(Updated in September 2021)
The sweeping horror resurgence of the 2000s remained strong at the start of the next decade. After ten years of retro monster movies, zombie comedies, torture pornos, found-footage thrillers, animated chillers, political petrifiers, and scary musicals, one might assume there was nowhere left for the genre to go. Darren Aronofsky, a filmmaker never afraid to take daring chances that might end with him flat on his face, was the right guy to uncover roads still waiting to be traveled.Black Swan is both a film about and a loose adaptation of Swan Lake. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a dancer chosen to star as the Swan Queen in a major production of Tchaikovsky’s ballet. Sayers’s path to success is jagged with obstacles. She must contend with the knowledge that her role came at the expense of former star Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), who lapses into alcoholism and ends up getting disabled in a car crash. Her colleague and new friend Lily (Mila Kunis) not-so-secretly covets the role and schemes to put Nina out of commission. Her director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), sexually harasses Nina while placing demands on her that challenge the influence of her domineering mother (Barbara Hershey). Nina also suffers internal obstacles. Her body begins displaying strange rashes and sores. Her mind is beset with paranoid visions of her own doppelgänger.
The surreal aspects of Black Swan function as an allegory for the fears and absurd physical demands dancers face in the competitive ballet world, but the film works best as a stylistically radical and really disturbing horror movie. And don’t be fooled by all the critical praise and Portman’s Oscar; this is a horror movie. Aronofsky certainly doesn’t present his material traditionally, but inside the belly of Black Swan lies decades of horror tradition. The presence of a nefarious doppelgänger bears the unsettling tang of David Lynch, and a sex scene in which Nina sees that she isn’t copulating with the person she thought she was could be an outtake from Fire Walk With Me. The fixation on grotesque physical transformation and deterioration is pure David Cronenberg, and it particularly recalls The Fly. When Nina stands before a mirror, tears off her own skin, then finds herself perfectly intact, one can’t be faulted for remembering a nearly identical scene in Poltergeist. Nina’s relationship with a mother who infantilizes her and demonizes her sexuality is straight out of Carrie. The apartment setting evokes Polanski’s horror films. Nina’s paranoid visions are strongly reminiscent of The Tenant. Her sexual repression brings to mind Carole Ledoux in Repulsion, and traveling further back, Cat People, which also tied repression to physical transformation into an animal. Sexual desire and beastly transformation are also close associates in The Wolf Man, and Aronofsky has even described Nina as a “were swan.” Then back to the very birth of sound horror when Dr. Jekyll, who allowed his dark side to emerge and consume himself all in the name of his work just as Nina does. Back to when a movement from Swan Lake served as the theme music for Dracula and The Mummy, forever linking that composition with monster movies in the minds of horror fanatics. Back further to the silent era when Phantom of the Opera placed horror in the lush interior of a theater. Elsewhere, Black Swan brings to mind the ballet-themed Suspiria, the house- bound mind games of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Shining, and every horror movie that ever exploited mirrors to get a cheap shock.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Aronofsky takes all of these well-traveled tropes and transforms them into a film that is wholly original, wholly personal, wholly a work of art. In doing so, he enters the realm reserved for cinema’s finest, most distinct artists, a place populated by Hitchcock and Kubrick and Lynch. Like those filmmakers, Aronofsky takes outrageous risks, and perhaps doesn’t always succeed, but Black Swan thrives on that audacity. It is reverent of horror traditions but disdainful of the rules, which leaves us viewers perpetually uneasy because we know its creator is capable of throwing anything at us at any time. Scary, humorous, wonderfully acted, imaginatively written and directed, thoughtfully metaphorical, respectful and irreverent, Black Swan packs the complete essence of what makes a horror movie truly essential.
176. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010- dir. Jalmari Helander)
Jusso (Jorma Tommila) is incensed to learn the reindeer he planned to harvest are already dead because someone cut a hole in the fence intended to keep wolves from the herd. Just a short while earlier, Jusso’s young son Pietari (Onni Tommila) had cut that hole to spy on a local excavation site. Very naughty. Pietari is worried, not because his family just lost their livelihood, but because Christmas is approaching, and we all know what happens to naughty boys on Christmas. Or do we? Pietari would probably heave a massive sigh of relief if he suffered the traditional lump of coal in his stocking. However, the real Santa Claus ain’t your merry, bowlful-of jelly-Santa. He’s a giant horned beast who tortures bad kids come December 25th. And guess what’s just been unearthed in a Godzilla-sized block of ice at that excavation site?Jalmari Helander delights in playing with horror and action-movie clichés in the aggressively originalRare Exports: A Christmas Tale. An ominous advent calendar ticks off the days to Christmas like the date cards in The Shining. Pietari thumbs through terrifying pictures of Demon Santa like Roy Scheider poring over shark attack photos in Jaws. A creepy, face-biting old man arrives naked as the Terminator. The frozen beast evokes the Thing.
That’s all fine and clever, but Helander does not merely use his retro references to please genre fans with recognizable images. He uses them to orient viewers as we navigate a world beyond anything we recognize; a world where Christmas elves are full-frontally naked old men with murder on their minds and a small child leads his elders into battle and resigns himself to suicidal self-sacrifice and the heroes end the picture as slavers and our main monster is used as a great, big shaggy dog. That last matter leaves Rare Exports with a slightly disappointing aftertaste, but it remains an innovative item essential for horror fans tired of the usual slicing and dicing and desperate for a seasonal alternative to Miracle on 34th Street.
177. Kill List (2011- dir. Ben Wheatley)
Ben Wheatley’s follow-up to his crime-drama-comedy Down Terrace is a deeply disturbing movie that goes places few other films with this level of artistry dare. Wheatley and wife Amy Jump’s script is a carefully constructed puzzle box. Jim Williams’s ominous score heightens the dread of every frame. Wheatley masterfully calibrates his horrors and is as cagey when deciding what to linger on as he is when deciding what to shield from view. And Kill List is often most upsetting when it hides its horrors. One scene begs viewers to imagine the vilest crimes against children they can while refusing to defuse our conclusions by clarifying the off-screen action.
The director’s shocks are not limited to the violent or thematic variety. Kill List is most audacious for the way it takes sharp turns into different genres, veering into traditional horror during its final act. There’s nothing traditional about how that climax connects to the preceding story, though everything makes sense on a re- watch. And as uneasy going as the film is, and as much as you may not want to revisit it, Kill List most definitely rewards multiple viewings.
Themes of sexuality and identity have always been integral to the films of Pedro Almodóvar. In La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In), he culls them from Thierry Jonquet’s novel Tarantula. The results are far more twisted than even the earlier dark comedies and dramas for which Almodóvar is known. The film takes both the transgressions of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Antonio Banderas’s unsettling intensity beyond the pale.
Banderas is Dr. Robert Ledgard, a scientist developing a form of indestructible artificial skin. The gorgeous Vera (Elena Anaya) is his seemingly willing, yet existentially despairing, guinea pig. Their relationship seems like a conscious echo of the father and daughter of Eyes without a Face. It is hardly so clear cut, much like the chronologically choppy first half of the film, which leaves the viewer bewildered but eager to see how the jigsaw pieces will fit together. When they do, we realize the horrific extent of Ledgard’s madness and the even more horrific cause of it.
The film’s scenes of physical violence are not as shocking as the psychological implications. Almodóvar forces us to empathize with both a mad scientist capable of particularly horrible vengeance and the vile, misogynist/rapist who wreaked havoc on his life and complicates matters further by presenting a completely unexpected—and seriously unhealthy—relationship between the two. Most viewers will find this material very difficult to digest, but Almodóvar’s fearlessness in tackling it is heroic, as are Banderas and Anaya’s performances. The director called The Skin I Live In “a horror story without screams or frights.” While that may be true, it will disturb viewers more profoundly than most typical horror fare ever could.
179. The Woman in Black (2012- dir. James Watkins)
Fans of Britain’s most venerated house of horrors couldn’t help but be thrilled by news of its return in the late 2000s. That excitement may have quickly turned to disenchantment, because like so many resurrected corpses, Hammer came back wrong. The new generation of producers didn’t seem to know what to do with the valuable property. Following a toe-in-the-water web series called Beyond the Rave, the first new Hammer feature to see release was a stalker picture set in hipster Brooklyn calledThe Resident. Aside from the winking presence of Christopher Lee, this emphatically American hackneyed piece of lint couldn’t have been more out of step with Hammer’s emphatically British Gothic horrors of old. The folk horror throwback Wake Wood was closer to the mark though slight. A remake of Let the Right One In was well made but pointless when the body of the superior original wasn’t even cold yet.
After five years of trial and error, Hammer finally returned with a picture that would have made the Carreras family proud. James Watkins’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s ghost story The Woman in Black is a return to the creep shows of old. While the lack of dime-store blood and heaving bosoms is decidedly un- Hammer-like, the period setting, Gothic desiccation, and Daniel Radcliffe’s fey performance ably fill all the baggage that comes with the studio’s name. Radcliffe is a solicitor charged with settling the paperwork of the unappetizingly christened Eel Marsh House. His arrival at the crumbling old manor sets off an extended sequence that recreates the sensation of walking through a really scary carnival spook house right down to the ghosts that slide out of the darkness as if on tracks. Watkins does not let a cheap trick pass him by—from faces that materialize out of the shadows to rocking chairs and doors that swing of their own volition to loud bangs to close ups of the creepiest antique doll collection in the world. We let him have his clichés because they all work so marvelously well.
That nerve-wracking passage alone would make the film essential. However, The Woman in Black is also bolstered by a strong central mystery that doesn’t cop out on its specter’s malevolence and what may be the most macabre happy ending in ghost story history. Welcome back, old friend!
180. The Cabin in the Woods (2012- dir. Drew Goddard)
Even those familiar with Joss Whedon’s penchant for yanking the carpet from beneath his viewers will be sent loopy by The Cabin in the Woods. In the quite brilliant script he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Drew Goddard, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other cult TV favorites establishes the usual slasher movie clichés only to draw attention to and subvert them.
I know, I know; Scream did that very same thing some fifteen years earlier. But it didn’t do it like The Cabin in the Woods does it. Scream was clever because it finally acknowledged the silly decisions and sillier archetypes common to slasher pictures. The Cabin in the Woods is genius because it explains why those clichés exist, and the explanation is a stroke of such unfettered imagination that it makes the appearances of massive force fields, a merman-fixated scientist, a murderous unicorn, and a universe-annihilating god fist completely logical.
Like the Evil Dead films, which it references often and lovingly (keep an eye out for that “angry molesting tree”!), The Cabin in the Woods works as both incisive parody and visceral horror. The one thing it lacks—and this is highly unusual for a Whedon creation—is empathy. The writer is usually a master of manipulating his viewers into caring about his daffy characters. The ones in this film are stereotypes by nature: the stoner, the slut (well, sort of), the jock (well, maybe), the virgin (ummm, not quite, but for all intents and purposes...). The thinness of these characters certainly serves a plot function, but it also makes the film feel a little hollow since we don’t get quite as broken up when they’re dispatched as when, say, Buffy died that one time, or when she died that other time, or when she died all those other times. What The Cabin in the Woods lacks in emotional depth, it more than makes up for in intellect, originality, and a menagerie of geek-pleasing references to 90 years of horror cinema.
181. Frankenweenie (2012- dir. Tim Burton)
182. Sightseers (2012- dir. Ben Wheatley)
While Wheatley’s Kill List is not without humor, it is hardly the broad sort Lowe and Oram had in mind. Without clipping the overt comedy from Sightseers, Wheatley encouraged more realism to balance the wacky antics of Tina and Chris as they travel the English countryside in a caravan, killing fellow tourists along the way. Chris kills according to a code of etiquette. Stifled by a controlling mother and boyfriend, as well as England’s long history of emotional reserve, Tina seems to kill to get in touch with her primal self, which disturbs hardened killer Chris.
Sightseers is very funny, largely because of Lowe’s comic expertise (see her at full absurdity in the uproarious horror-comedy TV series Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place), but Wheatley’s seriousness makes it haunting as well. His depiction of the English countryside is beautiful and foreboding, tourist-friendly and dangerous. Tina and Chris never have to get very creative with their kills when there are so many steep drops and craggy rocks at the ready. That naturalistic setting and Tina’s communion with Britain’s pagan past make Sightseers another of Wheatley’s stealth folk horror movies, but he’d explore that sub-genre most fully with his next picture...
183. A Field in England (2013- dir. Ben Wheatley)
A Field in England follows a few military defectors and a sorcerer’s apprentice named Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) as they roam the English countryside. The defectors are determined to take refuge in some Godot-esque pub. Whitehead has bigger game in mind. He is tasked with locating former colleague O’Neill (Michael Smiley), who has defected from the employ of their mutual master with several of the master's precious texts. After the gang pulls O’Neill from the ground like some soil-born Golem, Whitehead arrests him, but the more powerful O’Neill immediately turns the tables and takes Whitehead prisoner. In the film’s most disquieting scene, O’Neill uses some sort of torturous, off-screen process to transform Whitehead into a human diving rod for locating buried treasure.
Already off kilter, A Field in England then speeds headlong into Wacky Land. Characters are killed only to return without explanation. Whitehead has visions of a blacked-out sun that threatens to consume the countryside. A bravura editing feat justifies the pre-credits warning to people who suffer from seizures. Characters swap personalities and power positions (or, at the very least, costumes). Everyone feasts on psilocybin mushrooms. What this all means is way open to interpretation, but the overall effect is more direct. A Field in England is a demanding but unforgettable experience with expertly crafted atmosphere. Jim Williams’s spellbinding score might be one of cinema’s best.
184. Under the Skin (2014- dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Jonathan Glazer’s follow up to 2004’s Birth took nearly a decade to realize, perhaps because the project went through so many iterations. First conceived as a special-effects bonanza starring Brad Pitt, Glazer wisely whittled the script down to a spare mood piece. Non-actors often caught on hidden cameras play off of Johansson’s icy alien with disarming realism. Yet there is some striking movie magic evident in the cavernous black rooms in which victims are sucked into some sort of primordial pool (most likely an alien fridge) and the finale in which Johansson’s true form is revealed.
Under the Skin will be too cold and repetitious for a lot of viewers, but it is the kind of risk-taking, atmosphere-above-all-else filmmaking too rarely seen in the 2010’s outside of the still vital horror genre.
185. What We Do in the Shadows (2014- dir. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi)
If nearly 100 years of horror cinema has taught us anything, it has taught us that vampires are mysterious, seductive, voracious agents of evil. They stalk their victims in dapper eveningwear and live (unlive?) in Gothic manses.
But what do they do when they’re just going about their business between bloody feedings? What happens when four vampires who live together in an old dark house stop being polite and start getting real? That is the dark mystery writers/directors/starsJemaine Clement and Taika Waititi uncover in their mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows.
The film is part Nosferatu, part Big Brother. Clement is the decadent Vladislav the Poker. Waititi is the timid Viago Von Drona Schmarten Scheden Heimburg. Jonathan Brugh is Deacon Brucke, a 183-year-young rebel with a fondness for knitting. Ben Fransham is the legit terrifying Max Schreck-clone Petyr. Together they boss around their familiars, make new friends, court old flames, make peace with a rival gang of monsters, and occasionally indulge in a frenzied blood orgy.
What We Do in the Shadows is light on plot but heavy on concept and funny performances from its vampiric leads, though Jackie van Beek kind of steals the film as Deacon’s familiar Jackie, who wants nothing more than to become a vampire herself but must settle for tidying up after one. What We Do in the Shadows is fun in itself, but its greatest significance is that it sired a superior TV version that takes the thin concept much deeper into the tomes of hilarity.
186. The Babadook (2014- dir. Jennifer Kent)
This horror sensation may not be as scary as its reputation suggests, but it’s still a quality picture with an original premise. The top-hatted monster serves as a metaphor for familial problems that can be tamed well enough to muddle through life but never banished completely. The dialogue and action are a bit clunky at times, but the monster is memorable, as is Essie Davis’s infectiously harried performance as a woman who can’t get her erratic kid under control and can’t get rid of that damn Babadook book.
187. It Follows (2014- dir. David Robert Mitchell)
What is David Robert Mitchell’s point? With its retro-eighties feel, complete with spot-on synth score, It Follows may be a pastiche of all those slasher flicks in which sex inevitably leads to dismemberment. It could also be just as reactionary as those slasher movies, though there’s a twist in that sex is both the cause and solution to the characters’ problems. The ambiguous yet vaguely romantic conclusion may suggest that sex with love is the key to conquering the curse, although everyone in the film seems to lack the ability to express any emotion but fear, so that theory is tough to confirm too.
More in keeping with the film’s dreadful tone, there are intimations of homegrown child abuse as the characters—who essentially seem to be raising themselves in a latchkey purgatory— are stalked by apparitions that sometimes resemble their own parents.
As intriguing as all of these possibilities may be, the message behind It Follows is less interesting than the collective effect of its nightmare premise, dreadful tone, nostalgic music, and spellbinding action. Even the film's not-infrequent stumbles into nonsense--fully on display during a scene in which the teens try to electrocute the evil entity, which has already been established as unkillable, by throwing appliances into a swimming pool in which Jaime is already submerged--aren't enough to dismantle Mitchell's expertly established atmosphere.
188. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014- dir. Ana Lily Amirpour)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a bit like an adult Let the Right One In, and Lyle Vincent’s black and white photography clearly intends to remind us of Browning’s Dracula, but writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour has still created a thoroughly original vampire movie. It is romantic, quietly eerier, rather beautiful, and resolutely feminist.
189. The Witch (2015- dir. Robert Eggers)
This tragedy leaves the family devastated from within while they seem to remain quietly under siege from without. Young Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) goes searching the woods for his missing baby sister only to return destroyed. Twins Mercy (Ellie Granger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) become gleefully obsessed with the idea that their family goat, Black Phillip, is the physical embodiment of the devil. Looking for a more figurative scapegoat for the family’s troubles, mother Katherine (Kate Dickie) turns on her eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy in a star-making turn), taking the girl’s tease that she’s a witch way too seriously. However, this is a world in which witches may be real, and mom’s accusation can transform into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As it is in A Field in England, dreadful mood is paramount in The Witch, but Eggers delivers a clearer resolution to his mysteries than Wheatley does, so it is more satisfying as a traditional horror movie. After all that eerie calm, The Witch reaches a frenzied finale with one act of shocking violence, one of daring anthropomorphism, and one that is bizarrely euphoric, possibly even hopeful, and will resonate with any child of a repressively religious household.The Witch is also significant as one of the films that established A24 Films as one of the most reliable purveyors of intelligent, atmospheric horror of the twentieth century.
190. The Love Witch (2016- dir. Anna Biller)
In the seventies, exploitative filmmakers like Jesús Franco made trashy fusions of horror and softcore sex with a very specific tone and style. It's not exactly the most enduring sub-genre, so Anna Biller’s decision to tap into those types of movies with her second feature was certainly novel and more than a little eccentric. While Franco (whom Biller has said was not specifically inspirational— she doesn’t even seem overly familiar with him) does not fit most cinephile’s idea of the true artist, Biller approached The Love Witch with complete artistry. She did not just recreate a seventies vibe with utter authenticity in the way she cast and directed her actors and shot her film. She also wrote, edited, and produced her film. She personally crafted the perfectly period-specific costumes and music.
All of this meticulous work took more than seven years to complete, which seems like a lot of time and energy to devote to a cinema form that has dated so poorly. Biller's brilliance lies in how much better she made her film than any of its predecessors. Every frame is astoundingly gorgeous. More importantly, she counters the sexism of ogle-happy seventies guys like Franco with a pointedly feminist stance, using her tale of witchcraft and murder to expose how powerful men twist women's views of themselves and how that can blossom into a sort of violent revolution (a theme Von Trier explored slightly less lucidly in Antichrist). The mannered acting and overly stylized filmmaking become demanding over the course of a two-hour film, but The Love Witch remains a monumental achievement and established Biller as an astoundingly singular artist.
191. Get Out (2017- dir. Jordan Peele)
Photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) leaves the comfort of the city for an always-uncomfortable ritual: meeting his girlfriend’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener). The outing to a ritzy suburb crosses the threshold between cringe inducing and outright horrific when the Armitages’ intentions for their daughter’s beau become clear.
Even considering Hollywood’s embarrassing refusal to green light movies by black filmmakers, it’s surprising that a horror movie that casts white society as its main villains took so long to get made. After all, it had been more than forty years The Stepford Wives did the same for the patriarchy. In fact, Get Out comes very close to playing like an unofficial remake of The Stepford Wives right down to its fish-out-of-water photographer protagonist and a garden party scene in which I kept expecting someone to start droning “I’ll just die if I don’t get that recipe.” However, a mad science twist is refreshingly bizarre, and the decision to make the villains ostensible liberals who take cultural appropriation way too far rather than easier-target right-wingers is novel.
On the down side, the cop-out climax doesn’t reflect the horrors of racism as honestly as the original ending Peele planned before test screenings made him rethink it. The director’s background also unbalances the tone a bit as Get Out sometimes seems to teeter over into comedy without squeezing out the jokes that could have made it a successor toAn American Werewolf in London or Cabin in the Woods (an issue also present in his follow-up, Us). So I wasn’t as knocked out by Get Out as a lot of viewers were, but its audacious flashes of originality and the confidence of Peele’s direction and his willingness to take a story into truly outlandish directions make it clear that he’s a talent to keep watching.
192. Prevenge (2017- dir. Alice Lowe)
Think of it as The Fetus Wore Black. In her directorial debut, Alice Lowe plays a very pregnant woman with a kill list of people who have wronged her. It’s not really her fault though. It is the squeaky voice of her unborn child that spurs Ruth to kill.
We last saw Alice Lowe in this series when she was playing the similarly ordinary slasher in Sightseers. Like that film, which she co-wrote, Prevenge is a seamless blend of sincere horror and sincere comedy heavy with doomy atmosphere. It is also sincere in its depiction of a woman going through a, shall we say, difficult pregnancy, partially because Lowe was actually pregnant during the two weeks it took to execute the film’s principal photography. That has to be some kind of first. Prevenge is also an astounding achievement considering that Lowe also managed to coax terrific performances from her groovy cast (Hello, Kate Dickie and Gemma Whelan from Game of Thrones! Hiya, Kayvan Novak from What We Do in the Shadows!) while delivering one herself as the ruthless Ruth under such trying and unusual circumstances.
But let’s not overstate the importance of the nature of its creation, because Prevenge would be a treat even if Lowe had made it with a pillow stuffed under her shirt. Although the “stalk-ingratiate-murder” structure of each of the film’s main sequences could have become a bit repetitious à la Under the Skin, Lowe makes each one fresh with its own tragic-comic personality and complication and a unique persona for Ruth to try on (stuffy mom, goofy club goer, nice woman taken off guard by a genuinely nice man, etc.). She also does not flinch when depicting the graphic violence of Ruth’s actions, or in what may be the picture’s most legitimate and unorthodox shock, a close up of a very realistic C-section.
193. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017- dir. David Lynch)
While Lynch obsessively revisits motifs and even structures of his previous works, it’s rare that he revisits a specific work. Twin Peaks is the natural choice both because he’d done it before with the feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and because of the original series’ painful cliffhanger that even Fire Walk with Me refused to resolve. Twin Peaks is also Lynch’s most popular production, most likely because network desires and a slew of less experimental writers and directors watered down his experimentalism. Had he made Eraserhead: The Series!, it probably would not have endured as Twin Peaks has.
The amazing thing about the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks is that Lynch has, in a sense, made Eraserhead: The Series!Instead of servicing our collective nostalgia and desire to spend more time chatting with Big Ed Hurley over cherry pie and coffee, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost took the raw materials of Twin Peaks and took it to places that even the highly abstract Fire Walk with Me did not walk. This certainly was not the Twin Peaks that fans expected, but it truly justified both Lynch’s return to Twin Peaks and his return to filmmaking after a decade-plus absence.
While I’m sure I would have enjoyed a nostalgic return to the feel of the original series, I probably would not have spent much time thinking about it. And thinking is something that the third season of Twin Peaks provoked in me like no other series in our current Golden Age of Television. As brilliant as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Americans are, none hijacked my thoughts like the third season of Twin Peaks did, none provoked so much deep discussion, frustration, obsession, and wonder. It was like having a jumper cable clipped to my brain every Sunday night. Lynch and Frost may not have given us the Twin Peaks we wanted, but they surely gave us the one we needed and deserved as intelligent people.
The creators seem to do everything in their power to level the original series that we know and love, so The Return may be best viewed as a self-contained work rather than a proper continuation of something we don’t really want to see leveled. And it is nice that The Return can be interpreted in so many ways despite so many online commentators insisting that their own interpretations are the only definitive ones. The fact that it allows for such options are part of what makes Twin Peaks: The Return such a thoroughly intellectually stimulating work of art.
It’s also really, really scary. With its fluttering, faceless demon materializing in a great, glass box; its vomiting zombie girl; Kyle MacLachlan’s shark-eyed defilement of the angelic Agent Cooper and Grace Zabriskie’s throat-ripping spin on maternal grief; and the entirety of the instantly legendary episode 8 with its avant garde depiction of Killer BOB’s birth in a mushroom cloud and all the head crushing and frog-bug swallowing that follows, Twin Peaks: The Return may be the most traditionally horrific thing the genre-defying David Lynch ever created.
194. mother! (2017- dir. Darren Aronofsky)
Javier Bardem is the Old Testament God. Jennifer Lawrence is Mother Nature. They are married, but he has all the control. He is also deeply narcissistic and thrives on the worship of his followers. He invites them into his home, ignoring her protests. They destroy it. They destroy the couple’s offspring in the film’s most deliriously gruesome scene. They destroy Nature. They destroy themselves. The cycle continues.
Many critics were baffled and angered by the initially amusing then increasingly brutal and grueling mother! It was widely accused of lacking humanity, succumbing to unintentional campiness, trafficking in empty shocks, and simply not making sense. Figures that humanity would have such a hard time recognizing its own unflattering reflection.
195. The Shape of Water (2017- dir. Guillermo del Toro)
In a sense, The Shape of Water wonders what might have went down if Kay Lawrence had actually been open to the Gill Man’s advances. Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a foundling who grows up to work as a cleaner in a hush-hush government lab. There she encounters an imprisoned Gill Man (Doug Jones) with whom she forms an intense bond that goes where few other films would be willing to take it.
The Shape of Water is such a bizarre and unexpected gift to the dwindling Monster Kid ranks that its occasional logic lapses and sometimes heavy-handed imagery can be forgiven. It is beautifully filmed and beautifully acted, it is a romance for outcasts that never feels patronizing or twee, and— Jesus Christ—it’s a goddamn Creature from the Black Lagoon movie! Hoorah!
196. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017- dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
The Killing of a Sacred Deer was Lathimos’s final film before The Favorite, and it is his first that could be viewed on a fairly face value, genre movie level. That does not mean it is easy viewing. A loose adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis, The Killing of a Sacred Deer updates Euripides’s ancient tragedy as a present day tale of power shifts and bizarre, borderline-supernatural revenge. 16-year old Martin (Barry Keoghan) blames his father’s death on recovering alcoholic cardiologist Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell). After manipulating Steven into a sort of reluctant father-figure role for several years, Martin reveals his vengeful end game: he will causes the death of Steven and everyone else in his immediate family if Steven does not choose one family member to murder first. Martin’s method is a science- defying mystery. First, the victim will suffer paralysis of the legs. Next, she or he will starve, then bleed from the eyes, then die.
As Martin, Barry Keoghan gives such a starkly realistic performance that it is impossible to believe he is not some non-actor Lathimos plucked from an institution for shifty-eyed monsters (he isn’t, by the way). That is where the realism ends as the rest of the cast falls in with the director’s usual theater-of-the- absurd monotony. This contributes to the film’s borderline comedic tone, as does Martin’s ludicrous murder method. Yet the Murphy family predicament is still upsetting, and Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman’s robotic readings only thicken the fog of dread that engulfs the film. Not even daffy one-liners like “I don’t suppose you have any pubes I can have by any chance?” can dull the horror of The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
197. Hereditary (2018- dir. Ari Aster)
Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is the mother of a young girl named Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who is apparently on the spectrum, and teenage Peter (Alex Wolff), who has more than enough evidence to conclude his mom never really wanted him. That relationship gets even more strained when Peter accidentally causes his sister’s death and his devastated mom starts finding solace outside her home with an over-attentive medium (Ann Dowd).
Like most of its genre brethren, Hereditary traffics in jump scares, family conflict, supernatural hooey, extreme violence, and big-wink references to the horrors that inspired it (The Shining and The Wicker Man to name a couple). Yet it also manages to feel starkly original because of Aster’s willingness to take his most bizarre plot twists sincerely (a refreshing turn after his wisenheimer short films) and execute it all with great artfulness. Annie is an artist who crafts miniature houses and scenes, and there are several seamless segues between zooms into those artificial environments and the actual environment of the Grahams’ home. The final scene, though guilty of over-explaining the preceding plot mechanics, achieves a sort of transcendence largely because of Colin Stetson’s exhilarating score.
Hereditary is no mere triumph of genre and style. Its complex family issues resonate as emotionally as they would in any conventional drama and Collette gives one of her best performances in a career of great ones. Yet the star of this picture is clearly its writer/director, who became a new talent to watch on the multiple merits of his debut.
198. Hagazussa (2018- dir. Lukas Feigelfeld)
Hagazussa itself is hallucinogenic: a slow-moving, dreamlike creation that is haunting, enveloping, and tremendously disturbing. I’m not sure I totally buy Feigelfeld’s assertion that The Witch is explicitly supernatural (Eggers’s Thomasin may suffer from her own psychotic hallucinations after all the suffering she endured in that picture) or that Feigelfeld’s own film is devoid of the supernatural (how else do you explain the final shot?), but Hagazussa is most definitely unlike any other film I’ve ever seen.
199. Us (2019- dir. Jordan Peele)
When she was a girl, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) went missing for five minutes in an amusement park fun house. As an adult, she is still haunted by the experience and with good reason: it set off a doppelgänger invasion that now threatens her family and friends.
Despite the neat doppelgänger twist, Us feels overly familiar in chunks, first mimicking home invasion pictures before metamorphosing into a sort of zombie- less zombie movie. I find the picture least interesting when playing in such typical horror territory, but that familiarity and Peele’s mainstream filmmaking style likely helped the subversive Us reach a massive audience (to date, Avatar is the only live-action original movie to earn more at the box office on opening night). Those who may have expected nothing more than a few jump scares found themselves confronted by the kind of thoughtful social criticism missing from most other slick pictures. The monsters’ back story brings purpose to those jump scares, even though Peele’s metaphorical tale of the have-nots rising up against the haves is revealed in a rather blunt exposition dump. A final twist seems a bit purposeless at first, but it actually enriches the film by both justifying where our sympathies have been lying for most of the picture and highlighting the grey areas between right and wrong, good and evil.
Portions of Us also highlight the full-breadth of Peele’s imagination. The fun house sequence that opens the film is 100%masterful. Nyong’o is superb throughout as she creates two seemingly dissimilar sides of the same character who actually share a lot more in common than we are first led to believe.
200. Midsommar (2019- dir. Ari Aster)
Ari Aster’s second feature shares its fascination with sinister cultures, severe family issues, and really, really grisly violence with Hereditary. ButMidsommaris a more consciously epic piece of filmmaking. That’s not always a boon, since it’s overlong even in its theatrical version (a director’s cut adds another 24 minutes to the standard one’s 147). Yet Midsommar mostly manages to maintain its stifling tension from beginning to end, which is a particularly impressive feat considering its perpetually sunlit, wide-open-space setting. Much of that tension can be traced to Pugh’s devastating portrayal of a woman struggling with unimaginable trauma.
Aster has defined his film as a “breakup movie,” while other have read it as a treatise on mental illness, but its intense, even punishing portrait of grief is Midsommar’s most potent theme. While death has been an integral element of every single one of the films that precede Midsommar in this series, few deal with the emotional aftermath of death. Midsommar does so in true horror fashion with a climactic detonation of shocks and very graphic violence. Yet its realistic and powerful emotional component, its superior acting, its daring, and its cinematic artistry are all testaments to what is possible in a genre often dismissed as unhealthy, exploitative, and virtually moronic. It’s a fine final chapter in the first century of horror cinema. What new horrors will rise from filmmakers’ fetid imaginations in the decades to come? I shudder to think.
