This looks nice - I think ‘small enough to be pocketable’ is an important form factor. Reading preferences are a very personal thing, and for people like me - who feel they internalize more effectively when reading from a physical book better than when reading from a screen - this form factor makes owning one more worthwhile.
I have always wondered why the form factor that has been settled on for e-readers was ‘book-like’, other than the obvious screen-size advantages. I wonder if there is a better form-factor out there and if anyone has any ideas. Electronic devices don’t need to resemble the thing they are replacing, and it’s sometimes better that they don’t.
I know a lot of people lust after the clamshell e-reader imagined in the film It Follows. [1]
The haptics of a physical book are, I think, what helps me better remember them, because memory is intrinsically linked non-digital sensory information like touch, and smell.
I’ve personally tried a few prototypes to try to bring unique sensory inputs to individual books read digitally to help me remember each one better: converting an AliExpress Game Boy into one to enable more haptic and visual differentiation; generative ambient & binaural music that is automatically created based on the text shown.
Each did help, to an extent, in preventing the way everything I read on an e-reader slightly blurs into indistinct memories of ‘reading generally’, rather than ‘reading this specific book’.
Maybe the e-reader has to be as personally customizable as a cyberdeck for those of us who kind of need the other sensory inputs. So it’s good that the firmware on this one seems to be open-source, but I haven’t yet read through it to understand the extent of that.
It really depends on the movies you're watching and how you watch them. I've watched "It Follows" like 4 times in the past year to show it to different people. I would watch The Shining every year at Halloween, and It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. On the other hand, sometimes you just want to throw on one of your comforting favorite movies in the background.
There's also a media preservation angle - you can imagine the monopoly media companies of the next decade not wanting to stream "My Own Private Idaho" or "Female Trouble".
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
It's a nice list. I've only seen a few of the movies on there. Offhand, that includes "Hotel Artemis", "Vision Quest", "Moon", "Automata", "It Follows", "Omega Doom", "Predestination", "Cube", and "Freejack". But quite a few more look very interesting and will be going on my personal "to watch" list. Thanks for sharing!
To some extent, those sorts of motifs are a dramatization and personification of death itself. A very real threat that's usually rather immaterial and conceptual, cast as something you can see and touch. And that can chase you down an alley.
Nothing got you today. But something might have! And something definitely will sooner or later. It's always lurking, it doesn't rest, it's relentless in its mission, and it can strike at any time. If it hasn't taken someone you love, just wait, it will—in fact, it'll take everyone you love, eventually, if you stick around long enough.
You see similar use of the unstoppable-killer with marked victims (achieved via copycats and other trickery in Scream, but it's the same idea) for the purpose of representing other fears, traumas, or threats that have a degree of universality and don't tend to entirely go away, as in It Follows. You see this whole thing made perhaps a bit too on-the-nose in works like Final Destination—which is why, I think, you can have endless unstoppable-knife-guy movies and they may retain some appeal, but a little bit of a "cute" very-literal twist on the formula like Final Destination goes a long way; the world only needs so much of that, much as a joke that subverts a particular standard joke-form only works once or twice before it stops being amusing.
The fun thing about the Scream series, when the movies remember it, is that the killer's emulating this fictional trope of an unstoppable and possibly-supernatural-but-not-omnipotent killer on purpose, in "real life", which is good fodder for creative narrative, twists, and well-earned winks at the camera. The movies are meta not because they've arbitrarily chosen to be (though they do choose to lean into it, of course) but because they aren't about these kinds of fictional unstoppable-personification-of-death killers directly, but about "real people" doing the unstoppable-personification-of-death thing in "real life", in imitation of film (even in the first one, before the idea of copycats hunting the survivors entered the picture, there's a particular thing done in order to imitate not just a human knife-wielding killer, but specifically this kind of wholly fictional, unkillable death-dealer).
Actually, as with Final Destination, this is another thing the world only needs so much of, for similar reasons—I'm not sure the market would support a much greater rate of release for this kind of film than we already see. It's not as immediately-played-out, though, less of a one trick pony.
Oh no, I was afraid someone would take me up on that! Hahaha.
No particular order. Since 2010ish. Not an exhaustive list of all good horror in that time frame.
- You're Next. It's a trad home-invasion/slasher kinda thing but... then changes genre. I'll leave it at that.
- Cabin in the Woods. Needs no introduction? Solid humor-horror.
- Evil Dead. The soft reboot. Pretty good for the kind of thing it is, which is an Evil Dead-type movie, of course.
- The Babadook. Great horror for people who like to be scared but don't want gore. Extremely efficient use of a tiny cast and very few locations.
- It Follows. A core concept that's creepy as hell, and some damn fine imagery that will stick with you. Lots of moody, slow-paced (but good!) scenes but... it does follow. Unsubtly very much about the harmful aspects of sex and sexual behavior.
- The Witch (or, The VVitch, as it's styled). If you like frontier-type stuff, with period-accurate dialog, plus horror, this will very likely be up your alley. Nb that here "frontier" means "New England, probably just a few miles in from the coast", not, like, the "Old West".
- Bone Tomahawk. Action-horror that is set in the Old West. Not exactly a piece of fine film-making but it pretty much does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it well, which makes it a success in my book.
- The Void. Carpenteresque creature work and Lovecraftian baddies. Excellent example of a throwback horror movie that aims to feel like it was made in another decade.
- The Girl with all the Gifts. Some people liked this a lot more than I did, so I'm including it. I thought it was just OK. Basically a zombie movie, kinda.
- Krampus. I'm not usually into Christmas-horror, which tends to be sub-b-grade garbage and otherwise just isn't to my taste, but watched this because I kept seeing it recommended, and... wow, it's actually good. Careful that you get the right film, there are a bunch with similar titles and I'd guess most of them are terrible. This is the 2015 one directed by Dougherty.
- Get Out. I'd call it just OK (I don't... think I was supposed to find as much if it laugh-out-loud funny in the final act, as I did?) but accept that I'm probably wrong about that, given the overwhelmingly-positive reaction.
- Train to Busan. Maybe my favorite zombie-hoards type of movie I've seen.
- Sorry to Bother You. If you like genre-bending and lots of absurdism in your horror, this one's for you.
- Happy Death Day. Slasher x Ground Hog Day, with that concept explored for just about all it's worth. Relatively light-hearted (it'd almost have to be) but not without tension. Sequel's less good—not awful, but a big step down. Same director made a similar film, "Freaky", that's another mash-up concept, and is quite good.
- It Comes at Night. Uh... if you really like movies that make you kinda wish you'd never watched them, not because of, say, realistic gore, but because they sorta make your soul hurt, this is a very good movie of that kind. But maybe don't, though?
- One Cut of the Dead. Brilliant concept, fun throughout. Not in any sense a traditional zombie movie, and I would 100% recommend it to people who usually don't like zombie movies. Don't spoil it, go in as cold as possible. It's one that is much better if you know almost nothing about it before you start.
- Game Night. Horror-adjacent, at least. Not amazing but another one that I watched after being repeatedly assured by many people that it was much better than it looked like it would be (it looked pretty bad), and it was.
- Hereditary. I hated this one but it's another where my opinion is way, way in the minority. Lots of people love it.
- Colour out of Space. If you can tolerate, or actually enjoy, Nic Cage, and like Lovecraftian horror, this is worth a watch. Good FX work.
- The Last Matinee. By-the-numbers slasher set in a Uruguayan movie theater, in the 90s. Great kills, the right kind of gross, good set-up/pay-off, good at making you care enough about almost everyone that you're sad when they get got. Requires tolerance for subtitles.
- Caveat. Tight little small-cast film (I think it was a during-the-pandemic production, maybe?). Very stupid-sounding premise that ends up making enough sense in the film itself, and a lot more by the time it's over.
- Vicious Fun. I probably like this one more than it deserves, but I do like it. Horror-comedy, heavy on very winking-at-the-camera references to other horror films and the genre itself. It gets a little bit of the bad kind of indie-feeling in some of the shot choices and acting, but the way it keeps delivering even when you think it's winding down or running out of tricks is outstanding. Did not go the direction I thought it would, judging just from a short description of the plot.
- My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To. Probably the art-housest film on this list, so keep that in mind before deciding to watch it—you're not in for a standard horror experience, though there is tons of tension and definitely some murderin'. Very good, though. Strongly recommend avoiding spoilers as discovering what the movie's about is a big part of the experience.
- The Haunting of Hill House. OK, so it's a self-contained season 1 of an anthology series, not a movie, but it's (like The Babadook) a really good watch for people who like horror but not a bunch of gore or a sky-high body count. Creators seem to both know what themes are and how to use them for horror, which wouldn't be impressive in an ideal world, but is in this one.
"It Follows – One of the best horror films of the decade"
I liked that as well. Also liked both the original and remake of "Let Me In". Also, if you're a horror fan, hopefully you've seen Rosemary's Baby. Watched that again last night.
The red block reminds me of the monster in the film "It Follows". It very slowly but relentlessly heads straight for you wherever you are. Surprisingly unnerving.
The thing I find crazy is that in 2017 $20M movies with B-list names are getting picked up as "independent". Ridley Scott's name shows up on IFC movies now; It Follows had an excellent ROI compared to most "blockbuster"; Get Out was a sold-out hit with audiences and critics... but it's all just a blip compared to the latest Transformers or DC or Marvel franchise shit-show.
A few millenia from now archaelogists and historians will be pontificating about Hollywood the way we do about the Pyramids.
>A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/
Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices.
I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive".
I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.
The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet.
There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.
Reminds me of "It Follows". David Robert Mitchell made some pretty interesting prop choices specifically to avoid dating the movie. From his AV Club interview:
> There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.
I've been meaning to watch this show, but haven't yet gotten around to it. But, having just watched the title song video, I absolutely agree with the music aspect. I just recently saw the movie It Follows an 80's-influenced horror/suspense movie from 2014, and it has a lot of the same aspects as what I saw in the trailer, especially with the music. I'd recommend it to anyone based on the music alone, but as far as horror movies go (I'm usually not a fan) it was brilliant.
Beauty comes in very different forms. Not all beautiful paintings are pleasing and peaceful fields for flowers; IMHO, something can be dark, strange, even scary, and still beautiful. E.g.: The Garden of Earthly Delights[1], or It Follows[2].
It Follows, along with a handful of others (The Strangers, the Ring, the first Paranormal Activity), was the first well done horror movie I've seen since the BWP. I guess it comes down to what scares you personally. For me, it is much more about the atmosphere that the movie creates, that often borders on weird and uncomfortable, and human. Of course, the Shining is also a great example of this. The slow slip into insanity in a grand, isolated hotel in a blizzard does way more to evoke that weird feeling that lingers after the movie ends.
It confuses that so many directors keep pushing the same style of horror movie out, when they consistently get poor reviews. Are all directors scared by the same exact themes?
BWP was a solid innovative film that inspired a whole sub-genre of horror films. It was great, but there have been really outstanding horror films since then.
I am thinking, in particular, of "It Follows". THAT was a revelation of what can be possible in horror.
Hacker Cinema
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This looks nice - I think ‘small enough to be pocketable’ is an important form factor. Reading preferences are a very personal thing, and for people like me - who feel they internalize more effectively when reading from a physical book better than when reading from a screen - this form factor makes owning one more worthwhile.
I have always wondered why the form factor that has been settled on for e-readers was ‘book-like’, other than the obvious screen-size advantages. I wonder if there is a better form-factor out there and if anyone has any ideas. Electronic devices don’t need to resemble the thing they are replacing, and it’s sometimes better that they don’t.
I know a lot of people lust after the clamshell e-reader imagined in the film It Follows. [1]
The haptics of a physical book are, I think, what helps me better remember them, because memory is intrinsically linked non-digital sensory information like touch, and smell.
I’ve personally tried a few prototypes to try to bring unique sensory inputs to individual books read digitally to help me remember each one better: converting an AliExpress Game Boy into one to enable more haptic and visual differentiation; generative ambient & binaural music that is automatically created based on the text shown.
Each did help, to an extent, in preventing the way everything I read on an e-reader slightly blurs into indistinct memories of ‘reading generally’, rather than ‘reading this specific book’.
Maybe the e-reader has to be as personally customizable as a cyberdeck for those of us who kind of need the other sensory inputs. So it’s good that the firmware on this one seems to be open-source, but I haven’t yet read through it to understand the extent of that.
[1] https://collider.com/it-follows-clam-phone/
It really depends on the movies you're watching and how you watch them. I've watched "It Follows" like 4 times in the past year to show it to different people. I would watch The Shining every year at Halloween, and It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. On the other hand, sometimes you just want to throw on one of your comforting favorite movies in the background.
There's also a media preservation angle - you can imagine the monopoly media companies of the next decade not wanting to stream "My Own Private Idaho" or "Female Trouble".
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
It's a nice list. I've only seen a few of the movies on there. Offhand, that includes "Hotel Artemis", "Vision Quest", "Moon", "Automata", "It Follows", "Omega Doom", "Predestination", "Cube", and "Freejack". But quite a few more look very interesting and will be going on my personal "to watch" list. Thanks for sharing!
To some extent, those sorts of motifs are a dramatization and personification of death itself. A very real threat that's usually rather immaterial and conceptual, cast as something you can see and touch. And that can chase you down an alley.
Nothing got you today. But something might have! And something definitely will sooner or later. It's always lurking, it doesn't rest, it's relentless in its mission, and it can strike at any time. If it hasn't taken someone you love, just wait, it will—in fact, it'll take everyone you love, eventually, if you stick around long enough.
You see similar use of the unstoppable-killer with marked victims (achieved via copycats and other trickery in Scream, but it's the same idea) for the purpose of representing other fears, traumas, or threats that have a degree of universality and don't tend to entirely go away, as in It Follows. You see this whole thing made perhaps a bit too on-the-nose in works like Final Destination—which is why, I think, you can have endless unstoppable-knife-guy movies and they may retain some appeal, but a little bit of a "cute" very-literal twist on the formula like Final Destination goes a long way; the world only needs so much of that, much as a joke that subverts a particular standard joke-form only works once or twice before it stops being amusing.
The fun thing about the Scream series, when the movies remember it, is that the killer's emulating this fictional trope of an unstoppable and possibly-supernatural-but-not-omnipotent killer on purpose, in "real life", which is good fodder for creative narrative, twists, and well-earned winks at the camera. The movies are meta not because they've arbitrarily chosen to be (though they do choose to lean into it, of course) but because they aren't about these kinds of fictional unstoppable-personification-of-death killers directly, but about "real people" doing the unstoppable-personification-of-death thing in "real life", in imitation of film (even in the first one, before the idea of copycats hunting the survivors entered the picture, there's a particular thing done in order to imitate not just a human knife-wielding killer, but specifically this kind of wholly fictional, unkillable death-dealer).
Actually, as with Final Destination, this is another thing the world only needs so much of, for similar reasons—I'm not sure the market would support a much greater rate of release for this kind of film than we already see. It's not as immediately-played-out, though, less of a one trick pony.
Oh no, I was afraid someone would take me up on that! Hahaha.
No particular order. Since 2010ish. Not an exhaustive list of all good horror in that time frame.
- You're Next. It's a trad home-invasion/slasher kinda thing but... then changes genre. I'll leave it at that.
- Cabin in the Woods. Needs no introduction? Solid humor-horror.
- Evil Dead. The soft reboot. Pretty good for the kind of thing it is, which is an Evil Dead-type movie, of course.
- The Babadook. Great horror for people who like to be scared but don't want gore. Extremely efficient use of a tiny cast and very few locations.
- It Follows. A core concept that's creepy as hell, and some damn fine imagery that will stick with you. Lots of moody, slow-paced (but good!) scenes but... it does follow. Unsubtly very much about the harmful aspects of sex and sexual behavior.
- The Witch (or, The VVitch, as it's styled). If you like frontier-type stuff, with period-accurate dialog, plus horror, this will very likely be up your alley. Nb that here "frontier" means "New England, probably just a few miles in from the coast", not, like, the "Old West".
- Bone Tomahawk. Action-horror that is set in the Old West. Not exactly a piece of fine film-making but it pretty much does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it well, which makes it a success in my book.
- The Void. Carpenteresque creature work and Lovecraftian baddies. Excellent example of a throwback horror movie that aims to feel like it was made in another decade.
- The Girl with all the Gifts. Some people liked this a lot more than I did, so I'm including it. I thought it was just OK. Basically a zombie movie, kinda.
- Krampus. I'm not usually into Christmas-horror, which tends to be sub-b-grade garbage and otherwise just isn't to my taste, but watched this because I kept seeing it recommended, and... wow, it's actually good. Careful that you get the right film, there are a bunch with similar titles and I'd guess most of them are terrible. This is the 2015 one directed by Dougherty.
- Get Out. I'd call it just OK (I don't... think I was supposed to find as much if it laugh-out-loud funny in the final act, as I did?) but accept that I'm probably wrong about that, given the overwhelmingly-positive reaction.
- Train to Busan. Maybe my favorite zombie-hoards type of movie I've seen.
- Sorry to Bother You. If you like genre-bending and lots of absurdism in your horror, this one's for you.
- Happy Death Day. Slasher x Ground Hog Day, with that concept explored for just about all it's worth. Relatively light-hearted (it'd almost have to be) but not without tension. Sequel's less good—not awful, but a big step down. Same director made a similar film, "Freaky", that's another mash-up concept, and is quite good.
- It Comes at Night. Uh... if you really like movies that make you kinda wish you'd never watched them, not because of, say, realistic gore, but because they sorta make your soul hurt, this is a very good movie of that kind. But maybe don't, though?
- One Cut of the Dead. Brilliant concept, fun throughout. Not in any sense a traditional zombie movie, and I would 100% recommend it to people who usually don't like zombie movies. Don't spoil it, go in as cold as possible. It's one that is much better if you know almost nothing about it before you start.
- Game Night. Horror-adjacent, at least. Not amazing but another one that I watched after being repeatedly assured by many people that it was much better than it looked like it would be (it looked pretty bad), and it was.
- Hereditary. I hated this one but it's another where my opinion is way, way in the minority. Lots of people love it.
- Colour out of Space. If you can tolerate, or actually enjoy, Nic Cage, and like Lovecraftian horror, this is worth a watch. Good FX work.
- The Last Matinee. By-the-numbers slasher set in a Uruguayan movie theater, in the 90s. Great kills, the right kind of gross, good set-up/pay-off, good at making you care enough about almost everyone that you're sad when they get got. Requires tolerance for subtitles.
- Caveat. Tight little small-cast film (I think it was a during-the-pandemic production, maybe?). Very stupid-sounding premise that ends up making enough sense in the film itself, and a lot more by the time it's over.
- Vicious Fun. I probably like this one more than it deserves, but I do like it. Horror-comedy, heavy on very winking-at-the-camera references to other horror films and the genre itself. It gets a little bit of the bad kind of indie-feeling in some of the shot choices and acting, but the way it keeps delivering even when you think it's winding down or running out of tricks is outstanding. Did not go the direction I thought it would, judging just from a short description of the plot.
- My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To. Probably the art-housest film on this list, so keep that in mind before deciding to watch it—you're not in for a standard horror experience, though there is tons of tension and definitely some murderin'. Very good, though. Strongly recommend avoiding spoilers as discovering what the movie's about is a big part of the experience.
- The Haunting of Hill House. OK, so it's a self-contained season 1 of an anthology series, not a movie, but it's (like The Babadook) a really good watch for people who like horror but not a bunch of gore or a sky-high body count. Creators seem to both know what themes are and how to use them for horror, which wouldn't be impressive in an ideal world, but is in this one.
This would make a fantastic horror movie. I could see it being in the same vein as "It Follows", except in this case you can't talk about the monster.
"It Follows – One of the best horror films of the decade"
I liked that as well. Also liked both the original and remake of "Let Me In". Also, if you're a horror fan, hopefully you've seen Rosemary's Baby. Watched that again last night.
The red block reminds me of the monster in the film "It Follows". It very slowly but relentlessly heads straight for you wherever you are. Surprisingly unnerving.
The thing I find crazy is that in 2017 $20M movies with B-list names are getting picked up as "independent". Ridley Scott's name shows up on IFC movies now; It Follows had an excellent ROI compared to most "blockbuster"; Get Out was a sold-out hit with audiences and critics... but it's all just a blip compared to the latest Transformers or DC or Marvel franchise shit-show.
A few millenia from now archaelogists and historians will be pontificating about Hollywood the way we do about the Pyramids.
>A movie designed to do well on a RT score needs to please everyone. The end result is something that tries to be bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive.
This is demonstrably untrue. Here is a link (along the left column) of the top RT movies for each year from 2014-2016:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/
Sure there are some blockbusters, but there are also many excellent, interesting, engaging, even daring films like Moonlight, Hell or Highwater, Manchester by the Sea, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, It Follows, Boyhood, Nightcrawler, and Birdman. And those are just among the top 10 scores for each year; if you expanded to movies in the 90% range of each year you'd have a large number of excellent choices.
I couldn't find a list of the top-rated RT movies for 2017, but (I think) currently the highest-rated among them is Get Out, a film specifically made to be the precise opposite of "bland, uninteresting, and inoffensive".
I submit that you simply choose to watch bad movies.
The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet.
There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.
Reminds me of "It Follows". David Robert Mitchell made some pretty interesting prop choices specifically to avoid dating the movie. From his AV Club interview:
> There are production design elements from the ’50s on up to modern day. [...] if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream—to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.
I've been meaning to watch this show, but haven't yet gotten around to it. But, having just watched the title song video, I absolutely agree with the music aspect. I just recently saw the movie It Follows an 80's-influenced horror/suspense movie from 2014, and it has a lot of the same aspects as what I saw in the trailer, especially with the music. I'd recommend it to anyone based on the music alone, but as far as horror movies go (I'm usually not a fan) it was brilliant.
Beauty comes in very different forms. Not all beautiful paintings are pleasing and peaceful fields for flowers; IMHO, something can be dark, strange, even scary, and still beautiful. E.g.: The Garden of Earthly Delights[1], or It Follows[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235888/
It Follows, along with a handful of others (The Strangers, the Ring, the first Paranormal Activity), was the first well done horror movie I've seen since the BWP. I guess it comes down to what scares you personally. For me, it is much more about the atmosphere that the movie creates, that often borders on weird and uncomfortable, and human. Of course, the Shining is also a great example of this. The slow slip into insanity in a grand, isolated hotel in a blizzard does way more to evoke that weird feeling that lingers after the movie ends.
It confuses that so many directors keep pushing the same style of horror movie out, when they consistently get poor reviews. Are all directors scared by the same exact themes?
NO!
BWP was a solid innovative film that inspired a whole sub-genre of horror films. It was great, but there have been really outstanding horror films since then.
I am thinking, in particular, of "It Follows". THAT was a revelation of what can be possible in horror.