Think of Norman Bates’ mum’s house or the attic in The Exorcist. Bad vibes leak from the walls and floor, memories of horrors past still walk its halls, and it might be conspiring with terrible supernatural forces to attack the unsuspecting humans foolish enough to walk in there. This adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House might be the absolute peak of it. Rose Glass’s astonishing debut wanders deep into the recesses of a troubled young woman’s mind in a story which the director describes as Travis Bickle taking a trip to the seaside. The film follows Maud, a nurse who becomes obsessed with her ward Amanda, with the lines between reality and fantasy ever blurring before the ending delivers what Glass calls a “short, sharp shock”.
The tripartite narrative centres on Ana at three stages in her life (played by Cassandra Forêt, Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud and Marie Bos respectively). Everyone’s heard of Leatherface, but have you https://www.factory-publishing.com/ actually sat down and watched this horror about a group of friends who fall victim to a family of cannibals? There’s a reason it was banned in several countries after its 1974 release, y’know.
While the actors took a break from filming the new movie, some of the film crew took time to visit nearby Framlingham Castle. But Carlos and Elkind’s cues can be heard in the film’s bone-melting organ and synths theme music, and bringing the rocky mountains to life with nauseating slices and swoops of electronic sound. This thrill of anticipation could be nauseating, but it always kept me coming back for more.
Perhaps Britain was too squeamish about the parallels Powell drew between the voyeur Mark Lewis, who films the murders he commits, and the filmgoing public. A campaign on its behalf by Powell protégé Martin Scorsese helped to restore its reputation – along with Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, he said, Peeping Tom said everything that could be said about filmmaking. It’s got a lot to say about sex, life, death, and violence too.
His second entry in the top three, Sam Raimi is the master of jump scares. Kirsten Stewart shrugs off her Twilight role by taking on this role in a film that begins with a terrified mother packing to flee when an unseen https://www.wikipedia.org/ attacker kills the whole family. Ash Williams should have never opened the book of the dead – but we are so glad he did. And like many of the films on this list, there’s already a sequel out – and a third on the way!
Just when you thought this year’s Scream was enough meta horror for 2022, A24 would like to have its satirical say. From director Halina Reijn, Bodies Bodies Bodies looks like scary movie crack for Gen-Zers. It stars Pete Davidson, Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, and Rachel Sennott and A24 is calling the movie a ‘razor-sharp murder mystery’ as a group of twenty somethings decide to play a game at an isolated house party. As is the way of horror movies, the game goes off the rails when someone ends up very dead and the murderer must be found. The Rotten Tomatoes score from the SXSW screening earlier this year isn’t just fresh but frankly on the vine at 96%.
Here he recommends five acclaimed horror movies that add prestige to the genre. Alfred Hitchcock basically invented the slasher, the psychoanalytical horror-thriller, and the creepy mummy’s boy murderer with Psycho in 1960, but The Birds is the furthest he ventured into pure horror. It all starts quite innocently, in the classic Hitchcockian mode, until all of a sudden birds start launching themselves at people. It’s all incredibly tense, with its sparse electronic score the under-appreciated MVP. This slasher elevated the genre to high art via a mixture of black comedy, the unsettlingly childlike Leatherface, and a total commitment to its sense of spiralling surreality. In civil war-torn fourteenth century Japan, soldiers are pillaged and looted by an old woman and her daughter.
Fans of the original video game this is based on are also likely to be let down as I’ve heard the game is far superior in every way. Once the family arrive at the orphanage, they greet a few childhood friends of Hanif’s and their spouses. Considering this film was completed in something like 25 days, I’m honestly more impressed with the result than grossed out. But Abel, who was attacked there as a child, is terrified to move back in.
The film delves into the story of an abandoned orphanage by the seaside and an orphan named Laura, who returns to the home 30 years later with her husband and son, Simon. Intending to open the orphanage as a facility for disabled children, they soon realise that their son develops malicious behaviours days after their arrival. An unthinkable exorcism takes a dramatic turn and takes over the life of a young woman. Months after, Megan Reed (played by Pretty Little Liars’ Shay Mitchell) is working a graveyard shift in a morgue and discovers a disfigured cadaver. While locked inside basement corridors, she sees disturbing visions and speculates that the body may be possessed by a merciless, satanic force. And it’s got a score worthy of all that scared-y stuff, provided by legend of horror scoring, John Carpenter.
They’ve got a sweet gig going, until a handsome stranger turns up and the daughter starts sneaking off to see him at night. What begins as a historical family drama takes a chilling swerve in its second half, and in its Hannya mask-wearing ghoul, Onibaba made a lasting impact beyond the East too. Every masked terror who came after, from Jason to Michael Myers, owes something to it. Aster’s script is steeped in dread and shows a family imploding in upon itself in one of the best displays of grief seen in modern horror.