Horror Films

There's been some requests in the Slasher Movies thread for a "horror general" thread, so the slasher thread doesn't get bogged down by topics not related to that specific subgenre. So, uhh... I made one. Talk about all things horror here, especially ones that aren't slashers and likely don't have enough buzz to warrant their own threads.

To start us off, have a rather fascinating article about how every horror movie is about World War I.

Edited by HamburgerTime on Jan 6th 2023 at 10:57:10 AM

reminder there's at least one horror movie set in the trenches,it's called Death Watch

(trailer below)

I saw that. It would have been better if it didn't have any supernatural elements and it was just people going crazy.

The trailer just dropped for Beau is Afraid, the next movie from Ari Aster of Hereditary and Midsommar fame. While this is apparently still working in the horror mode, it's a lot more overtly comedic than his previous movies. Personally, I'm quite fine with that, given how much Will Poulter's character in Midsommar made me crack up, and since I prefer Joaquin Phoenix's comedic performances over his dramatic ones.

This does look more surreal than being a horror film but it does looks interesting.

It will be interesting to see if a new approach changes his fortunes a bit. Most of his films seem to follow the pattern whereby people who like them (most horror buffs and critics) really like them but he's not found mainstream success.

That's not to say that as a bad thing, he's obviously well thought of and a financial and critical success. Just curious if he's going to be a bit of a niche favourite or go more mainstream a la Sam Raimi.

This feels perfect.

I shared the first trailer in the chatterbox thread many moons ago, but here's the second trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin. Aka, the one where a gay couple and their daughter are being harassed by Drax the Destroyer, Ron Weasley, and some others.

Huh. I guess I missed the mark on that whole "apocalypse isn't real" prediction.

My new guess for the twist: all the evidence of the apocalypse being real (the news reports, the plane crash, etc.) is actually a really elaborate con on the part of Bautista and co. to get one of them killed. Why? I don't know. Maybe they're homophobes with a Complexity Addiction and can't just commit simple hate crimes. Maybe they're a cult massively in denial about the clear falsehood of their beliefs and this whole thing is to make themselves feel better. Maybe they're secretly part of that conspiracy from the end of Glass, this is yet another Stealth Sequel, and the daughter is an emerging superhuman they want to kill before she discovers it. Maybe it's a Happening sequel and the trees are making them do it.

That's always the fun thing about getting a new M. Night movie: you can wildly speculate to your heart's content and it all has an equal chance of being correct.

Edited by lbssb on Jan 14th 2023 at 7:26:21 AM

....Even "Its a Stealth Sequel to The Last Airbender?"

Might run into copyright problems with Paramount and Nickelodeon, but beyond that, I guess any of could be viable enough thanks to Split revealing itself as a stealth sequel to Unbreakable.

Now virtually any of Shyamalan's movies can be considered canon with each other. For all we know, the home invaders could be guys from The Village still reeling from how the actual world works and are vainly trying to bring it back to how they thought it was.

I just recently learned that Glass was originally intended to feature a cameo from the fake grandparents from The Visit in the asylum, so, yeah, Shyamalan might actually be interested in building a universe for his films... save Last Airbender, probably (equally due to three factors: the copyright of an established franchise, the general impossibility of connecting the Avatar world to our world, and the fact that it's the one film Shyamalan explicitly has disowned).

Edited by lbssb on Jan 15th 2023 at 12:08:44 PM

This movie is based on a book, which apparently ends with the bad guys finished off, but not before the kid is killed in an accident, and the grieving dads left to wonder if that was enough to prevent the apocalypse or if the apocalypse ever existed to begin with. So ridiculously ambiguous, in other words. Who knows if the film will retain that.

It's possible Shyamalan will give it a new ending. Old is based on a graphic novel which never answers anything about the beach and no one makes it out alive, while he gave his usual twist to it and had two of the characters survive and discover the beach was an experiment by a pharmaceutical company.

Back from Infinity Pool. Honestly thought it was mediocre. It had some nice barbed barbed satire, specifically of rich hedonistic pricks who go to foreign countries with lax law enforcement where they know they can get away with anything, and some good performances, particularly the amazingly-named Mia Goth as the Honey Trap main villain.

Buuuuuut it leaned a bit too far into "gross" rather than "scary" for my liking. Like, there's one bit where our gang of hedonists has a drug-fueled orgy, and at one point they start sucking on this giant lactating boob that may or may not be attached to anyone in particular, it just protrudes from screen right. And that didn't scare me, or disquiet me, it made me internally giggle at the idea of the guy in the props department who you just know is going to be telling the story of how he made the giant rubber boob from Infinity Pool at parties for the rest of his days. And where did this impoverished island dictatorship get a fully-funded human cloning program, anyway?

Also, ever thought about how many horror movies include an awkward dinner scene? Just from the past five years I've seen this in Get Out, The Invitation, Midsommar, Barbarians plural (though not Barbarian singular), the now-legendary one from Hereditary, Don't Worry Darling, The Menu which is basically an entire movie of this one type of scene, and now this one. There doesn't even have to be anything scary that actually happens at the dinner itself, it just has to be a dinner scene that's really uncomfortable to watch. And considering Rocky Horror parodied this type of scene in the '70s it definitely isn't new.

I feel like the originator of that was Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

As part of my attempt to sate my stepdad's never-ending hunger for vampire movies I've been referring to this Paste magazine list. Unfortunately the ones on the list that we haven't seen are often not vampire movies, or the vampires are not cool and sexy, or even worse they're daywalkers.

Wonder how many of those have pages here?

I'm on it.

• The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Subspecies, Kiss of the Damned, The Little Vampire, The Fearless Vampire Killers, The Vampire Lovers, The Night Stalker, Countess Dracula, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, The Lair of the White Worm, Daybreakers, Hotel Transylvania 2, Love at First Bite, The Night Flier, Scars of Dracula, John Carpenter's Vampires, Son of Dracula, Vamps, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Dracula (1979), Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Vampire Circus, Deafula, Innocent Blood, Hotel Transylvania, Yakuza Apocalypse, I Am Legend, Nadja, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Waxwork, Life-Force, Vampire's Kiss, The Ωmega Man, Blood for Dracula, Rabid, Fright Night (1985), Thirst (1979), Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula's Daughter, Fright Night (2011), Interview with the Vampire, Byzantium, Stake Land, The Last Man on Earth, The Brides of Dracula, Mr. Vampire, Afflicted, The Monster Squad, 30 Days of Night, From Dusk Till Dawn, The Addiction, Let Me In, The Lost Boys, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Cronos, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Blacula, Black Sabbath (1963), Blade (1998), The Hunger, Shadow of the Vampire, Thirst (2009), Nosferatu the Vampyre, Ganja & Hess, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, Only Lovers Left Alive, Near Dark, Martin, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, What We Do in the Shadows, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Blade II, Horror of Dracula, Vampyr, Black Sunday (1960), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Let the Right One In, and Nosferatu have pages.
• Blood and Roses, House of Dark Shadows, The Wisdom of Crocodiles, Midnight Son, Habit, I Vampiri, Bloodsucking Bastards, Jakob's Wife, Summer of Blood, Planet of Vampires, Trouble Every Day, and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary do not have pages.
• Da Sweet Blood of Jesus does not have a page of its own but is included in Ganja & Hess as a remake of it
• The 'Salem's Lot adaptations are all in one page.
• Day Watch and Night Watch are included in Night Watch (Series).
• Both the Spanish and English versions of Dracula (1931) are on that page.

In all, only 12 movies are completely absent.

Impressive.

I disliked Knock at the Cabin, but I'm a Paul Tremblay fan and the movie arguably has as good a reason as any for not crediting him in the ads, so I guess I should have taken that as being forewarned. Tremblay and Shyamalan seem to have mutually incompatible views on where a story like this should end up, but if you vibe more with the latter than the former, I can picture you feeling the opposite. Very well-made, I just found the plot turns it takes borderline-offensive, and not just because it's a piss-poor adaptation of The Cabin at the End of the World.

I’m tempted to see it just because I’m intrigued by the fact that it brought Rupert Grint out of hibernation tbh.

He was also in Shyamalan's Apple TV show, wasn't he?

His accent is pretty rough.

I feel like I should clarify that for the first half, Knock at the Cabin is a remarkably faithful adaptation of The Cabin at the End of the World. It's what Shyamalan does with the last twenty minutes that pushes it into feeling genuinely distasteful and dumb, compared to Tremblay's sympathetic and extremely dark portrayal of righteous anger at how the world treats the "othered".

I feel like I would need a chart or a guide or something to keep track of all the movies that have "Amityville" in the title.