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 donāt 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 doesnāt have those experiences and they donāt benefit her in any way, in fact we are shown 10000000000 times that she doesnāt like this arrangement lol. Thereās a scene where she does resentful meal prep about it in fact
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Plus there was the whole david cageās America to deal with. A PBS exercise program has āshareholdersā and launches someone into stardom that includes āthe New Yearās Eve showā. Nothing wrong with outsiders criticizing US culture but if thatās how french people are going to do it donāt bother
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Iād bet youāll like Romero you should watch Martin
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Iām no horror expert, but Iāve 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 donāt 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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Iād bet youāll like Romero you should watch Martin
I do like Romero! At least what Iāve seen of him. Iāll track down Martin.
The Green Knight
I have troubled thoughts about this movie. I think itās successful as a movie but I also kind of hate it because I think itās one of the worst adaptations Iāve ever seen, done by someone who either never read the poem or just didnāt understand it even a little bit.
One of my complaints is that itās pruder than the 700 year old poem and also, I think, homophobic in a way Middle English poetry simply isnāt. Itās 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 itās hard to nail down what āhorrorā 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 isnāt a horror movie which is like saying RE4 isnāt a horror game. But then is 2001 a horror movie? Difficult to argue against Alien being one taxonomically speaking, but I donāt 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.
Thereās been a trend in the past decade of new horror films being marketed toward āsmart peopleā ā¦ the thinking manās horror film if you will ā¦ which I donāt 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 genreās history, filmmakers, the audience, etc. What this means anyway is a lot of horror films today want you to know theyāre 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, itās just unfortunate theyāre 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 havenāt 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 itāll get you good.
Pulse (2001) is like nothing else in this post!
āmarlon brando et al. 1979 ā©ļø
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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
- salemās lot (og)
- nosferatu (og + herzogās version)
- dawn of the dead
- fright night (og)
- rosemaryās 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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Iām sure Iām 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 didnāt give anyone a rubric or constraint on what to recommend me!
Iām also one of those artsy people who really hates watching David Lynch movies. I think heās 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 aināt for me.
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Edwardā¦!
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heās 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: āmy niece and nephew right thereā
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red rooms from this year absolutely ripped if people are looking for a dark web horror quebec thing
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My only defense is that I have seen a lot of movies, and only a small fraction have been horror
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TBH, I pretty much separate it in my mind from the Middle English poem. The poem one of my favorites, and itās pretty much what got me into Middle English. (My undergraduate advisor: āYou havenāt read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? I know what your homework is.ā) This retrospective academic article by Derek Pearsall looms large in my head for why I donāt think most filmmakers could do it justice:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the poem upon which I wrote my
M.A. thesis nearly sixty years ago, and I have written on it several times since
then, but I am still not sure what it is about.
In comparison, yeah, it seems like the film took the premise and ran in a different direction with it. Itās loose as an adaptation. I ended up enjoying it, but your comments sum up some things Iām more ambivalent about in it. (I want a straightforward three days of kissing games.) More generally, I havenāt found much recent horror to like. In the rare moments Iām searching for horror to sit down with, Iām much more likely to end up with Dawn of the Dead or Alien or something old I havenāt seen than anything recent, seen or unseen.
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I honestly think The Green Knight would work better as a screwball comedy than as this ponderous thing, since the poem remains rather light throughout in a way that few epic poems do.
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