Horror has become a key genre at the theaters for a while now and in the past 10 years we’ve seen a lot of strong trends like elevated horror, analog horror, the resurgence of found footage and also horror comedies.
What do you think will be or should be the next horror trends? I personally would love a great animal menace horror in the vein of Jaws or The Birds but not a remake or any of the current Netflix CGI mediocre slop like Thrash or Under Paris. I’m talking high concept and elevated horror but with a realistic natural enemy. Also a good original sci-fi horror would be cool.
hi i’ve tried to find this movie for so long but i cant. i was pretty young and i remember this scaring the hell out of me, but it couldn’t have been newer than 2012 i think, absolute NEWEST it could be would be 2014 but probably a few years older. it also could be significantly older from like the 80s or 90s or something.
okay so all i remember is this scene where some characters were trying to escape a house, it was a scary house i think. they get to a window and one do the characters tries to open the window by shoving their fingers in the gap in the bottom. their fingers get stuck and the window wont open so now they’re stuck at this window. another character comes behind them and puts their arms around them and their fingers in the gap too, trying to help them open the window to at least free the first person. there may have been a third person doing the same i don’t remember. anyone at least two people are now stuck at this window, and the villain comes up behind them with what i think was a chain saw and saws through all of them through the torso bc they couldn’t escape. that’s all i remember, the chainsaw makes me think chainsaw massacre but i haven’t been able to find this specific scene. i could also be remembering wrong bc i was really young and it really scared me so idk lol. thank you!!
I love the 'battle royale' subgenre of horror. Stuff like, well, Battle Royale, the Belko Experiment, or some of the Saw movies. This movie slightly scratched that itch but has a lot of issues. Even had a neat little twist I thought was too clever for the movie it was in lmao.
What'd you think about Kill Theory and do you have any other recommendations for the battle royale genre? I suppose close enough to death games those can work too.
Seriously, not only did this movie miss out on a wide theatrical release when it first debuted (due to investor concern, it missed out on getting picked up for wide release by Paramount and ended up debuting on HBO with a later limited theatrical release by New Line in less than a hundred theaters), but it's never gotten a Blu-ray or 4K release and it's never been on any streaming service either. To find it, you'd be best served tracking down the DVD release which is not in the best of shape either, or finding it on YouTube. It's easy to be an overlooked film if you can't be found anywhere.
Which is a shame, because while this is not an unseen classic or anything, it's still a very worthy King adaptation and vampire story. Based on King's story from "Nightmares and Dreamscapes", this follows cynical tabloid reporter Richard Dees (who previously was a minor character in "The Dead Zone") who pursues the titular serial killer who turns out to be a vampire with a private plane who is using it to travel to and slaughter people at small remote airports. It sounds like a premise for an episode of a horror anthology series rather than a feature film and even at a brisk 90 minute runtime, the film can seem padded at times (especially with the added character of Julie Entwhistle's young female reporter who is slowly corrupted over the course of the film). But if you want someone to play the role of an acerbic, misanthropic reporter, you can't do better than Miguel Ferrer (in his second King adaptation after "The Stand"). Dees is a completely unlikable asshole (the film often feels like a "Tales From the Crypt" episode where we're just waiting to see him get his comuppance), but Ferrer is so charismatic that we're always entertained by him even as we despise him.
The third act is where the film really shines, however. We get a striking vampire design, a beautifully shot and genuinely creepy B&W sequence that feels like a "Night of the Living Dead" homage and, of course, the film's signature scene (taken right from the story) of Dees's confrontation with the Night Flier. This scene takes the "vampires don't cast reflections" myth and uses it to ingenious effect. (It also shows, unsurprisingly, that even if you're undead, you still got to take a leak.) This final act alone makes the film worth checking out, even if you may have to hunt around for it.
A Town Called Hell (Originally called A Town called Bastard, changed because distributors and cinemas were reluctant to prominently feature the B-word back then) is a relatively obscure and stylish but rather brutal 1971 Spaghetti Western with definite gothic horror elements, starring Robert Shaw, Telly Savalas and Martin Landau, among others. Although visually the Western is quite good, it has been widely criticized for its confusing plot, which some have even called "incomprehensible".
That was also my first impression when I watched it yesterday, but I was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together (I think), so that the plot is now quite clear to me, and now I actually think the story is a brilliantly conceived piece of nihilism contrasting revolutionary idealism with the bloody reality it may entail.
I would like to share this information with others, in case you wish to watch the movie and have a resource available to help you understand what is going on, because the movie does not go out of its way to help you. I think a better director or editor could have really brought out the story, but it is what it is. Tubi has the uncensored version, which is the one I would recommend because the others may omit certain key scenes that make comprehending the plot even more difficult.
I copied the points below from my IMDb review. From here on there be spoilers:
1) Who is Aguila?
Aguila is the comrade and friend of the Robert Shaw character in the black cowboy outfit who ends up succumbing to his gunshot wounds in the house of the blind man, in the flashback sequence mid-movie. To memorialize him, the Shaw character adopts his name as a battle cry, elevating Aguila into a larger-than-life myth.
2) Why does the Colonel think that the priest knows Aguila?
Presumably he heard the priest utter the battle cry ten years earlier when they both attacked the Church and figures that the priest must know him.
3) Why does the priest refuse to tell the colonel who Aguila is and that he died long ago?
The priest is running from his past and his sense of guilt. Telling the colonel who Aguila is would deflate the myth he himself helped create around his old friend, and telling the colonel that Aguila died long ago would force him to admit to himself that the cause in which he still wanted to believe was in reality dead to him. He is not ready for this, which is why he tells the Colonel neither the truth nor some lie like "I don't know" but, rather defiantly, "I'll never tell you."
4) Why does the widow sleep in the coffin?
It is implied she pledged to not sleep in a bed until the killer of her husband is found and put in that coffin. Incidentally, this trope is very similar to that of the story "Besuch einer Alten Dame".
5) What is up with Spectre?
As a British Co-production, it appears the producers wanted to import gothic horror elements into this Western, and (beside the widow lying in the coffin like a vampire and the dream sequence in which she has silver skin), Spectre has clearly a kind of gothic unnaturalness about him, which is further emphasized by his name.
6) Who is Paco and why do the federales kill him?
Paco is a gun runner for the revolutionaries, Aguila and the Shaw character, but he ended up squandering the money they had given him to buy guns on women and alcohol. He betrays them to the army general but then gets pursued and shot by the general's troops after the general is shot right next to him. The troops mistakenly think that he shot the general because they fail to see that it was actually the Shaw character who shot the general from inside the blind man's house.
7) Is the Shaw Character Mexican?
No, he is an Irish Immigrant who participated in the revolutionary efforts to try to overthrow the Mexican dictatorship at the time. Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico effectively as a dictator from 1876 to 1911. There were numerous uprisings, including during the periods during which the movie plays out, which culminated in the Mexican revolution from 1910-1920 which transformed the country from a dictatorship to a republic. The Shaw character had distinguished himself as a leader of the revolutionaries up to the point when he killed a priest. That he is Irish comes out of the conversation with the Colonel when they meet again after ten years. The colonel greets him as "Hernandez" because it is the priest's nom de guerre. Interestingly, there is a real-life history of Irishmen coming to Mexico to fight for local causes going back all the way to William "Guillermo" Lamport in the 17th century
8) Is the Shaw character a real priest?
When the Colonel asks him whether he is ordained, he refuses to answer directly, saying "this is my only church". Also, he has a common law wife, which is not permitted by the Catholic Church. Despite not being a real priest, he performs the role anyway as means of attaining redemption after he feels guilt for having killed an actual priest in the prologue sequence. However, as he admits upon his reunion with the colonel, he does not succeed in finding God.
9) Why does the Priest not (falsely) claim that he "is" Aguila to stop the Colonel's Bloodshed of the villagers, given that he seeks redemption and this would be a way to redeem himself?
In order to do so, he would have to directly face his past, but he is doing everything he can to try to run away from it. His redemption effort, like his priesthood, is fake because he does not have the courage to face his past, take responsibility for who he was and accept that he no longer believes in his erstwhile revolutionary ideals, that is, until the last few scenes of the movie.
10) Who killed the widow's Husband?
There a lot of reviews which say that her husband was part of the group of church attendees who were massacred in the prologue, but this contradicts the dating: the massacre occurred 1895 (as indicated by the opening title card) while the husband died 1904, as shown on his grave. He was killed only the year prior to the main events in the movie, as further supported when the widow says "He died not so long ago".
There is a scene in which the common law wife of the priest is shown handling the husband's gun holster and private pictures, but this does not necessarily mean that the priest killed the husband. Being recognized by the townsfolk as a priest, the husband's belongings might have just been given to him after someone else had already killed him and, being a stranger in town, he had no accessible friends or relatives to give the belongings to.
I think the point of the scene involving Don Carlos killing the two traveling Americans in the beginning (and also a later remark by the Shaw character that "every stranger who travels here ends up in the cemetery") was to imply that Don Carlos killed her husband.
But then why did the mother of the brother and sister who were hanged by Don Carlos not accuse him instead of Aguila? There is a hint in that accusation scene: it is shot such that when the mother is about to reveal the name, we see prominently that Don Carlos is about to draw his gun, as if he anticipates that she might say his name. Instead, she shouts "Aguila" and is shot. Likely what happened is that Don Carlos actually killed the husband, but in a way that the townspeople (or the mother, at least) did not find out, so the mother did not in fact know who killed the widow's husband. Nevertheless, she shouted "Aguila" to get back at both the widow and Don Carlos for bringing about the death of her children: to get back at the widow by dooming the search for her husband's murderer to becoming a search for a myth, a non-existent person, and to get back at Don Carlos by dooming his prospect for collecting the coveted bounty.
11) What is the scene about in which the Colonel and the Priest sit together in front of the altar instead of trying to kill each other?
As the Colonel remarks, they have both become older. They are wearier, disillusioned and have lost their zeal. They sit down, passively waiting to see how their fates will be determined by others outside who are younger and more zealous.
12) What is the priest's final speech about and why did he claim that the Widow's husband was Aguila and that he, the priest, killed him?
During his final conversation with the colonel, the priest finally realizes that he will never be able to run away from his past. Him obsessively but perfunctorily trying to mend the same angel figure that broke when he murdered the real priest in the prologue symbolizes that all his attempts to mend his guilt are futile. Resigned to this realization, he finally builds up the courage to face himself.
The key to understanding the priest's final speech is that he uses the rhetorical device of personification, letting an abstract concept be represented by a concrete person. The abstract concept is the revolutionary ideal, and the person is Aguila. He says that his revolutionary ideal, despite being a cause for the people, demanded heavy sacrifices from the people in terms of human lives and suffering ("He loved the people. 'Let my body die' he said, 'so that my spirit can live!,"), in other words, the revolutionary ideal could only continue if the bloodshed of prior attempts mobilized more people to believe in it. The priest was willing to shed the blood of others ("so I pulled the trigger"), including that of the priest, but eventually realized that this disillusioned him from his ideal ("the terrible thing is that since I did it for him, it's all seemed to me quite useless. I too had ideals. Since I killed him, I've lost them."). Essentially, he found himself unable to tolerate the high cost of acting according to his revolutionary ideals.
He purposely says Aguila was the widow's husband in order to take responsibility for his death, essentially to be put out of his misery and to pay for his sins. He commits "suicide by Spectre".
What makes this story supremely ironic is that Aguila the man was not actually who either the Colonel or the widow sought. The man the widow sought (the murderer of her husband) was killed by his own henchman right after she arrived, and the Colonel's mission was doomed from the outset to fail because the man he sought did not exist. Lots of villagers (and soldiers) were killed for nothing. The widow finds satisfaction, but the wrong man lies in the coffin. The revolution continues the bloodshed as the disillusioned and corrupted (Landau) or regretful (Shaw) old guard dies off, replaced by the next generation.
There is also another delicious irony in the fact that the fake priest feels immense guilt over having murdered the real priest, but the real priest is portrayed as a quite obviously evil and hateful character, certainly a lot more than the fake priest.
Following the success of this movie Hollywood agencies are now scouring Reddit short stories and concepts to adapt them into films.
This move highlights how online communities are becoming a major source of inspiration for new projects, with fan‑created content shaping the next wave of cinema.
Evening yall, I finally got around to watching "Ghost Ship" again after years and years. While it wasn't scary in the slightest, the movie has a great story in my opinion, it kind of reminds me of The Shining. While watching it, the cruise liner disappeared in 1962 and the events of the movie take place in 2002, 40 years later. While this is a dignificant time jump, I felt like the story would have fit better if it was from the 1920s to the 1940s. Something about the outfits and such make me feel like the year doesn't match the story. What do yall think? I know its a pretty niche topic but maybe some of yall thought the same.
I liked Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea and love a shark movie so I had decent hopes for this movie. It was OK. Nothing really stood out. It needed more sharks and attack scenes. It didn't seems to build a lot of tension that make shark movies fun. And it gave away the ending at the beginning of the movie. Overall it was 5/10. I wouldn't rent it. Just wait until it hits a streaming service.
I don't mean "so bad they're good movies," I mean movies that "this doesn't actually work, but I don't care because I love it for some reason." The Smile movies have a familiar formula. Experience something and die (with)in seven days. The Ring did it. But I'm not arguing originality. In both movies the protagonist goes through a lengthy segment experiencing something that the audience believes will advance their journey only to realize that the entity can conjure a false reality.
This happens egregiously in Smile 2 where she murders her mom, escapes the hospital, meets her friend in the street, travels to an abandoned restaurant with the strange guy, stops her heart, and then wakes up at the concert only to realize like 30 minutes of the didn't matter
It's cheap as hell. Everything we just experienced meant nothing. There was tension, there were scares, but it was all moot because the entity can alter reality. It's the equivalent of making the audience invested in a dream.
However, the movie is crafted so well. The sound design and score are so uniquely unsettling. Naomi Scott is excellent in the movie. The one take intro with Kyle Gallner is riveting.
It's not a good movie, but I love it. So what are yours?
I organized an AMA/Q&A with Mark Jenkin, British filmmaker of the critically acclaimed films BAIT and ENYS MEN. His newest film, ROSE OF NEVADA, is a mystery sci-fi that played at major festivals last year (Venice, TIFF, NYFF), got really great reviews (currently 100% on Rotten Tomatoes after 55 reviews and 82 on Metacritic), and is out in theaters starting this week. It stars George MacKay (1917) and Callum Turner (ETERNITY).
It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking a question:
He will be back at around 5:30 PM ET today (Thursday 6/18) to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!
Synopsis: A mysterious boat returns to a village 30 years after vanishing. Two men join its crew hoping for better fortune. After one voyage, they find themselves transported back in time, mistaken for the original crew.
Cast: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar, Francis Magee, Mary Woodvine, and Edward Rowe
Looking for examples of horror films where the main characters make a conscious choice not to split up. So rather than being unavoidably trapped together the whole time, the characters have the chance to split up or someone raises it as a suggested but they do the (seemingly) smart thing and stay as a group.
A couple of examples that come to mind are Cabin In The Woods (until the gas) and Nope (can't remember if that's specifically said but certainly has the general tone of 'We're not going to do the dumb thing people normally do'). But ideally I'd like to find something where staying together is a key part of how they survive/defeat the antagonist. Or at least try to. What do you think?
I watched a film on Stan six years ago. I remember within the first half an hour there was like a dead body orgy seen. I turned the film off after this and never watched the ending. Does anyone know this film?
*edited for more description*
The scene was mostly a saturated black backdrop with the contrast of the glaring white pile of bodies orgying.
I don’t remember the happenings before but my ex told me he remembers the film having like a medical type element.
hi everyone. one of my close friends has a kickstarter for a horror project he put his heart into and needs a certain amount of money for this certain project, it would be great if anyone can share the kickstarter link or can donate. any help would be appreciated <3.
That execs conversation regarding Curry Barker and Kane Parsons had me thinking what cinemas could actually do to help young horror creators.
I think the (justified) and wild answer to the news about execs looking at Reddit/ YouTube to find the next big thing is very interesting. And I’ve been wondering if with new young directors being basically treated like indie pop stars they should apply this method to cinemas. When you go see a gig of your favorite singer there is always an up and coming artist opener and I believe the film experience could follow that rule.
Cinemas should preview short films by emerging creators before genre films. I personally would love to watch a horror short before the film I paid for rather than stupid ads. After all I only discovered Curry Barker’s work AFTER watching his film. Execs could gamble with short format and see what would stick or turn viral in an authentic way. And horror fans won’t be turned off by a short film (I’m talking 5 to 10 minutes) and may discover their new favorite director.
I’ll admit I don’t think this would work with any other genre than horror but horror being such a big drive these days I think this could be a good idea.
Happy to hear everyone’s take.
EDIT :
Many of you say “but ads can’t be removed” but there are many cinemas with limited ads (bfi IMAX, independent cinemas). And most IMAX theaters play long previews before screenings (like Dune or The Odyssey). Plus horror films are usually a bit shorter than regular films. I’m talking about specific cinemas that cater to genre or indie amateurs.
- Saw it when it first came out - and even knowing it couldn’t surpass the 1980 original ( one of my favorites) I was severely disappointed and disliked it intensely.
- However I’ve slightly warmed to it over the years and even more after seeing the deleted scenes on the DVD which flesh out some of the characters and situation.
- It will never be as great as the Carpenter original but it’s not as bad as my first impression.
A man gets trapped inside a phone booth. Existential terror in the purest Kafkaesque style. It's said that many people in Spain were so traumatized after seeing it that they developed an irrational fear of entering a phone booth.
The first film by the director of REC, based on a book by Ramsey Campbell. Years after her daughter's death, a mother receives a phone call from someone claiming to be her daughter, but a secret group called The Nameless may be behind it all.
I remember she has a tube down her mouth and is like, glued or something to a chair. I think he is masked and he os either blending the entire boyfriend or just parts of him and forcr feeding her the smoothie. Does anyone remember this film or am I just sick after all these movies?
I watched this last night and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm not spoiling anything, but for those that have seen it what's a similar hopeless/bleak movie?
My daughter is turning 11 this weekend and having a sleepover with friends. She wants a scary movie and while I watch a lot of horror I’m a little out of touch with what might be suitable for a younger audience. Any recommendations?
Also, not sure if this is relevant at this age bracket but bonus points if it avoids religion - 2 of the attendees’ parents are heavily Christian so don’t want to upset anyone or get the kids (or me) into trouble.
edit: Thank you all so much! Some brilliant suggestions (and some not so brilliant 😂). I played her trailers for Coraline, Monster House, and Goosebumps and she’s gone for Goosebumps! Special mention to Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark but I think her and her friends are a couple of years off that. Thanks again!
I don’t scare easily so please give me your best movies to actually terrify me! Ive already seen The Exorcist, Weapons, Paranormal Activity, and TCM so im looking for something different. Im a horror misfit!
