The seasonal countdown of horror movies continues, with werewolves as romantic metaphor, the horror of adolescence, and a bunch of films whose place on this list is real unstable.
58. Kwaidan (1964)55. Tragedy Girls (2017)54. The Blob (1988)53. Gojira (1954)52. Cure (1997)51. NOPE (2022)
Nope is the first Jordan Peele film I've ever seen, and objectively it should
be higher on the list. Subjectively, it's 51.
That's not really a knock on the film, though, so much as a window into the
weird, specific process I used to create this list. Nope is a film I expect to
grow on me. I certainly haven't stopped thinking about it since I watched it.
It's often a little bit bizarre and inaccessible, with elements of the
narrative not quite meshing together in direct causal ways. I get the
impression that a number of folks assumed the opening scene, where a
chimpanzee goes on a murderous rampage through a sitcom filming, was directly
connected to what the film hints is an alien menace. Nope! I don't even think
that's a *wrong* reading, exactly. The film's language and genre conventions
and fixation on the limits of our ability to explain fluke events makes it a
perfectly plausible preliminary reading.
I wouldn't characterize the ongoing revisions of those expectations as a
twist, exactly, so much as just, you know, the process of reading. It being at
51 on the list is, I suppose, my way of acknowledging how the film makes me
uneasy, how that process of reading is going to be an ongoing one. Suspiria
2018 is somewhat higher on the list this year, as I've started to process it
more and found myself returning to think about it repeatedly. Last year it
would've probably been around here.
There are things about the film that feel genuinely hard to swallow. For one
thing, it's tonally strange. Sometimes it's almost horror comedy. If anything,
that heightens the moments when violence strikes: swiftly, mercilessly, and
often fairly meaninglessly. An awful lot of people die in this movie in a way
that genuinely makes my skin crawl, and the worst part is the whole time I
found myself thinking "ok but SURELY he's not gonna just-". Dear reader. He
absolutely is gonna just. The film is also laden with potential hooks for
analysis. It feels self consciously about Hollywood and celebrity as a kind of
consuming maw, in a way that resonated with me precisely because Jordan Peele
is one of the few contemporary directors who actually does live up to the
hype. Is that a distorting feature, that immersion in Hollywood politics and
culture? Is it a distorting feature that I go in hyper aware of Peele's place
in contemporary entertainment, a place so intimidating that till now I've kept
thinking "well, I should hold off watching Get Out until I'm *really in the
right headspace to appreciate it*"? I'm not sure how to resolve those
questions, and that does intrigue me even as I feel like I'm left not totally
knowing what to think of the movie.
I'm finding, weirdly, that as I go through this list it's not the high or low
ends that I'm most compelled to write and think about. Those feel like either
solved problems, or unsolvable ones. It's this space in the middle where I
find films like Nope, elusive but not completely beyond comprehension,
intriguing but with a power or alienness that defies easy engagement.
COMPARE:
Little Shop of Horrors
10 Cloverfield Lane
In the Mouth of Madness
Under the Skin
50. Let The Right One In (2008)49. One Cut of the Dead (2017)
How do you talk about One Cut of the Dead? It's tricky, because this is a film
that structurally unfolds, transforming into something completely different
from its start. I guess that's a literally flowery way of saying "this is a
film with a great big Twist and I don't want to give that Twist away." And
unlike Nope I really do think it constitutes a decided Twist (though don't ask
me to come up with a strict taxonomy for where the two split apart). I do
think it's worth it to experience the film fresh so that you can experience
what it's like to piece together how it all fits together. I promise, it's not
a let down.
Though, that said, I think that framing betrays a certain nervousness about
the film, a sense that maybe if the film's transformations got spoiled it
just... wouldn't quite hold up as well. That's how the film seems to have
wound up in the middle of the pack here, despite being such a hit, and despite
how much I enjoyed the trick in the moment. I got what it was doing, and
enjoyed it, and I'm not sure I necessarily need to get anything more from it
on a rewatch.
Unless I wanted to show it to someone who had never seen it before.
How the heck would I *sell* a friend on it though? There's always the power of
my own immaculate reputation as exemplified by this objectively correct list,
but I think it's possible to at least gesture at the experience of the film
without going too far into specifics. The film's title already gives away the
conceit: it's a single cut zombie horror film. Sorta Blair Witch by way of
Evil Dead 2, or maybe the other way around. And then it's something more.
If it's got one trick, that one trick is worth seeing performed masterfully.
COMPARE:
Evil Dead 2
Night of the Living Dead
Blair Witch Project
48. November (2017)
I got quite a ways into my mental plan for this review before I remembered,
oh, right, I should probably mention that the movie's shot in black and white,
huh. It sort of slipped my mind. The colorless photography feels fitting for
the subject, a medieval folktale about unrequited love and alliances with
supernatural powers, not just because the story is about old things and as we
all know the past was in black and white. No, it feels purposeful, a way of
stylistically focusing on light and shadow and murky twilight, the paleness of
snow and the dead that walk and visit the living, the grime of mud that covers
a girl that shapeshifts between human and wolf, the shifting boundaries of
good and evil.
November is part of this strange contemporary moment we're having of a return
to medievalism, an attempt I suppose to understand the "dark ages" not as
empty homogenous time acting as the prelude to enlightened modernity but
history in its own right. The characters in November are anything but
homogenous, certainly not homogenously Christian. Selling ones soul to the
devil in order to build a Kratt, a kind of farm-tool-and-bone servant, is
standard practice; the protagonist is (without this being remarked upon) a
werewolf who consorts with witches... hell EVERYONE seems to consort with
witches and the boundary between witchcraft and just practical life skills is
decidedly fuzzy. Visiting nobility from Germany are bewildered by these
seeming unchristianized, uncivilized peasant traditions. The approach of the
film is to take these folkloric elements and go, ok, how would this operate
for these characters, assuming the peasantry are, you know, just people, like
us?
Mostly, people try to do everything they can to make their hardscrabble lives
easier, whether it be through mundane theft or using currants to trick the
devil into thinking they've signed their souls over with blood in return for a
living tool servant. More often than not, this leads in the long term to
disaster. The film is decidedly a tragic one, the mechanisms of its plot
slowly winding toward a quietly apocalyptic conclusion. I don't get the
feeling that it's passing moral judgment on these characters, really, though.
Sometimes shit just happens. Sometimes you get the living avatar of the
Plague, and sometimes the Plague gets you. The characters are tragically
flawed, but largely sympathetic.
Well, there's one rape scene that I honestly found offputting, kind of weirdly
shot compared to the rest of the film, and a bit unnecessary? Look, November
is also a fucking *weird* movie. It has an episodic structure, a bunch of odd
characters and plot threads running around, and its desire to present the
magical elements as simply a part of the lived and natural world of the
characters means you sometimes just have to kinda roll with the obtuse shit
it's throwing at you. It's the kind of film that I think would benefit from a
rewatch. It's also often very funny, in an absurdist folktale sort of way,
though never becoming, you know, Python-esque. Early on someone thoughtlessly
commands a Kratt to build a ladder out of bread, and the thing gets so upset
at the obvious impossibility that it explodes. It's great.
What's the appeal of folk horror at this moment, I wonder? Well, ok, notable:
some of the other stuff on this list that feels like folktale or fairytale
horror came from the 80s or 90s, and a lot of it is from Europe. This film is
based on a frustratingly untranslated Estonian novel. Still, I think it's
interesting what the framing opens up in terms of an ability to tell this sort
of episodic, weird, wandering tale that gleefully defies the Hollywood Style.
I wouldn't say it's remotely *nostalgic* for premodern Europe. But I think it
might be for a form of pre-corporate storytelling, and the strange moments of
high contrast and muddy greys that are possible through a storytelling that
simply follows characters through their lives without trying to color code the
world into Good Guys and Bad Guys.
And hey as the rest of this list attests, I'll always make time for a tragic
werewolf girl.
COMPARE:
The VVitch
The Company of Wolves
Faust
The Masque of the Red Death
A Field in England
47. Scanners (1981)
I heard this movie, about very autistically coded psychics battling over whose
vision for the future of humanity would prevail, was a lesser Cronenberg. It's
not! It's got that weird Cronenberg tendency to have plot threads that sort of
truncate or go nowhere but comparatively it's a pretty tight film that does
actually rely on the strength of thriller intrigue to keep everything working.
It's worth checking out!
46. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
45. Tetsuo The Iron Man (1989)44. Evil Dead 2 (1987)43. Ginger Snaps (2000)
Jennifer's Body feels like a last gasp of good cinema for a while
post-9/11; Ginger Snaps is almost perfectly the last gasp pre-9/11.
(Probably notable that Ginger Snaps is Canadian, but maybe less notable
than Canadians would have you believe.) It's a grungy, nasty film in a lot
of ways. Jennifer's Body gets some catharsis into the mix; Ginger Snaps by
the end really is a horror movie, a rolling tragedy that gradually loses
all the Heathers-esque snark of the opening for real sincere sorrow.
The central metaphor of Ginger Snaps--lycanthropy as STD and/or the onset
of puberty--feels obvious and on the nose, but the fact that it can't
quite make up its mind which of those things it represents makes the
metaphor significantly more interesting. This isn't a film that lives or
dies on the strength of its metaphorical representation. Rather, it lives
(and dies) with the apocalyptically codependent relationship between its
two main characters, the titular Ginger and her sister Brigitte. The
adolescent sexuality stuff is just the grimy water in which the two girls
tread.
It connected for me because I was also a weird morbid kid, though I was
nowhere near as talented as these two. And god damn they are talented:
mostly they spend their time producing extremely elaborate horror movie
polaroids of their own murders and suicides. Like, real professional grade
stuff. I never felt like the film was pathologizing that impulse in
particular, and the film is very interested in Ginger as a tragic figure.
It is also, however, a film primarily from Brigitte's perspective as she
slowly comes to terms with a realization I think anyone who grew up with
goths and metalheads and people who read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac will be familiar with. It
is the realization that the person you thought you were playing a game
with does, in fact, mean it. That someone you love might be, if not a bad
person, then at least a dangerous one, someone who can and will hurt you.
"Toxicity" gets thrown around in a fairly obnoxious way these days, one of
the many words the internet discourse has rendered meaningless through
overapplication, but the relationship between Ginger and Brigitte turns
increasingly toxic as the film goes on and Brigitte realizes that their
maxim of "out by sixteen or dead on the scene, but together forever" is
less a vow of staying true to themselves and each other than it is,
sincerely, a suicide pact Ginger takes very seriously. And like Jennifer's
Body, the film is messily wrapped up in queer desire all the more
troubling for its incestuous nature.
If Ginger was just a monster, or the love between the sisters was less
sincere, the film wouldn't work at all. The murkiness of its metaphors,
the absence of straightforward heroes and villains, the way that Ginger,
much like JD in Heathers, is plausibly charismatic and relatable, the way
it's hard to tell how much of Ginger's bloodlust was always there and how
much is the result of her tragic accidental werewolfism... all of these
things make the film compelling to think about. But ultimately all this
complexity relies on a very simple story: realizing that someone you love
might just be a monster, but still not wanting to let go, even at the cost
of your own life.
COMPARE:
The Lost Boys
Tragedy Girls
Jennifer's Body
42. Personal Shopper (2016)41. Dracula (1992)
You will note that this Dracula, which has a werewolf sex scene, has been
ranked twice as high as Dracula (1931), which infamously does not have a
werewolf sex scene.
40. Suspiria (2018)39. 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)38. Malignant (2022)37. In The Mouth of Madness (1994)
I heard this movie, about Stephen King inviting Outer Gods into reality, was
a lesser Carpenter. It's not! It's a wild time, one of the best attempts at
capturing the vibes of the Weird, the sense of reality inexorably in subtle
ways warping into something impossible. It absolutely deserves to be in the
horror pantheon if for no other reason than the iconic refrain: "Do you read Sutter Cane?"
36. The Company of Wolves (1984)
I don't understand why this film doesn't have a deranged cult following
like that of Labyrinth.
Well, that's not true. I do get it. Labyrinth and The Company of Wolves
both are fairy tales about adolescent desire and fantasy, the onrushing
terror of the adult world, and, reflexively, about the fairy tales we tell
about those things. They're about dangerous strangers and their allure.
But Labyrinth tells, relatively, a straightforward story with one
protagonist vying against one villain. Company begins in the present day
with one character, sinks into a dream world of a medieval village where
that viewpoint character takes on the role of a peasant girl, and then is
subsumed further into multiple different folk tales recounted to the
peasant girl by various characters. Structurally, it's bizarre and can
feel disjointed as it pushes and pops between narrative layers.
Company is also a story about werewolves, and in fact is (eventually) a
very winding adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. Labyrinth has some
maybe frightening moments, and there is an ever present sense (once you're
old enough to see it) of the sexual threat and attraction of David Bowie's
Jareth. Company of Wolves on the other hand has a guy clawing his scalded
face off and transforming horrifically into a werewolf of naked muscle and
bone, and much more directly utilizes its wolves as metaphors for sexual
predation.
I can see it being a bit of a hard sell.
Yet. When we finished I said I wasn't sure if Company of Wolves was a
"good movie". Sarah replied that if it wasn't, we need to redefine what
"good movie" means. It's 36 on this version of the list so I guess I agree
with her! There's just something so compelling about seeing a fairy tale
that really is for adolescents and adults, like for actual for real. This
is a film that gleefully refuses to simply resolve its internal
contradictions and difficult moments. It feels like a strange evolutionary
bridge from 80s dark fairy tale fantasy to contemporary folk horror
(compare: November, The VVitch). Its most mesmerizing story is about a
young werewolf girl who can't quite find a place in the overworld of the
village, and it shouldn't come as any surprise that it resonates strongly
as a trans allegory,
as explored in this mesmerizing video essay on it/its pronouns.
And, look sorry to keep coming back to Labyrinth but, while trying to
avoid spoiling anything, the two films have *essentially the same ending*,
but whereas the Labyrinth is an empowerment fantasy where its protagonist
realizes her conjured fantasy man has "no power over me", Company
concludes with a vision of wolves rampaging through a mansion and the
sense that fantasy has broken its borders and burst
terrifically/terrifyingly into the real world. I don't think this is a
condemnation, however. Rather, the film luxuriously expresses the full
danger and thrill of fantasy, the way a folktale or legend or passed on
wisdom can turn and twist and take on new, scary morals. It doesn't hurt
that the film feels like a panacea in an age of awful lighting imposed on
actors standing in front of green screen cgi sets. Everything from giant
mushrooms and oversized toys to werewolf snouts protruding horrifically
from a human's mouth are lush, practical, real, lovingly hand produced.
I still don't know if The Company of Wolves is good, and it's certainly
one you shouldn't go into expecting easy morality or comfortable
situations. But I think it might just be great.
COMPARE:
November
The VVitch
Ginger Snaps
The Wolf House
35. The Mariners vs The Astros (2022)
Like the old saw, this experience was long stretches of boredom punctuated by
moments of terror. The Mariners vs the Astros is a grueling nightmare, but
ultimately an earned and satisfying one. I think there's a rather crude
tendency to associate horror with fear specifically as its one and only
affective register of note. This always bothers me. Of just primal affects
horror can run the whole gamut, not just through subgenres like horror
comedy but through a careful use of disgust, contempt, sadness, (impotent)
fury, and so on. When paired with the phenomenology of a film's duration and
modulation, they can become whole complex experiences of grief, anticipatory
dread, desperation, exhaustion, or escalating schadenfreude.
Somewhat inevitably, a six hour long game of baseball between the
protagonists of the sport, the Mariners, and the seemingly unstoppable arch
villains, the Astros, would have to be a complexly modulated experience. The
nature of such a thing is to fluctuate wildly between moments of hope and
despair.
Granted, usually those moments don't come in the context of 18 scoreless
innings. 18 innings. An absurd record that feels like it can only be
explained with scripting, as a kind of performance art exploration of
audience directed hostility and performer endurance, or maybe a kind of
practical joke. As a work of contemporary horror, it wasn't lacking for the
broken bones I find so characteristic of the moment: one of the
protagonists, Cal Raleigh, endured the closing moments of the game with a
broken thumb, which he ignored to bat repeatedly. Endurance feels like a
characteristic of 21st century horror. In that sense, The Blair Witch
Project feels to me like a marker of things to come, a film about watching a
bunch of miserable people just slowly get harangued into defeat by
supernatural evil. How else could you characterize a game against the
Astros?
But whereas boredom and terror is kind of the whole of Blair Witch and so
many other contemporary endurance horror experiences, the Mariners vs Astros
game had constant moments of elation and hope. Six hours of one note would
be a lot to endure, after all. And it didn't hurt that I watched the game
simultaneously with a bunch of friends online tuned into the finale between
a double feature of Rocky Horror and Shock Treatment (we had expected the
game to be over long before the first movie started), and also with a small
cadre of actual people, our friends in Seattle. Actual people, in our
apartment, that we've now been living in for a year after struggling with
eviction and homelessness and what sometimes felt like constant misfortune!
Somehow, we survived. Somehow, the damn Mariners made it to the playoffs to
become the last line of defense against the unstoppable force of the Astros.
The Mariners vs Astros game succeeded in capturing an energy the first two
Halloween reboot films struggled to articulate: the sense that just enduring
in the face of an implacable force like Michael Myers or the Houston Astros
is itself a victory. Any defiance is, by definition, a victory in
itself.
A+ baseball. I will be watching again in the new year. And I'll also be
concluding this list in the new year. I'm glad to see it, after everything,
with all of you out there.
The way that I interpreted Nope, Gordy the Chimp isn't directly connected to Jean Jacket, but they parallel each other: Gordy and Jean Jacket are both animals that have a relationship with a human who (1) intends to use them for entertainment purposes and (2) drastically misunderstands what they are dealing with. Gordy and Jean Jacket both kill an entire audience, not because they are evil murderers but because they're wild animals.
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