty curious about whether we’d really think dead is better.
After all, the grieving family in Pet Sematary went asking for trouble. Here, the trouble comes calling, and Handling the Undead answers with a bleak but compelling study of desperation meeting inhuman connection.
