On 31st October 2016, Ed and Lorraine sat with a creepy doll in the Amityville to compile the most diabolical horror movie list. During their investigation, the demonologists were spooked by the presence of some malevolent movies.
Out of thousands of horror movies that were released throughout the year, these are 20 movies that they couldn’t look away from.
Based on a true story.
20. Darling | Dir. Mickey Keating
Keating’s ultra-stylish psychodrama Darling pays homage to some of the most iconic horror movies, namely The Shining and especially Polanski’s Repulsion. This micro-budget indie horror is stunningly shot in monochrome, mostly shot in close-ups. It’s the story of Darling (Lauren Ashley Karter), who accepts the position of caretaker in one of the oldest mansions of Manhattan with a haunted history. It’s a slow-burning, performance-driven movie where silence becomes the scariest sound. Despite some shocking dreams and hallucinations, the film relies more on sound than visuals, not to mention Karter’s harrowing performance.
19. The Greasy Strangler | Dir. Jim Hosking
In his debut feature, Jim Hosking has created a disgusting misogynist world that revolves around dicks and disco. If you have a low tolerance for surreal diarrhea, keep your puke bag handy, but for those who like the stink of originality and prefer their films greasy, this nauseating piece of art is a hootie-tootie disco cutie.
In a nutshell, this indie horror is about a strange dick contest between a father and son who run a disco walking tour. Between petrified porridge body suits and prosthetic penises, there are moments of epiphany where the hideousness of human existence is laid bare. The Greasy Strangler is the most nonsensical and deranged horror comedy of the year.
18. The Conjuring 2 | James Wan
It’s rare to see horror film sequels build upon the predecessor’s plot points & craft a spine-chilling, tense, & interesting story around the same premise without losing themselves to cheap thrills & lame jump scares, & to prospect a story that doesn’t seem to be out of a dumpster. James Wan’s The Conjuring 2, although not completely washed out by being a horror sequel, somehow manages to walk away unharmed, thanks to brilliant writing & riveting performances.
While the film follows every single old-school horror film cliché, it does it with great conviction & has a whole lot of innovative ways to scare the child in you who just wants to sleep in your own bed, away from all the monsters that can sneak into your room, below your bed, or inside your head.
17. Hush | Dir. Mike Flanagan
The restricted premise of Hush doesn’t give into a lot of grander ideas that can be manipulated into a film. But two things work in its favor. Firstly, Maddie being deaf and mute gives it that incredible advantage of setting up all the things to give you an effective, bone-chilling horror-thriller. Secondly, it doesn’t bother the audience with most of the clichés that are found in home-invasion films. Jump scares are one of them.
The film mostly indulges in the back and forth between the two opponents. It plays like a cat and mouse game, where the cat chases down the mouse, showing the occasional concern or dis-concern about being trapped out of the house. Hush is probably the best home invasion film since Adam Wingard’s You’re Next. Mike Flanagan, who previously made another interesting, although not entirely satisfying film in Oculus, doesn’t leave any stones unturned this time around. He completely brings you into a solitary house in the midst of a hefty wood, before everything starts in full throttle.
16. Lights Out | Dir. David Sandberg
This world is full of possibilities; fear has its own, and it can be sniffed by the demon easily. Lights Out welcomes another itinerary for the supernatural activity. But, how long can it stay? Whatever starts also ends up the same way. During this period, Rebecca and her younger brother Martin try to dodge the intruder Diana and to save their mother Sophie’s unhealthy family relationship. Lights Out is a genuine shock conferrer.
Despite its low budget and short duration, chills and thrills are amazingly well-crafted. The climax makes for a little disappointment. Still, it is brilliant in many ways. The mystery boasts of delivering the message that possession can be dangerous, and blind faith can be even worse. Even though Lights Out is not as bright as you want it to be, its dark character build-up, solid performances, and stimulating sequences keep the film in the visible luminescence.
15. Alchemist Cookbook | Dir. Joel Potrykus
The director of Buzzard has cooked yet another maddening micro-budget movie in his own private trailer. Alchemist Cookbook is like a hipster cousin of The Witch, who is high on cat food with tuna fish. A self-made chemist lives in the trailer in woods and performs ancient rituals of alchemy to summon the demon that roams in the wilderness. As he runs out of pills and starts tripping, things begin to lurch towards crazy. It feels more like bizarre comedy than a proper horror film, a mishmash of different genres that’s more shocking than scary.
14. Nina Forever | Dir. Ben Blaine, Chris Blaine
The Blaine’s Nina Forever takes ‘Dying is easy, but living with death is way more complicated’, quite literally. It is a weirdly entertaining film that dissimulates its tones in the proactive bed sheet filled with blood, a totally distant and engaging look at love, loss & the feeling of latching on to someone. Under its darkly hilarious premise, Nina Forever subverts audience expectations with its singular vision of what a date movie should be like. It presents itself in a cloak of blood, upending expectations with how deep it can actually be.
13. Southbound | Dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Chad Villella, Roxanne Benjamin, Patrick Horvath, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez
A regretful hound that slashes the wrists of all the B-horror film clichés and smarts out all of them with occasional speed bumps. It’s fascinating to see how Southbound takes up everything from home invasion to shady town fascism, wraps them in a cloak of blood-soaked and partly terrifying tales of guilt with such finesse. The chapters in this anthology film unfold one after the other, as you hear them following the light in the darkness.
There are instances where the black humor intermixes magnificently with the gore that is to follow, and you just sit there enjoying this tale that doesn’t overindulge itself in explaining every single bit that comes out of its mouth. Southbound brings the incredible talent of intermixing 5 stories into one with an anti-climax that leaves you in the same state as most of the film’s characters. It’s the type of horror film that makes you wish that you never find or see the regrets running after you.
12. They Look Like People | Dir. Perry Blackshear
Unlike other alien invasion movies that flaunt destruction of earth, this low budget indie movie operates on paranoia caused by the fear of unknown. Wyatt is the kind of man who takes the ‘People are not what they seem’ quote quite literally. A recluse takes shelter in the basement of an old buddy to prepare for the biggest battle against ‘them’, the malevolent beings in the disguise of humans.
Wyatt listens to a motivational recording, takes orders from an unknown authority that constantly alarms him about the severity of the threat they impose. He is convinced that humanity is on the brink of war and that anyone can be the enemy, even his best friend. ‘They Look Like People’ is a tense, suspenseful psychological thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat, a twisted reminder of the horror of losing a friend.
11. Baskin | Dir. Can Evrenol
Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol has created the sickest slasher of the year with his debut film, Baskin. This hellish nightmare is not for the squeamish, but if you survive this orgy of blood and gore, the payoff is massive. It’s another rough night for the police squad. They are called for backup in an old abandoned house, where they come face to face with hell. With its dream-within-a-dream structure, Baskin feels like Inception directed by Sam Raimi. The film follows the logic of dreams, but despite its loose narrative, there is enough meat to chew. Baskin takes elements of conventional horror-slasher and subverts them into something truly horrifying.
10. The Childhood of a Leader | Dir. Brady Corbet
Like it or hate it, Brady Corbet’s directional debut is audacious and singular in its vision. The film is set in the era of the Great War. An American diplomat flies to France to sign the peace treaty. The film focuses on his son, who becomes increasingly violent and authoritative. The film has one of the most haunting and spine-chilling opening scores. It’s a strange little fable about the rise of ego that traces the journey of an important figure in his days of childhood. This terrifying quasi-horror is also a nod to the cult horror film The Omen.
9. Green Room | Dir. Jeremy Saulnier
After the crowd-funded, absolute stunner – Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier gets back to grass-roots B-thriller mode in Green Room. And even though there are major changes from his previous work, you still see what made Blue Ruin a great film. Instead of fussing around and making a slow-burning, Saulnier puts all his ingredients into the pan and burns them up, building a superior and convincing atmosphere around them. Green Room is bloody, energetic, and stunning B-town madness. One that takes up the Neo-Nazi vs Punk Rock slasher genre twists it around with enough black humor and grounded surprises, and chews through all possible single-room let-downs.
8. Train to Busan | Dir. Yeon Sang-ho
With his first live-action movie, Train to Busan, director Yeon Sang-ho has ventured into a wholly entertaining premise of rapidly spreading zombie infection inside a high-speed KTX train, while also clamorously shoving in socio-political messages. Yeon may not have achieved the mastery of Bong Joon-ho in mixing up the genres or in building really intricate characters, although he makes up for that through his flawless technical skills and in visualizing the taut set pieces. Thanks to the distinctive action tropes, Train to Busan remains a wildly entertaining ‘zombie’ film, despite possessing typecast characters and lacking good performances. It is part exhilarating and part exhausting.
7. Evolution | Dir. Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s hypnotic tale of body horror is set on a dystopian island where ghostly, skinny women conceive boys without the help of men. It’s a feverish fable of motherhood in which sick boys begin to doubt their own existence. Watching Evolution is a truly unsettling and infuriating experience. It’s an act of becoming one with the ocean, like an ink of innocence dissolving into a vast sea of angst. Evolution is the most beautiful nightmare, a perfect watch for curious minds who are willing to dive deeper to catch the red starfish.
6. Don’t Breathe | Dir. Fede Alvarez
What makes Don’t Breathe truly terrifying is how deeply it’s rooted in reality, unlike most of the horror movies that rely heavily on jump scares or ghostly figures. A group of teens breaks into the house of a rich blind man, thinking it’s an easy target. But the blind man is not as blind as they imagined. Don’t Breathe is one of the most intense and spine-chilling horror movies of the year. Stephen Lang’s badassery, brilliant camerawork, tight script, effective sound design, perfect pacing, it’s like a captive in the dark basement, screaming to be found by the audience. Don’t miss this fright fest.
5. The Similars | Dir. Isaac Ezban
There is a middle ground between Hitchcockian suspense and Rod Serling strangeness where familiar ominous sound swells in and transports us into an eerie zone of yesteryear. In the disguise of a trashy B horror movie of the 70s, The Similars is an earnest tribute to The Twilight Zone and one of the most original (and yet old-fashioned) horror movies of the year. The film is meticulously structured to play like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone with traditional Rod Serling-style narration. There are references to famous episodes like ‘Five Characters in Search of an Exit’ and ‘Monster Are Due on Maple Street’. Ezban is one of the most talented indie filmmakers working today who can examine terror with comical gaze.
4. The Neon Demon | Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn
The Neon Demon is another NWR film that feels hollow and soulless when you turn it inside-out or outside-in. A supposedly uber-stylized fairy tale drenched in blood, gore & the darkest side of the human soul. But when you look closely at its incredible metaphors and symbolisms, the use of Cliff Martinez’s pulsating score and Natasha Braier’s heart-pounding visuals, mixed with NWR’s vision of giving you an experience instead of a solid story, you realize its true mastery at work. While being a terrific critic on the world of fashion, The Neon Demon is basically a horror film about beauty. The harsh truth is investigated with splats of blood, hate, and insane frames of poetic injustice.
3. The Witch | Dir. Robert Eggers
The Witch has to be the most terrifying viewing experience I have had in a long, long time. Robert Eggers’s debut feature film is so freakishly unsettling, yet grounded, that I had to convince myself that it’s just some insane cinematic artistry at work. There are no half measures in Eggers’s film. It’s brutal and has such immensely haunting imagery that it can create a complete facial blur.
There are no answers that Eggers provides, and that just makes it all kinds of devastating. The Witch is that rare horror film that not only seduces you to its grimdark patches in the woods, but it traps you into its human trapping tendencies, where wronging the wrong and righting the right can no longer ensure your safety. It’s a film that can be what you magically want it to be.
2. Under the Shadow | Dir. Babak Anvari
Jump scares have never been this good and unpredictable. Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari perfectly syncs taut war tension between Iran & Iraq and the terrifying presence of ‘Djinn’ from folk tales. Babak breaks all the conventions of making a horror film and constructs a layered and satirical horror film that will scare even the coldest person who is not easily spooked. What makes it a great film is how ambiguous and un-clever it makes you feel. A mother’s dilemma is questioned in more ways than one. It takes you on an experience like never before. Under the Shadow is a clever, intriguing, and scary horror film for all ages.
1. The Wailing | Dir. Na Hong-jin
Forget about most of the inflated but substandard horror films you’ve been served for a long time; there is nothing quite like ‘The Wailing’. It is the most loved horror film series in recent times. ‘The Conjuring’ looks like a school project. ‘The Wailing’ is the best psychological thriller horror film since William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ (1973). The film is set in the small mountain town of Korea, where people are locked in the worst nightmarish conflict of mysterious happenings to the village dwellers, rational thinking, and supernatural forces.
At the center of the conflict is incompetent, sissy Police officer Jong-gu (Kwak Do-won) who is going through mid-life crisis, and having an extramarital affair, and somehow he gets entangled in strange random killing rampage. His investigation unleashes the greatest terror in the form of paranoia and the satanic cult. Disclosing any further plot would be a crime. ‘The Wailing’ is like a gigantic monster whose presence is unknown, but its terror-stricken, ominous presence of supernatural force is felt by the eerie silence around you, as if you are about to be gulped by the rain of horror.
