2018 Horror Roundup Thread

I remember that epispde of Seinfeld.

What a tragedy! There would be no new photographs of the beautiful American Southwest!

Patient Zero (Matt Smith, Natalie Dormer, Stanley Tucci) finally has a trailer:

Doesn’t Night of the Living Dead take place almost entirely inside a boarded up house?

So this weekend my wife, who loves to wallow in what I call “trailer hell”, tells me I might like one she just saw. It was for The Endless and I didn’t remember it from the forum and had no idea what it was. The lake shot in the trailer had me so we watched and wow it was awesome.

I loved Resolution so much. My son and I have watched it several times. We had no idea it was the same peeps so needless to say this was a real blast. We both sat up and were like WTF is going on?"

I caught this one on Hoopla. I liked it and it has gotten great reviews.

Just finished The Endless…absolutely loved it. This isn’t one you want to know too much about going in, so just see it.

Thanks for the heads up on seeing this via Hoopla. It would never have occurred to me to check to see if the library had this via Hoopla.

I was surprised to see it too as it had just been released. I was checking out “just added at Hoopla” category and saw it. Also saw The Night Eats the World, which had been mentioned on the forum. It is a pretty good zombie movie.

He’s Out There. Looks like it could be fun. It definitely gives off a Hush vibe, but there’s very few of those kind of movies I’m not all in for.

(The Wikipedia page makes it sound like this was already released in 2017, but IMDB says 2018 and I can’t find it streaming anywhere, so who the fuck knows. Movie releases are weird nowadays.)

One-and-a-half thumbs up for The Devil’s Doorway. Irish religious horror found-footage movie set in a home for wayward girls in the 60s…the twist on the “found-footage” being that it’s actual 16mm footage, with all the aspect ratio and fake film grain high-jinks that implies.

More than a little reminiscent of the excellent and underseen Borderlands from a few years ago, but extremely tense throughout.

I loved The Borderlands so I’ve made a note of this, thanks.

Something to look forward to this Halloween.

I must confess to the heresy of never liking the Halloween movies*. I respect them, certainly, and I’m a huge fan generally speaking of Carpenter’s body of work. But slasher films never have done it for me and that whole unstoppable psycho killer thing has always seemed slightly silly to me.

*Except Halloween 3, that movie is a trip. Plus it’s got Tom Atkins so it pretty much starts at third base.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s any reason to. The best thing you can say about the Halloween movies is that they’re not as bad as the Friday the 13th movies.

-Tom

My main connection to the Halloween franchise is that my great-uncle plays a crusty old doctor who gets a needle in the eye in Part II.

Other than that, they’re OK slasher movies, I guess. Better than Friday the 13th, not as good as Nightmare on Elm Street.

Calibre. Netflix.

Really excellent film. The less you know going in, the better. Let’s just say it’s something of a Straw Dogs/Deliverance “yuppies on backwoods holiday” story, set in the Scottish Highlands somewhere. Reminds me a little of The Ritual in tone, without all the hallucinating.

Definitely worth the 100 minutes.

Yeah, we enjoyed Calibre too. Bizarrely, we watched The Ritual just before it.

Kind of linking into Calibre (but released in 2017 I believe) we watched Super Dark Times and really enjoyed it. A very different sort of take on Mean Creek perhaps and I can’t help but feel there’s something bubbling just under the surface of it that isn’t made explicit (that Alison is involved in some of the killings). Really intriguing.

Actually, we were reminded of American Werewolf in London too with the rural pub, tight knit locals and night prowling.

I also really liked Calibre! I think it works because of the leads, who manage pretty well that whole structure of “oops, we made a bad decision and now we’re going to compound it with worser and worser decisions”. That so often feels contrived in movies, as a way to keep the movie from being fifteen minutes long. But Calibre and those two actors manage it well. And I’ve been a big fan of Martin McCann since The Survivalist and a zombie movie called Rezort. He’s kind of like a younger and not quite as pleased with himself version of Michael Fassbinder.

But the I think the real key to Calibre’s effectiveness is Tony Curran. That guy is always great. He manages an unlikely combination of insidious and sympathetic. Red Road, for instance. There’s a dopey horror movie called Shuttle that taps into our fear of airport shuttles. It’s kind of a bargain bin version of, I dunno, Saw meets those horrible girl-in-a-basement movies. But I think it’s worth watching because of Tony Curran.

-Tom