Movies Talk

The movie she made with Claire Denis was great.

I have some friends coming over for a triple (maybe quadruple) bill of movies with a more or less loose horror theme. Iā€™ve shortlisted a bunch including the Perfect Blue anime, Mario Bavaā€™s Planet of the Vampires, Lair of the White Worm starring Hugh Grant, Wolf Guy (Sonny Chiba), Holy Virgin vs Evil Dead (Donnie Yen) and a myriad of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price movies.

Separately, I have been recommended Substance by several people (colleagues) that donā€™t know just how weird I am. I donā€™t think itā€™s for me. I am, however, interested in Heretic, more so to see Hugh Grant in something where his character isnā€™t a bumbling West Londoner - those trailers have caught my attention!

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the substance is very bad imo. Skip with extreme prejudice

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What do people consider good horror?
That may sound flippant but I am genuinely curious since I donā€™t typically watch any horror movies.

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counterpoint, I thought The Substance was rather good. I went in expecting some dumb stuff only horror can get away with, and it delivered.

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I donā€™t mind the general dumb just that it was super repetitive + the premise made no sense. Why would the old lady want to sacrifice her body so that a separate younger person could live it up? She doesnā€™t have those experiences and they donā€™t benefit her in any way, in fact we are shown 10000000000 times that she doesnā€™t like this arrangement lol. Thereā€™s a scene where she does resentful meal prep about it in fact

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Plus there was the whole david cageā€™s America to deal with. A PBS exercise program has ā€œshareholdersā€ and launches someone into stardom that includes ā€œthe New Yearā€™s Eve showā€. Nothing wrong with outsiders criticizing US culture but if thatā€™s how french people are going to do it donā€™t bother

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Iā€™d bet youā€™ll like Romero you should watch Martin

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Iā€™m no horror expert, but Iā€™ve figured out over time what good horror is to me. I like being scared, I prefer to have at least one somewhat sympathetic character, I like occasional implausible/incongruous dream logic, I donā€™t fancy being grossed out (but I can take a bit of blood). So some highlights for me getting into a horror mood:

  • Poltergeist (1982) - I like the premise of a decent family getting in way over their head on a home purchase. Some of the support in the film is rather hokey (like why all this is happening), but the scares and generally sympathetic characters made this a TV cable classic when it was on a lot
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - the film this is remaking from 1956 is pretty good too. There is a basic stress to slowly seeing those around you disengage emotionally and not knowing what to do. Leonard Nimoy plays a new age psychiatrist very well, and I consider the rest of the cast at least good

I was trying to think something from the last 10 years to complete the list. Get Out, maybe. Or maybe The Green Knight, if that counts.

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Iā€™d bet youā€™ll like Romero you should watch Martin

I do like Romero! At least what Iā€™ve seen of him. Iā€™ll track down Martin.

The Green Knight

I have troubled thoughts about this movie. I think itā€™s successful as a movie but I also kind of hate it because I think itā€™s one of the worst adaptations Iā€™ve ever seen, done by someone who either never read the poem or just didnā€™t understand it even a little bit.

One of my complaints is that itā€™s pruder than the 700 year old poem and also, I think, homophobic in a way Middle English poetry simply isnā€™t. Itā€™s also such a self serious somber movie that it eradicates all the humor of the poem.
I guess I could go on and on but I wrote about this back in January.

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I wrote this assuming you were born yesterday and have seen nothing

Tricky to answer this since itā€™s hard to nail down what ā€œhorrorā€ means,[1] largely because people, as individuals and as groups, in one place and time or another, find different things to be scary. So stuff that I find disturbing might be something yeso finds funny, etc. Do you respond to the real, the surreal, the gothic?

There are also Halloween movies that are not scary at all; some lean into sort of goofy theatricality, and some were written in a horror film grammar which we are today desensitized to, but we still call all of it Horror.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Thing (1982), as mentioned on the recent IC episode, are good. @exodus says The Thing isnā€™t a horror movie which is like saying RE4 isnā€™t a horror game. But then is 2001 a horror movie? Difficult to argue against Alien being one taxonomically speaking, but I donā€™t find it particularly frightening. The Exorcist is for many people the scariest movie of all time but to me it came across as silly. Night of the Living Dead is more transparently social commentary than scary per se. Listen to yeso and watch Martin.

Thereā€™s been a trend in the past decade of new horror films being marketed toward ā€œsmart peopleā€ ā€¦ the thinking manā€™s horror film if you will ā€¦ which I donā€™t know how else to describe it except that the idea that horror films needed some kind of cultural rehabilitation is implicitly stupid, condescending to the genreā€™s history, filmmakers, the audience, etc. What this means anyway is a lot of horror films today want you to know theyā€™re About Something (forgetting that many, many horror films throughout history have been About Things, just less on-the-nose about it). Some of these films are good, itā€™s just unfortunate theyā€™re part of this set of sort of dumb white elephant movies. I like The Witch (2016) a lot, especially for the sound design and dialogue; Hereditary has some truly awful images in it (compliment), and It Follows is good too.

Somewhere else on the spectrum, Vampyr and Kwaidan feel more like listening to a ghost story (eerie) than watching something horrific.

The intense parts of David Lynch movies can be pretty scary. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Inland Empire, and Mulholland Dr. all qualify. I still havenā€™t seen Eraserhead.

Possession slots into a similar genre as the Lynch stuff, although is really its own thing.

Some people have strong negative feelings about The Blair Witch Project. If you can get into the right frame of mind itā€™ll get you good.

Pulse (2001) is like nothing else in this post!


  1. ā€”marlon brando et al. 1979 ā†©ļøŽ

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Great recommendations. Would add Carnival of Souls for a lower intensity option, and Nope for a newer, bigger budget pick.

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as a horror hater who nonetheless finds himself liking some horror movies from time to time, here are a few i love, ranging from the obvious to the up-my-own-ass:

  • the silence of the lambs
  • the exorcist
  • salemā€™s lot (og)
  • nosferatu (og + herzogā€™s version)
  • dawn of the dead
  • fright night (og)
  • rosemaryā€™s baby
  • kwaidan
  • the wailing
  • as above so below
  • demons
  • house on haunted hill (og)
  • audition
  • cure
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Martin is on Tubi for free

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Iā€™m sure Iā€™m not the first to coin the term the A24 effect but I do kind of hate A24 movies even when I like them for this reason. They seem to so deeply want to impress me that I find myself actively disliking them sometimes.

But thanks for the recommendations! I have seen many of these but I also didnā€™t give anyone a rubric or constraint on what to recommend me!

Iā€™m also one of those artsy people who really hates watching David Lynch movies. I think heā€™s quite good and extremely talented but I really hate the way his movies make me feel. Which, again, is part of his genius. But he really ainā€™t for me.

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Edwardā€¦!

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heā€™s right about the Armitage Gawain

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The commentary track with George, Tom Savini, and Christine Forrest is a fun time

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Ken Foree throws two zombie children to the ground and blasts them with a M-16. Tom Savini: ā€œmy niece and nephew right thereā€

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