It’s horror movie season in the US and my favorite type is zombies. I also love campy B movies. Watching Dead Snow 2 right now and I think it ranks up there with Shawn of the Dead and Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness.
What is your top pick for whatever genre?
Alright I can think of a few that strangely haven’t been mentioned yet!
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Barbarian - Woman checks in to an AirBnB. But beneath it lies a horrible secret. This one’s pretty disturbing in subject matter, actually. But it’s solidly eery.
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Tremors - It’s bright daylight! In a small desert town! What’s so spooky about that? Vibration-sensitive, man-eating sandworms maybe. This movie is just solidly fun all around. Legendary B-movie monster film.
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The Descent - Always thought caves were creepy? Want to experience claustrophobia from the safety of your own home? Wanna see how an all-woman horror film cast is done correctly? This one’s a treat.
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Dog Soldiers - The Scottish Highlands are gorgeous for a hike. Less appealing though if you’re a squad of British soldiers doing a training exercise in a monster movie. Features reasonably smart cast of soldiers doing their best, but cleverly using the training scenario premise to take away their live ammo so they can’t just shoot away their problems. Also, I remember it being very “B movie” in a good way. A well-placed cheesy joke or two had me laughing out loud without it being Marvel-grade snark, but it was still tense and exciting.
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Pandorum - Guy wakes up from hypersleep on a giant ship where things have gone horribly wrong. His only other awake crewmate is uh…a bit off, maybe? This one feels VERY Deadspace. If you like “Creepy massive cathedral-like dungeon ships” flavored sci-fi horror, this one’s pretty good. I’d say maybe much tamer than Event Horizon, but clearly took some inspiration there.
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30 Days of Night - You know how in Alaska they get really long periods where the sun is just gone? You know how certain classic horror antagonists hate sunlight? Uh oh.
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Overlord - A World War 2 horror film. I mean, WWII was full of horror but…like… unbelievable horror. No, like, pulpy mad scientist supervillains and secret experiments horror–No, like stuff that DIDN’T actually happen. It’s the closest to a Wolfenstein movie as we’re gonna get. (And very “Weird Wars 2” if you’ve played a good Savage Worlds TTRPG or two)
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Resident Evil - I liked maybe two or three sequels too, before it got utterly ridiculous to farm cash, but the original is always cited as a horror classic, even among people who aren’t fans of the games. (Almost entirely unrelated characters and plot.)
Wish I could upvote this more.
Barbarian was written by Zach Cregger of Whitest Kids You Know fame, it’s a solid movie with unsettlingly comedic chops.
As for Pandorum, I am obsessed with that movie. Here’s a FanTheory I wrote a few years ago that delves into much of intrigue hinted at in that incredible movie:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/gmlo53/pandorum_earth_took_serious_countermeasures/
Barbarian was wild. I had no idea what I was in for, my cousin just said “Check this one out” last Halloween. That movie had so many good moments. The sheer tonal whiplash once the tapemeasure gets broken out. 😂 And we were all in the living room screaming “That would TOTALLY HAPPEN TOO!”
I love when scary movies know how to manage and pace their tone. They can be scary without drowning the viewer in so much grimdark it becomes a comedy accidentally.
That’s so crazy cool that of all those movies I listed, I meet a Pandorum fan! It’s been ages since I’ve seen it, but it left an impression. I really liked your FanTheories writeup! But also I should really give it another watch with my matured brain and see what I missed the last couple times. I almost kinda like how…the plot is REALLY grim, but only when you really connect all the breadcrumbs.
The movie itself I remember being rather straightforward and exciting, (even with that Act 2 expo-dump), where the plot doesn’t completely screw you up and abandon all hope unless you really start analyzing it lol.
That’s why I liken it to Deadspace…That’s a grim and awful world to inhabit…but wow is it still such a WILD ride that I’m willing to do it again.
With Barbarian it was just seeing the WKUKisms that I’ve grown accustomed to take life in a whole new genre - it was disconcertingly familiar and horrifically new at the same time!
Deadspace is a great description of Pandorum, but I’d argue that Pandorum has a far better story filled more with what people do when burdened by unwanted knowledge, rather than what people do when they are no longer themselves
Haha so I’m only familiar with WKUK by title, so I’ll have to check it out. :p
what people do when burdened by unwanted knowledge,
I like this point a lot. A friend of mine once told me something like: horror as a genre is easily defined as “What happens to those who look?”
I loved that quote.
Forbidden knowledge is so scary. It’s like reading spoilers. Just a glance, and it’s in your mind. It’s a part of you. How do you cope? You can’t just drop it like some cursed object or outrun it like some monster.
We want to know lots of things, I know I always love to learn…but the scariest things are those you don’t want to know… But how can you know what these are? You don’t know what you don’t know yet…
Pardon my ramble. Midnight contemplative brain kicked in. 😂
… Yeah I need to watch Pandorum again haha. Introduce some new people to it. :D
Me too hehe
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Rec (2007) . A slow night where a novice news reporter shows a day in the life of the local firestation turns into so much more.
I think there’s something about the intersection between found footage and a foreign (to me) film that makes it so much more believable and enjoyable. This is miles beyond the US remake, quarantine. No big name actors here to ruin the found footage vibe. Just a small town news reporter meandering through a slow night at a local fire station.
I vividly remember the night we turned out the lights to try this one out. That was one of the very few horror movies that had me so freaked out and unsettled but also gripped me so much I couldn’t wait to see what happened.
What a wild ride.
It wasn’t contrived or anything, everyone felt real.
I just watched it based on the recommendations here, and it’s not bad. It does suffer from the same trope as a lot of horror movies, which is this, by the time it ended i wanted the main character to die because they were getting on my nerves.
Noroi - The Curse (2005, Japan) Supernatural first-person video documentary style POV, but with higher image quality than Blair Witch Project for example. No jump scares, just very creepy and unsettling. Slow burn, but good pacing IMHO. No weaknesses IMHO, hence on top of my list. Just a very unsettling and disturbing, almost real-feeling, horror movie.
Also good:
- A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, South Korea): less horror, more artistic, intelligent and original. Great story
- Shutter (2004, Thailand): my favorite jump-scare horror with cool effects
- Incantation (2022, Taiwan): great supernatural slow-burn horror with a cool twist
- Hereditary (2018, USA): great supernatural slow-burn horror, original as well
- Sinister (2012, USA/UK/CAN): great supernatural horror
- Event Horizon (1997, USA/UK/CAN): great sci-fi horror, very unsettling
- REC (2007, Spain): one of the best zombie style movies and also one of the most horror-like ones
- It Follows (2014, USA): kind of a stupid plot but it works. It’s original, well executed and unsettling (supernatural)
- Smile (2022, USA): an even more stupid plot, but also well executed. The ending is bad. But it still terrified me so it works at its core, and that’s all that horror films need to do (supernatural)
- As Above, So Below (2014, USA/France): the weakest one on this list but it’s very original as well, I like it because of that
Let The Right One In
I remember enjoying this. I need to re watch it because I can’t remember most of the highlights.
You like em tongue-in-cheek? You might try Chopping Mall (1986). Shopping mall management invests in a killer robot security system. A group of horny teens decides to spend the night there, but a lightning storm takes out the main killer robot controller! It’s funny, a little gory, has topless men and women, and it’s hilarious. A spook night favorite of mine.
Small shout out to !horrormovies@lemm.ee
The Devils Rejects.
House of 1000 Corpses and 3 From Hell are alright, but Devils Rejects is my favorite. I can’t hear Midnight Rider or Freebird without thinking about this movie.
I wish 3 From Hell was better, but it was nice to have more. The Devil’s Rejects and House of 1000 Corpses I ABSOLUTELY LOVED.
RIP Sid Heig
I actually liked devil’s rejects more than House of 1000 corpses. Rob zombie has a tendency to dip his toes into the torture porn type of horror genre from time to time and I think house of 1000 corpses had too much of that going on with it for my own taste.
Midsommer is my favorite. A slow, realistic slide into horror.
Army of Darkness.
Bob Roberts, a true tale of political horror.
Another horror favorite: Don’t Look Now (1973), directed by Nicolas Roeg, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Set in Venice, it concerns a couple recovering from the accidental death of their very young daughter. Roeg uses the color red as a signature throughout the film: things are not always what they seem.
One of my favorites, one I feel is hugely underrated, Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 Wolfen, which is not about werewolves, but ecological displacement, loss of habitat from urban development (among other issues), and not terrorism — a conclusion initially drawn by the police — but territory. With Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Gregory Hines, Edward James Olmos, and Tom Noonan. Its release in theaters was eclipsed by “The Howling” and “An American Werewolf in London”, but Wolfen is not merely a horror movie, but an intelligent one, ahead of its time IMHO. The confrontation atop the Manhattan Bridge between Finney and Olmos (see below, not a spoiler), which still makes my knees weak, involves no stunt doubles. The film also has beautiful dog sequences, imaginative cimenatography, and yes, some gore.
Little Shop of Horrors, original and remake. But I always assign social commentary, regardless if the writer meant any or not.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) and The Cabin in the Woods (2012) (go in spoiler-free with this one) are both good comedy horror.
I was not prepared for how good Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is!
“Well uh, howdy do, Officer! We’ve had a doozy of a day!”
Alien is my favorite horror movie by far. I really dig Hellraiser too. I watched Pontypool recently and was surprised how good it was. And The Shining is fab.
The sound design for Pontypool is particularly excellent
*Doug Bradley Hellraiser movies.
I’ve watched Alien as much as any movie excepting Aliens, so I kinda lost appreciation. My wife had never seen it so we watched and I payed close attention for the first time in years. Absolute master class in the genre.
Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess was also a NUTS book. Definitely check it out. The scope is much wider than the flick and as a result it’s a lot more uneven. I still really dig it.
I tried really hard to do this book but it beat me. It’s a dnf on my list this year. The radio play is pretty good too.
Did not know there was a radio play. Ta!
Pontypool pairs well with 30 days of night (and Tusk pairs well with The Substance).
We watched Pontypool when we read Snow Crash. There’s a scene where Snow Crash is placed really obviously if your looking fot it and the themes mesh really nicely.
Forgot about hellraiser! Thanks!