10: Audition

One of the signs of a great director is his ability to create the proper weight in all of his scenes. You will see a lot of horror movie director's pile the gore on, trying to gross people out with the sheer quantity. That doesn't usually work out because having such excessive amounts of gore tends to pull people out of a story. People have no idea what it feels like to have an arm severed cleanly with a machete, where the body seemingly offers no resistance. Scaling the gore back makes it more personal. Scaling back the gore and adding proper weight makes movies feel much more violent than they really are. You will see this effect if you go back and watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The film audition does something remarkable: it takes what easily could have been a cartoonishly ridiculous amount of gore and gives it enough weight to be incredibly effecting. This is as disturbing as it sounds. This film has scenes of torture and madness that you would be hard pressed to see done better in any other film. Scenes in this film would have had me and my friends laughing hysterically if they weren't so disgusting. The film is hard to watch even when nothing is going on.

The story is fairly bare bones: Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) sets up a fake audition to try and find the perfect girlfriend. He meets Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), who he falls in love with almost immediately. She turns out not to be perfect. Unbeknownst to him, she is dangerously obsessed with him. She sits at her phone day and night waiting for his call. She is also completely inconsiderate, barely even feeding the person she keeps tied in a burlap sack in her apartment (it's also a bad sign that she keeps someone tied up in her apartment).

One of the thing's I like best was the build-up. The film is very slow. We know almost immediately that she is dangerously insane, but we still watch their romance unfold. There are scenes that are almost heartfelt, but because we know it can't end well, they wind up bittersweet. Once he start's checking out the girls past, we start seeing the breadth of her insanity. You never actually see her hurt anyone until the final third of the movie, but there are stories and rumors that will make your skin crawl.

Once the torture scenes start, the film seems to go completely insane. Aoyama, who spent the whole film being a sweetheart, is still a sweetheart as she is murdering people. Slowly. She giggles childishly as she cuts through body parts with cheese wire. The tension was so high throughout the film,You never managed to get comfortable, and then the film ends with one of the most uncomfortable scenes I think I've ever seen. Actually, that's not true: the film doesn't end there. Takashi Miike manages to torture you for even longer after that scene.

Audition is a film of great moments. I've never been able to get some of the scenes from this film out of my head. The film maintaned such a sense of dread that it put my teeth on edge. The film didn't have to set up a scare to be scary, so when it did it was absolutely insane. If you only watch one horror film by Takashi Miike, watch Audition.

11: The Host

When you think of east Asian countries where monster movies are popular, you probably think of Japan and Japan alone. In the last ten movies, there was only one really great monster mash, and it was made In South Korea. The Host is really compelling, simultaneously sprawling and contained. The events in the film are large-scale, effecting the entire country in one way or another, but the film itself stays incredibly focused on how those events effect a single family. The film gives up a bit of scope compared to something like Godzilla, but instead gains a major dose of humanity. It was a good trade.

Gang-du Park(Song Kang-Ho) is a bit slow. He works at his father's snack stand cooking squid and falling asleep at the job. He has a problem supporting his daughter Hyun-seo, but he is managing. He is the big screw-up of the family. His sister is an Olympic-class archer, and his brother is a college graduate. He's been coasting through life on the skin of his teeth.

When a monstrous creature surfaces from the Han river, his daughter goes missing in the confusion. Everyone who was brought in contact with the monster is taken into the custody of the U.S. Military, because of a virus scare. Now the family has to escape the government to find Hyun-seo and save her from the beast. They all put everything on the line to try to save Hyun-seo.

The virus scare is only a ruse. It's covering up the fact that the government poured hundreds of gallons of dirty formaldehyde into the river, which created the monster in the first place. As they get more and more desperate to kill the beast and hide their mistakes, they decide to release a toxic chemical called Agent Yellow to kill the beast and to serve as an anti virus agent for the virus that doesn't exist. It's not that often that the Americans are portrayed as the bad guy in a film, so it could turn some people off. The government brings in dangerous chemicals and weapons, but the people on the ground don't have respect for the place they are occupying, so screw-ups happen. It does give pause to think that the government's actions in the film are based on real events in recent history.

The film's tight focus works well with the film's themes. Governments are too focused on the big picture, so a single family tragedy is below their notice. Hurting one man to keep up appearances seems like a reasonable trade on the macro level, but it is obviously monstrous from that man's perspective. In addition, keeping the focus on the family allows for some genuinely touching moments. All of the main actors are solid, and all of the characters are amazing. Any scene where the whole family is together is a scene worth watching.

Perhaps the film's one weakness is its poor CGI. The film was made with a $10 budget, a titanic amount for a Korean film, but not quite enough to make it rival a proper Hollywood production. The monster itself is impressively designed, and entire film is well-directed. The film is set to have a Hollywood remake soon, but I doubt it will look any better. A skilled director with a good design and bad effects tends to look better than an average director with poor design but great effects. 

12: American Psycho

Horror and Comedy inherently work well together. When a film ramps up the tension, the audience is looking for an excuse to laugh. A good joke right then would send the entire theater into stitches. That is why so many horror films have unintentionally hilarious bits, little things that wouldn't be noticed in another genre wind up causing gales of laughter in a slasher. The comedy works as a release of tension, essentially working in the same way a cheap jump scare would. Audiences will remember a great bit much more fondly than they will a cat jumping out of a closet at them. As an added bonus, the right brand of pitch black comedy can be funny in the moment, but also deeply disturbing once the laughter dies down. It's very tricky to pull off, but when it works it really works.

American Psycho is the king of disturbing black horror comedies, and it is all because of Christian Bale's performance. He plays Patrick Bateman, the king of vapid consumer culture. The only thing he likes more than reservations at the most expensive restaurant in town is dropping hints about his murderous hobby. He is cold and arrogant, obsessive and cruel. He has no real connection to his friends, they are just people who admire his stuff. He doesn't really know the first thing about them, and they don't really know the first thing about him.

At first, this is played up for some laughs. He and his friends all buy $600 dollar suits, but they all look identical to each other. In their spare time they admire each others business cards. Patrick Bateman almost cries when he realizes that his is inferior to Paul Allen's. No one can tell any of them apart, because they all make such an effort to look “good” that they all look identical. At one point, the whole gang starts making fun of Patrick, not realizing that he was still among them. Even when killings start happening, they somehow wind up funny.

The film never lets up, though. At some point, a switch seems to flip. Patrick Bateman's cold emptiness starts becoming more and more creepy. The character never changes, the film doesn't even really change. It just keeps going, and you start realizing that the film was serious the whole time. The second half doesn't have a whole lot of laughs.

One of the things I like most about the film is what it leaves unstated. In order for his friends to not realize how empty Patrick Bateman really is, how uncaring he is, they would have to be as uncaring themselves. None of them really care about anything, they are all just going through the motions. They go through all of these rituals because that is what normal people do. Any of them could be doing anything and none of us would even know. That's a very scary thought. Their alleged friend is going through a mental breakdown and no one even notices or cares. Even more, we never really know just how much of the film happened, and what bits were all in the main character's head. This is all capped off by one of my favorite lines in film history.

“there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing. "

The ending of the film is that there is no ending. It was all meaningless. It couldn't have ended any other way.

13: Battle Royale

You'd be hard pressed to find a film like Battle Royale made in America. The subject matter, brutal violence done to children by children, is one of the few big taboos that American studios won't touch. Even in the age of Saw style torture movies, there are still lines that Film producers won't cross. There isn't a whole lot of demand for a movie like Battle Royale, and for good reason.

The story is very minimalist. The government fears that the younger generation will overthrow their regime, so to keep them in line they cart a busload of 13 and 14 year-olds to an island and have them kill each other. The last living person is free to go. If more than one person is alive after three days, they all die. “Exchange Students” who appear to have extensive combat training are constantly trying to cull the herd.

The film really tries to hammer home the wrongness of the events. There is an extremely perky assistant who enthusiastically explains how and why people are going to be killing each other. The children all look like children and act like children would act. They group together with their closest friends and try to wait it out. They all know they can't wait it out, they just try not to think about that. As the days go on, something's gotta give.

It is easy for a film with such over the top violence to appear campy, but it never crosses that line. This is a film that has massacre after massacre after massacre. The film is full of nameless people killing and being killed. Unlike in a slasher film, there is real weight behind it. It is a tragedy when a nameless character dies in this film, as it should be.

There is a surprisingly prolific genre of films that throw innocent people into arenas and force them to kill each other, but Battle Royale is my personal favorite because it emphasizes the political aspect. The film has 42 students as victims, an unusually high amount for this type of thing. It allows them to throw bloodbath after bloodbath at the audience, have deaths of real meaningful characters, and still have more to give. One of the film's most affecting scenes was a group of 8 students holed up in a lighthouse. One is convinced that her friend is a murderer, and she slowly becomes more and more paranoid about it. Eventually, she tries to poison her food. Once this is found out, everyone in the lighthouse starts butchering each other. Someone was trying to kill them, and they had to protect themselves. None survived.

Battle Royale hammers home the same points again and again. It never moves to far beyond its central concept, but it does that concept so well that I can't help but be impressed. After watching Funny Games, I am convinced that the best way to speak out against violence is to show the result of violence, and Battle Royale does that well. Check it out.

14: The Hamiltons

A family is shattered by the death of their parents. The eldest brother David Hamilton (Sameul Child) is desperate to try and pick up the pieces, assuming all of the responsibility in the house. The Fraternal twins Wendell (Joseph mckelheer) and Darlene (McKenzie Firgens), on the other hand, just want to do whatever they want, to hell with the consequences. The youngest, Francis, is just starting to go through adolescence, an he doesn't really get the rest of his family. He's the only one who ever questions the morality of capturing people and torturing them for their sweet, sweet blood. Did I not mention that? They're also cannibals.

The core of the movie is the idea that Francis is an outside observer to all of these goings-on. He doesn't like the killing, but he loves his family too much to turn them in. He doesn't have any friends other than his family because the family is constantly moving from place to place. Eventually, he winds up getting really close to one of the victims they have locked in their basement. She keeps trying to convince him to abandon his family and his home by letting her out of the cage. The character of Francis is incredibly sympathetic, no matter what he chooses he is the only one who pays the price.

David Hamilton, on the other hand, is just generally unnerving. He is really flat, he is constantly trying to be the perfect older brother. No matter what he is doing, he always has the same posture, the same tone. He has nice conversations with the people he is murdering, as he is murdering them, and he gets upset that the conversation seems really one-sided. That's just rude after all, he was asking them a question. He gives off this vague sense of danger, you never really know what he could be thinking or doing. For all you know he could be ready to explode at any time.

You always know what the twins are thinking, because they are always thinking the same thing: Let's terrorize some people or have sex. It's hard to discuss one twin without simultaneously talking about the other. They are one and the same in a lot of ways. They give no thought to the consequences of their actions. They'll lure a kid from school home and viciously murder them, only for the kid to turn out to be the daughter of a police officer. They are the sole reason the family is constantly moving. They are predators, they enjoy the thrill of the hunt. Whereas David needs the control of someone tied down to get his work done, they enjoy a runner. The slight chance of them escaping is part of the fun. They are incredibly close, much closer to themselves than they are to anyone else in the family. They are very, very close. It's disturbing.

The Hamiltons is another After Dark Horrorfest film, and it really sold me on the idea of the Horrorfest. This film is pretty unorthodox. Watching a bunch of flawed but interesting movies Isn't a bad way to spend a day, especially if every once in a while you get to watch an excellent interesting movie. Even if you don't like the Hamiltons, you are unlikely to see anything like it for a while.

15: The House of the Devil

The '80s were a great time to be a horror fan. All of the kids who spent their nights watching The Curse of Frankenstein had grown up to direct horror films of their very own. Studios, emboldened by the box office success of films like Jaws and Alien, were willing to sink real money into films they wouldn't even have touched before, and special effects had advanced to the point that a good team with no money could look almost as good as a big budget film. And the 1980 release of Friday the 13^th would lay the blueprint for the the entire slasher Genre. So, while I was counting down horror movies from the '00s, I couldn't help but start missing the '80's. House of the Devil saved the day.

House of the Devil is indistinguishable from a film from the '80's. It takes the idea of the old school throwback and commits to it fully. The people listen to The Fixx on their Walkman's while driving around in old school Volvo's. The main character is a babysitter who is preyed upon by a satanic cult. It uses camera angles and zooms I never realized fell out of favor until I recognized them in this film and noticed I hadn't seen them in a while. The film was released on VHS, Seriously. It's actually hard to believe it came out in 2009.

While the film's basic setup, a babysitter whose sitting for a bunch of murdering satanists who wants to sacrifice her, sounds like just another gory shlock-fest, the film actually impressed me. For roughly the first hour, nothing really happens. It's just a slow building of tension. You know what's coming, but not how or when. Sure, there is some blood and murder going on a little bit near the end, but the majority of the film time is just waiting, knowing that somethings gotta give.

In a movie where the main antagonists are satanists hungry for sacrifice, it is amazing that the thing the film focuses most on is the creepiness of babysitting. The film tries to milk the scares from the mundane angle as long as it can before getting into the supernatural elements. She walks around an almost empty house in the middle of nowhere. It's dark, and you have to look around to try to find light switches when you enter a new room because you don't know where any are. The whole place is unfamiliar, the people are kind of weird. If you accidentally break their stuff you have to pay for it, and if you screw up they are going to go look for someone else instead. Babysitting is frankly terrifying, if you get right down to it. The babysitter winds up scaring herself, and her fear infects us.

It's easy to scare someone with a bang and a loud nose, or with a knife-wielding maniac chasing after you. This film scares you when nothing is happening. Jump scares and mountains of gore are all you see in a lot of today's movies. You get almost none of that here. The horror is in an odd bank of windows, or a disconcerting camera angle, or the music suddenly stopping. The director, Ti West, has to know some secret about making great films that I don't. Those were the most compelling 55 minutes of someone slowly walking through a house I've ever seen.

I guess the Devil is in the details.

(I swear never to make a pun that terrible again.)

16: The Descent

Sometimes, life just keeps piling bad stuff on top of each other. Sometimes, you try to get over the death of your husband by going cave diving with friends in the worlds most claustrophobic cave. Sometimes there is a cave-in. Sometimes, you find out that your friends are untrustworthy and cruel. Sometimes the claustrophobic cave with the cruel friends and dead husband is also full of monsters. The Descent is just one bad day that won't end (because you can't see the sun down in the cave).

This film uses the cave system to great effect. Seemingly endless black chambers turn into impossibly small alcoves the group has to squeeze through which turn into steep crevices too deep to see the bottom. The cave oozes atmosphere, and there is a real sense of danger that never really leaves the place. Once you start getting into the more monstrous areas, like a pool of blood covered in viscera or a mountain of bones, it feels like a natural progression. The cave is the antagonist here, and the monsters are just one part of it.

But the monsters themselves are what really makes the movie work. It is suggested that the monsters were just humans that had adapted to the underground environment. This really fits the tone of the film, this idea that the monsters were just humans that had to be wild to survive in the cave. While they never really become sympathetic, there is enough to make you question the morality of slaughtering them. Once the characters in the film start "adapting" to the cave, becoming desperate and vicious, the film really gets interesting.

When the film gets going, the people start turning nasty. Old wounds rise to the surface and old grudges start getting settled. People get separated from each other and lost and abandoned. One person breaks her leg early on, and the question of whether or not to leave her weighs on the survivors. In its own way, the cave claims each of them, body or soul.

17: Gravedancers

For a film that takes itself so seriously throughout, Gravedancers has one campy premise. After one of them dies in a car accident, a group of old high school friends get together to mourn him. In an attempt to relive their old school days, they go and do something stupid: namely breaking into the cemetery in the middle of the night for some drunken mourning. One thing leads to another, and they wind up angering evil spirits by dancing on their graves. While I don't mind campy films at all, this film is so serious and well done that the fact that it sounds so silly makes it hard for a film like this to have an audience.

After the funeral, The films follow Harris (dominic Purcell) and his wife Allison (Clare Kramer) and manages to build a sense of dread quite effectively. It starts out with the full suite of ghostly gimmicks: Creaky pipes, stuff moving on its own accord, and mysterious hangup calls. The wife is convinced that the person responsible for the calls is Kira (Josie Maran), one of Harris' old flames. She becomes increasingly paranoid that Kira is stalking her husband. Clare Kramer really sells it, I like her character a lot. After a break-in in their house, Allison forces Harris to go to Kira's house and confront her. That's when the real movie starts.

Kira is half dead, her house is completely demolished. She is delusional, bruised and battered. She is being attacked by one of the ghosts. The scenes where she is attacked are some of the film's most affecting. They really sell both the brutality of the attacks and the helplessness of being beaten by something you can't see. When Harris tries to get rest of the gang together to see what is going he finds that Sid (Marcus Thomas) had actually hired a group of paranormal investigators to try to help them. After this point, the film really takes off. They creature effects are quite good for an independent film. The spirits have these massive grins on them full time that makes them look quite demented. These aren't your typical melancholy specters, they like their work.

This film was bundled as part of the After Dark Horrorfest, what was originally billed as independent horror films that were “too scary for theaters,” but in actuality was more like “ cheap films we can bundle together and sell to completionists for profit.” But each horrorfest has 3 or 4 movies worth watching, and one or two that are really good. The Gravedancers is one of the best films in the original Horrorfest, which actually had some stiff competition for best movie. Watching through a bunch of horrorfest films is a nice way to spend day, and you can expect to see the After Dark Horrorfest make this list at least one more time.

18: Martyrs

Martyrs is the kind of film that never lets you get a solid footing. It keeps shifting underneath you. It's not that you don't know what will happen next, it's that you don't even know what can happen next. The film doesn't even let you know what rulebook it's playing with. It seems to make an effort to defy description: If I had to, I would call it a supernatural psychological rape-revenge torture film, but that barely even scratches the surface.

The film follows two best friends: Lucie (Morjana Alaoui), who was abducted and abused as a child, and Anna (Mylene Jampanoi ), who always try to be there for her. Lucie is haunted by a monster that keeps trying to attack her and she always only just gets away. She is convinced that the thing wants her to track down and murder the people who hurt her. When she thinks she found them, she murders them all: A husband, wife, and their two teenage children. By the time Anna gets there, they are all dead. Anna isn't convinced that Lucie shot the right people, but she still tries to hide the bodies for her.

The film's first half is based on two compelling relationships: that of Lucie and the monster, and that of Anna and Lucie. It is suggested early on that the monster is all in Lucie's head, but the exact nature of the thing isn't revealed for quite a while. Anna is convinced that it isn't real. Watching Anna try to help her friend, even when no help is really possible, fills the film with a melancholy that makes it so much more affecting than the average horror film. Anna is in a lot of ways a tragic figure: she wants to help, but all she can do is help clean up the mess.

This doesn't even bring up the film's second half, which is easily the most extreme shift in tone I have ever seen in a film. The first half is a very good film, gripping and exciting and scary. But the film grinds to a halt in the second half. The reason Lucie was tortured as a child are revealed, the monster haunting her is explained, and the plot up to this point is resolved. It's almost like a different movie. It becomes bleak, repetitive and grinding. It almost hurts to watch. Don't misunderstand me, it isn't bad. After this point, the film is designed to be unpleasant. And it succeeds. It is tortuously violent and gruesome, and it seems to just keep going and going and going.

Pascal Laugier, the writer and director of this film, said that he was suffering from Depression when he wrote this film. I hope making the movie helped him work through it, because the finished product has gone on to depress millions of viewers the world over. From the onset, the film sets you up to be shocked. It leads you on, making you feel like you never really know what is going to happen next. And it's a good thing too, because if everyone knew what was coming at the outset there would be quite a few walkouts. Some film's aren't set up to be pleasant. Martyrs doesn't want to thrill you or scare you, it exists on its own plane and defies traditional critique. I would not recommend this film to almost anyone, but it is really something special.

19: Three.... Extremes

This film is weird. It's an asian anthology film taking one of the most popular horror directors from South Korea (Park Chan-wook, the director of Oldboy), one of the most well-known directors from Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, director of Made in Hong Kong), and the legendary Japanese horror maestro Takashi Miike and having them all film a 40 minute short horror film. They are all very disturbing and very extreme, but other than that they couldn't be more different; Both from themselves and from any other movie I've ever seen.

In Fruit Chan's Dumplings, a retired actress named Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) wants to look as young as she ever was. She is having problems with her husband, and she wants to rekindle their relationship. So she goes to Aunt Mei, who is rumored to have a secret dumpling recipe that restores youth. Unfortunately, the dumplings aren't exactly made out of wholesome ingredients. Mrs. Li is so vain that she chokes them down time and time again for months. But she is convinced that the dumplings aren't working fast enough. Her uncaring husband is still uncaring. She still looks just as good as she ever did, but she wanted to look better than that. She keeps having Aunt Mei give her more Dumplings, and stronger. Both characters are deeply disturbing, not just in their actions, but in their casual indifference to the obvious wrongness of what they are doing.

The thing that really creeps me out about this film is it's plausibility. There really are people who will do horrible things to stay young. There really are ignorant and disgusting local customs that people believe in. Things like this could happen; they have happened. This all combines with a truly nihilistic ending to give the short film a lot of power. (No, I'm not going to tell you what the dumplings are made of. Watch the movie, but not if you're squeamish)

The last thing I expected after Dumplings was a horror film with comedic elements, but that is what I was given with Park Chan-wook's Cut. A well liked director and his pianist wife are taken hostage by a deranged extra. The extra had always been poor, but he consoled himself with the thought that at least all rich men were heartless bastards. But then he started working on the director's films, and the director was kind and decent to him. Now he has to prove that the good director isn't so good, and he does this by making the director a deal: He wouldn't cut off his wife's fingers if the director would strangle a child. It's your standard Faustian Bargain: do you sell your principles for your life? I know this doesn't sound like a premise for a comedy, but bear with me for a moment.

The Extra acts completely bizarre. He perfectly memorized all the roles he's ever been them, and seems to take great pleasure in doing them at seemingly random times. The man is obviously deranged, which works for the film in two different ways. A lot of the film's humor comes from this man's non sequitor's, but at the same time the idea of having to please this clearly unstable maniac also generates horror in the long run. It's like having your cake and eating it too. The result is the funniest movie to ever have one of the character's finger get puree'd in a blender. Except for Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.( I think I watch too many movies.)

The final film is Takashi Miiki's Box, and I'm still not entirely sure what the hell happened. It is definitely about a person's recurring nightmare of being buried alive. Other than that, I could be completely wrong about what it is about. There are quite a few other aspects that are also probably a part of the nightmare, and it gets to the point where the entire film could just have been a dream. In order to avoid having to write “What most likely happened is” before every sentence, just be aware that the whole film is vague.

We follow Kyoko, a young woman trying to move on from her childhood as a circus circus. Her and her sister were an act together, contortionists who would fit themselves into tiny boxes. But she was always jealous of her sister, who got all the attention from the ringmaster. The Ringmaster, incidentally, is a pedophile. In a fit of rage, Kyoko locks her sister in her box and attacks the ringmaster. The recurring nightmare is of the ringmaster tracking her down and locking her in a box with her sister forever. There is also a repeated image of the two of them contorted impossibly closely forever.

The film has one of my favorite twist endings of all time. It does what twist endings are meant to do. It allows you to see the film in a new way, you interpret the dream completely differently after the ending than you do before. That's why it is so hard to know what is going on. It seems like a mixture of memory and nightmare, dealing with Kyoko's guilt. But after the ending we don't really know what we know. All we are presented with is a character''s psyche, damaged and strange. It is up to the viewer to put a story to it, and the story will almost always tell you just as much about yourself as the character. That's why I love this movie.

This film has one of the most bizarrely specific niches of any film: Fans of Extreme East Asian horror films who also like anthologies, horror comedies and contemplative dream sequences. If even half of that sounds compelling, you should really check this out. But you'll never be able to eat dumplings again

20: Rec 2

Found footage films are a dime a dozen these days. Ever since The Blair Witch Project, any film trying to be “realistic” had one faceless character with almost no dialogue holding the film's only camera. No tripods exist in the world of found footage films. It takes a lot for one of these films to get noticed, and even more for them to be remembered. The 2006 film Rec was one of the good ones, and you can expect to see it somewhere on this list in the future. Rec 2 takes the strengths of the original (great pacing and perhaps the best jump scares in jump scare history.), and turns it up to 11. They try to make everything bigger, faster, and stronger. And it works. Rec 2 was so good that it has not one but two sequels currently in production.

Rec 2 takes place almost immediately after the end of the original, and follows a swat team as they enter an apartment full of zombies. But these aren't your normal zombies: In Rec 2, the infected are possessed by demons. They can be warded off by crosses and good old fashioned gunfire, but they will just keep coming unless the original host is found and destroyed. The Swat team needs to find and kill the host, while securing a blood sample for testing.

The film's strongest aspect is this unique zombie mythology, which allows for a lot of very impressive scenes that couldn't have happened in a more traditional zombie movie. From the point where one of the main characters reveals being sent by the Vatican to try and stop this infection, you know it is going to be something different. They milk this for all its worth. All of the zombies are controlled by a single entity, and it has a few tricks up its sleeve for people who think they are only facing rabid humans. The final act in particular is both novel and terrifying.

There is a cost to this greater ambition, however. While the original Rec felt perfect with only the one camera, the sequel really struggles against the limits it sets on itself. Each of the main characters has a camera on their weapon now, and that still doesn't feel like enough. When the second act rolls around, the film screeches to a halt in a really unnatural fashion, which almost certainly could've been avoided had the two talented directors not had to accommodate the found footage style of real-time filmmaking with no cutting between multiple viewpoints. All in all, I'm thankful the next Rec Sequel uses a more traditional style of filmmaking.

Rec 2 is often thought of as the Aliens to Rec's Alien, but I don't agree with this. Even if it were just an excellent action film sequel,, it would be worth watching. It is more than that. The last half hour of Rec 2 is just as good as anything in Rec. It has all the adrenaline and fun of an action film, but it still manages to stick with you when you are trying to get to sleep at night in a way no action movie can. Rec 2 is a horror film, and one of the best.

21: Drag Me to Hell

When Sam Raimi makes a horror movie, you sit up and take notice. His first feature length film, The Evil Dead, wasn't perfect, but it is still remembered as a cult classic. Evil Dead II was perfect, its first half a genuinely creepy tale of one man fighting against a horde of demon's slowly driving him insane and its second half a kickass action movie when he picks up a shotgun and a chainsaw and starts fighting back, with a vein of black comedy throughout to provide cohesion. I doubt I even need to say anything about Army of Darkness.

After spending the 2000's making two extremely good superhero films, he is finally back to horror with Drag me To Hell, and its got the blood of Evil Dead II running in its veins. When Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) finds herself on the wrong end of a gypsy curse, she has three days to find out a way to escape before she is damned to hell. While she looks, she is being more and more severely tormented by the Lamia, the demon that is trying to take her there. The films strongest aspect is its ability to meld its sense of humor with the horror. For instance, she goes and meets a psychic to try and expel the demon. This psychic is obviously money-hungry, and that winds up being milked for a lot of laughs. But, in the end, the main character is still putting all of her hope in this person who could pretty easily just be a conman, so the same scenes also manage to extend the helplessness of her situation, which works brilliantly.

This film is disgusting, but not in the traditional gory way. It's the kind of thing that never really happens in real life, so it never even occurs to you that it is as nasty as it is. Some of the gags wouldn't look entirely remiss in a Looney Tunes cartoon. At one point, Christine accidentally swallows a fly, and you still here the fly buzzing around in her stomach for the rest of the movie. Half of the film is hysterical because it is so over the top, and half of it is really quite nasty, but my friends and I can't agree which scenes go in which half.

I'm always a sucker for a good haunting film. They just work so well: the ghosts (or Lamias) start off slow and slowly ramp up the terror of their victim. They can be anywhere, at anytime. They are inherently unknowable and always a threat. Something supernatural just gives good directors so much more room to work with to set up good scenes. In a slasher movie, it usually doesn't make a lot of sense for the serial killer to start slow and ramp up the tension from there, but the film needs that to work. But in a film where the Monsters only motivation is to scare someone and mess with their head, everything works perfectly.

Because the monsters motivations and the directors motivations are exactly the same. Sam Raimi wants to mess with our heads, and he is the best at it.

22: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Behind the mask is the exact opposite of Wes Craven's Scream. Scream had a brilliant opening scene, one that was genuinely scary and innovative. It was a tour de force. What followed was an absolutely awful film, a lazy whodunit mixed with a lazy comedy prancing around pretending to still be scary. It was a great disappointment. In Behind the Mask, the main character comes out and says five minutes in that he is the serial killer. What follows is a genuinely clever comedy that pokes fun at horror films while still giving them the respect they deserve. The only low point in the film was the final act, in which the film devolves into a somewhat lazy slasher film.

Behind the Mask is a mockuemntary, following a group of college students producing a film about Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesal), a man who intends to go on a supernatural killing spree to avenge his wrongful death 20 years ago. Rather than being dark and brooding like you would expect a serial killer to be, he is full of energy. He is ecstatic to show off his hard work to the film crew, and his joy infects the rest of us. The film really only works because of Nathan Baesal's performance. He is the kind of guy you would want to sit down and have a drink with. Even when he goes out to murder people, you're still on his side.

The film's most hilarious sections are when he explains his preparations for the big night. He goes through the house where the killings will happen, making sure all the flashlights have dead batteries and rigging the fuse box up to a kill switch. He sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber to practice slowing his breathing and heart rate in case he needs to pretend to be dead. And on his off days he reads David Copperfield and Houdini (and a bit of Gray's Anatomy as well.) The film treats his serial killer ambition as something completely mundane. His best friends are a retired serial killer and his wife, who used to be his final girl. They worked back in the 70's, before the big names like Freddy and Jason “changed the industry,” into the franchise-based murder spree system we have today.

The film's only real problem comes in the final act, when Leslie actually goes on this killing spree. The problem is that the film tries to pull in too many different directions. It tries to deliver on the promise of murdering all of the teenagers he spent the movie stalking, while trying to wave its finger admonishingly at the audience for enjoying the carnage the film had been setting up for, while trying to be genuinely scary. And it does all of this while still trying to remain a mostly comedic film. In the end, it doesn't really work. But it is a fun ride. If you didn't like Scream, maybe you can give one last chance to a snarky slasher comedy. And if you did like Scream, this film will blow your mind.

(As a side note, this film might have the greatest one-liner in horror comedy history. I don't want to spoil it, but you'll know it when you hear it. My friends and I almost died laughing.)

23: May

The easiest thing to mess up in a horror movie is the ending. Do you know why most generic horror films end in one last predictable jump scare? Necessity. If the bad guy is unquestionably defeated and the film ends on a happy note, then the ending and the rest of the movie have major conflicting tones. If you have the good guys brutally murder the bad guys, you get a closer match, but the endings tend to feel cathartic and the entire movie winds up feeling like a thrill ride rather than a horror film. The ending needs to match the tone of the film, while extending the films themes AND providing a satisfying conclusion to the films plot. There are a lot of ways for an ending to go wrong, and there is only one way to get it right. May's ending is perfect.

The film starts off slowly, dealing with May's (Angela Bettis) rough childhood. She had a lazy eye, and was forced to wear an eyepatch. Everyone always made fun of her for it. In the end, her mother told her that if she couldn't find a friend, she should go make one, and gives her a handmade doll. May takes this lesson to heart, and the doll becomes her first and only true friend. Years later, the doll is still May's only friend. She talks to it day and night, and she never takes it out of its case, just as her mom would have wanted.

Eventually May tries to go and make friends with other people. She doesn't really have any idea what she is doing. She is obsessive and cripplingly shy. She becomes hugely attached to parts of people, even more than the person themselves. She's a big fan of this guys hands, or that person's legs, or Polly's (Anna Farris) neck. May starts getting into fights with her doll (apparently, it doesn't like the people she is hanging out with). It's clear from the beginning that May isn't exactly mentally healthy, and she eventually goes off the deep end when she starts getting rejected by her new friends. In time, she decides to make a new friend, to make up for the ones she was losing. It's pretty easy to see where this is going, but it is still a shock when it happens. May's switch from a victim to a predator is disturbingly abrupt, no one even has time to notice the difference.

This all leads up to the downright scariest ending in any film I've seen. It was perfect, it was spellbinding. I didn't see it coming, but it was really the only way the film could've ended. I was in awe, it was so dark and so vague and so creepy. I wasn't even sure I liked May until I saw the ending, but once I did I loved the film.

24: Black Swan

When I first heard about this film, I was convinced that it was produced for me personally. The film just sounded too good to be true: Darren Aronofsky writing and directing a horror movie, a sister piece to The Wrestler. A film heavily inspired by the apartments trilogy of Roman Polanski, but also featuring stylistic influences from David Cronenberg and Dario Argento. A film with an absolutely amazing orchestral score, starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, and they have sex. Nothing could have kept my from this film. Absolutely nothing. It didn't disappoint.

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina completely focused on perfecting her craft. She dedicates every hour of every day to being perfect at what she does. She has full control of her graceful movements at all times, and she is all set to play as the lead in Swan Lake. The problem is that Swan Lake is about losing control. She not only has to play as the graceful white swan, but as a very sexual and passionate black swan. Between her devotion to her craft, and her mother infantalizing her, she has no real idea what to do.

This isn't so much a film about a character growing up as a character realizing she grew up a long time ago and just never dealt with it. Her instructor keeps trying to force her to “lose herself” in the role (or have sex with her. It is disturbingly difficult to tell the difference between the two. He's probably trying to do both, actually). In an attempt to show her the way, he introduces her to Lily, who dances the black swan perfectly. Under Lily's “guidance,” Nina goes out and gets hammered, something she never would have done before.

In my eyes, this film is about repression and the malleability of identity. Nina thinks she knows who she is, but once people start trying to pressure her, parts of herself she didn't know existed started coming out. A repeating image in the film is Nina looking in the mirror to see herself as Lily, or to see Lily as her. To her, Lily represents all those aspects of her that are out of her control. Nina thinks of herself becoming a different person because she can't accept that those thing are a part of her. In the end, this leads her to blaming others for her behavior. She becomes paranoid, convinced Lily is going to steal her role. In the end, she starts hallucinating. She loses her grip on reality.

Once the hallucinations start, the film goes from a somewhat unsettling drama to a full on horror film. It's hard to describe most of the imagery, and to try would ruin the effect. Nina sees all of her worst fears paraded in front of her, and we're right there with her. She has no idea what is real or what is imagined, or what is half-imagined but really happened. It winds up feeling very much like the the works of Roman Polanski. People are almost definitely plotting against Nina, and Nina is almost definitely paranoid and delusional, but there is always the question of which events fall into which camp. In some cases, we never find out.

25: Funny Games

Funny games is a unique film, sort of. It is a shot for shot English-language remake of a unique film from Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke (who also made the original), this film is a horror movie in its truest sense. At first, it all seems like familiar genre territory: A nice family goes out to their vacation home to see some friends, only to have their home invaded by a pair of maniacs. But it soon becomes clear something else is going on. The bad guys seem to switch from pleasant to horrible to funny and back again. They care about the rules to their “game,” but you don't know anything else about them. The psychos practically seem chummy. It soon becomes clear that the bad guys hunting down and killing the good guys isn't really what the film is about.

This film is attackimg you, the viewer. The bad guys keep breaking the fourth wall to make little asides to you (“What do you think? Think they stand a chance?”). They have a running bet going with us if the family is going to make it. They break any and every horror taboo they can think of (right down to killing a dog).. And all the while they are still torturing the family in any way they can.

But it isn't just the bad guys. Every note of the soundtrack (classical music which jumps randomly into thrash metal), every shot of the camera, every convention and pattern created (and immediately ignored), is all just to say fuck you to the audience. Especially the camera. There is hardly a drop of blood in the entire film. It's always pointing somewhere else while the brutality goes on. Then the camera lingers on the family, bruised and frightened. For almost two hours, the film sits there and watches a family immediately before and after terrible things happen to them. There's no catharsis, no revenge, and no hope.

This film is often compared to the film Hostel by more mainstream critics, but that really sells this film short. Hostel, along with a whole host of other films use an anti-violence message as an excuse to show the audience what they want: Violence. The bad guys brutally murder the good guys, then the good guys triumph and murder the bad guys. The tension is relieved, and the audience cheers, The problem with this setup is that the violence always ends up being cathartic. It feels great to watch the bad guys be murdered, and as that is the last event in the film, people leave feeling pumped and happy. These cathartic endings are the main problem I have with Eli Roth's films, and why you won't see them on the list (spoiler alert). Funny Games choosing not to show the violence, and only showing the horrific effects, are one of the things that is striking about the film.

Funny games is probably one of the most polarizing films made in the past decade. That is exactly how it was designed to be. A furious review, accusing Heneke of creating the film as an elaborate troll, is probably just as much proof of the film's craft as an irreverent one like this. If a film that is willing to attack you in ways that you have never been attacked before sounds like something you want to watch, then this is the film for you.

26: session 9

I like unreliable narrators. They give stories depth and allow for several alternate interpretations of a series of events. The idea that what the film shows isn't necessarily what happened can be used to create suspense and tension, and the sudden realization that the main character was an unreliable narrator all along has been the backbone of numerous films.

Session 9 is the ultimate in unreliable narrators. The film follows an asbestos removal team as they try to clean up a dilapidated mental hospital, while the hospital starts slowly driving them all insane. One guy finds a bunch of old coins and quits to go to Vegas (or does he?). A second just seems to slime his way around, trying to get people fired so he can have his own guys come in (or does he?). The protagonist's one defining feature was that he never loses his cool, and he just starts going ballistic. Then there is the guy who keeps sneaking off to listen to tapes of a psychiatric patient from the seventies with repressed memories. Doubt is even cast on the doctors from the tapes, when the film brings up all the people who thought they “remembered” repressed memories only to learn that the memories had been planted into their head by well-meaning but misguided doctors.

The main story follows the asbestos removal team as they try to do the huge job on a tight schedule where everything is going wrong, but we also get to listen in on the old psychiatric sessions of one of the disturbed inmates. Mary Hughes has multiple personality disorder, and we listen to recordings of doctors trying to coax her into talking They keep asking her what happened on Christmas years ago, and asking to talk to Simon. We have no idea what is going to happen with her, but we know it can't be good. At first, it seems like the story is just a diversion from the main plot, just another way to ratchet up the tension. It winds up really tying the whole film together by the end.

The film doesn't need any tapes to ratchet up tension for it. It was shot on-location at Danvers State Hospital, which is the creepiest building in the history of creepy buildings. It is covered in dust and graffiti. The whole thing is Labyrinthine, dark, and disturbing, and that's before you get to the patient's rooms. Between the underground tunnel system, the crematorium, the high security ward (which more closely resembles a giant cage than anything else), and the room where the first lobotomy was ever performed, I am not sure which section of the building I am most disturbed by. Not to mention the cemetery (the graves are numbered, there isn't enough space for names).

A lot of times you'll have films with unreliable narrators go all-in on the concept, to the point where the films main draw is finally figuring out what the hell is going on. Films like that are good every once in a while, but way too many films try to do things like this and just fail to pull it off. Session 9 is so good because it leverages it's craziness with tension and a creeping uneasiness. These qualities play off each other, the fact that you know something bad is going on but not knowing what meshing perfectly with the atmospheric surroundings.

Paranoia and Claustrophobia: two great tastes that taste great together.

27: Ginger Snaps

Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabella) are as close as two sisters can be. They are each other's best (only, actually) friend. It is the two of them against the world. There friendship is tested when, on the night of Ginger's first period, she is attacked by a wolf. She becomes moody and distant with her sister. She starts having sex with strange guys, and growing hair in odd places. Then she eats the neighbors dog.

Ginger Snaps Lycanthropy as puberty angle has been done before in other movies (Teen Wolf probably being the most popular example), but what really sets this film apart is the acting and story. The main characters have great chemistry, and it is hard not to love them whenever they are onscreen together. You really care about the fate of Ginger and Brigitte, which is not the most common thing in horror movies. Emily Perkins is great as the sulky Brigitte worried about her older sister, and Katherine Isabella is amazing as the increasingly demented Ginger. Add in the sometimes hilarious and sometimes disturbing mother character (Mimi Rogers), and you have a recipe for a great film.

The film's first half has a black comedy feel to it as well. A bumbling group of adults try to help Ginger through her hard times, including the aforementioned hilarious mother character. The high school is your standard film fare of jocks and nerds and popular girls, but they all manage to entertain so I can forgive the film for a bit of cliché here. The one thing that is never funny is the films supernatural elements, which are always played dead serious. You will see this a lot in the better supernatural comedies like Ghostbusters or Zombieland, where the humor comes from the characters rather than the the fantastical elements.

When Ginger Snaps is at its best, it reminds me of David Cronenberg's The Fly. Considering that The Fly is my favorite horror film of all time, this is high praise. The idea that someone you love could change unrecognizably into something else is already disturbing, but the point of films like The Fly and Ginger Snaps is that they are recognizable. Even when Jeff Goldblum is full transformed into the fly, you are not allowed to forget he is still Jeff Goldblum. He never goes around screaming “I'm going to eat your brains.” He always says things like “Why would you want to kill my son” or “You can help me, all I need is your body.” And even when Ginger is at her most monstrous, she still cares deeply for her sister. Enough to kill for her, even.

Ginger's full transformation into a werewolf ran the risk of being incredibly campy, especially since the special effects aren't the best. But since it is treated so seriously throughout the whole movie, it manages to really be scary. Even the mother character loses her darkly comedic edge near the end, which really helps show the films major shift in tone. This is all leading up to one of the most intense climaxes I have seen in films in quite a while. I really don't want to spoil it, but the film would be worth watching just for the last 15 minutes. But you shouldn't have to watch it just for the last 15 minutes, because the first 93 are all excellent as well.

28: Insidious

The second truly scary movie directed by James Wan, Insidious is an imperfect film. The parts that work really work, and the parts that don't really don't. But underneath its problems with writing and pacing, there is a genuinely chilling ghost story with a unique and interesting visual style.

The film is at its best in the first hour. Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) is being haunted by ghosts after one of her three sons, Dalton (Ty simpkins), falls into a coma. Her husband is avoiding the problem by taking on increasing responsibility at work, leaving her home alone to be terrorized. Most of the scares occur during the daytime, which is a bold move that helps the film stand out. She is completely alone during the day, but she can't leave her son in a coma to the ghosts. It is a great setup, and it comes with a great payoff.

There is one scene in particular that really makes this film a must watch in my opinion. It happens right after the family moves out of their house and into a new, hopefully less haunted one. Once again, it is broad daylight. The soundtrack is entertainer Tiny Tim's “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (You might know Tiny Tim best from the pilot episode of Spongebob Squarepants). The ghost is just a small child. And yet, it is still bone-chillingly terrifying. I've studied this scene trying to figure out what makes it so good, and I haven't figured it out.

But, with a film like insidious, it is hard to gush about all the things it does right forever. The film has some real structural problems that drag it down. The film is guilty of a major plot dump about an hour into it, in which a paranormal expert talks nonstop for five minutes about the finer points of astral projection. About ten minutes later, she does it again, this time about her previous history with the family.

The story lacks cohesion. The first hour is all about the mother being terrorized by ghosts. But in the second half, the father ends up the protagonist. The film can never really decide whether it wants Dalton to be an actual character or just a mcguffin. There are actually two other children in the film, but they seem to disappear into the aether whenever they aren't saying something creepy. And each person seems to have their own personal ghost who wants to kill them and them alone for some arbitrary reason (and what's worse, Dalton's ghost looks like Darth Maul). In the end, the problem is that its not a family being haunted; it is a succession of individuals who live in the same house being haunted one at a time.

Its hard to argue that Insidious is a great film, but it does still manage to be a great horror film. James Wan squeezes dread out of every frame. Each scene manages to scare you in a new way. From a paranormal expert performing a séance while wearing a world war 2 era gas mask to a family of ghosts with demonic smiles that stand as still as mannequins, its pretty hard to not be impressed by the visuals he presents.

  

29: Final Destination

This is another case of a good movie which gets lumped in with its really bad sequels. Unlike Saw, which couldn't be more different from the films it spawned, the problem with Final Destination was that the films were all basically the same. There just really wasn't any room to innovate within a fairly restrictive Premise.

A group of college students are at the airport on their class trip to France. Before the Plane has a chance to take off, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has a vision of the plane crashing. He causes a panic and gets kicked off the plane, along with a few others. The Plane does explode, killing everyone on board. It is a major blow, but in time the survivors begin recovering from their loss. Until they start dying. They die, one by one, in the exact order they would have had they stayed on the plane.

What's more, Alex keeps seeing signs whenever Death is coming to claim one of them. He has to desperately try to piece together who is dying, where, and how, all in the minutes before their death. His mostly fruitless struggles help enhance the paranoid atmosphere, as now the audience is constantly watching out for signs that death is coming, and for mundane dangerous objects that could prove lethal, and for whatever new twist death seems to constantly have up his sleeve.

To be honest, the reason I like the film has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the execution. This film is just a standard slasher with an interesting gimmick. It borrows a lot of its structure and its tropes from other good films. But this film is good because of the way it is shot. When death is after the one of the people, it feels like it can come from anywhere. The death sequences really take center stage. They can be slow and messy, or they can come out of nowhere. Whenever the people think they have figured out how to cheat them, the rules change. A lot of everyday objects seem capable of accidentally killing you, and the film builds tension from that fact.

The first death, in which Chad Donella's character slips on a puddle of water in his bathroom and gets his neck tangled up in a length of wire used as a clothesline is probably the best scene in the film. It feels like it could really happen to someone if they aren't careful, and that's what makes it as memorable as it is. He just suffocated, slowly. Some of the deaths in the film's second half were campy , but the fact that the hanging was so brutal gave the film a lot of its power.

The film has a bit of a problem maintaining that atmosphere all the way to the end, however. Between the last several deaths being more silly than scary, and the ending being pure fun, it is easy to dismiss this as just another teen slasher like they make every year. That is really selling a pretty great movie short, though. It might just be me, but any film that delivers this much great atmospherics and this many cool kills deserves to be remembered fondly.

30: Saw

The Saw series gets a lot of well-deserved flak nowadays. They are just nonsensical story broken up into a series of impractical and elaborate set pieces. They aren't particularly scary, but their ability to incite controversy caused many to dismiss American horror films on the whole as “torture-porn.” People often forget that the original had none of these problems.

The story is simple: Two men wake up chained on opposite sides of a disgusting bathroom, with a dead body between them. Dr. Laurence Gordon (Cary Elwes) is told he needs to kill Adam (Leigh Whannel) if he wants to escape. The two work together to try to discover who did this to them and why. As the clock ticks down, it becomes clearer and clearer that it is a zero-sum game. Meanwhile, the plot of the movie Seven occurs outside the bathroom.

Much of the story is told by a series of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks). It can feel a bit clunky at times, with sections of the film not really bothering to advance the main plot at all. The films most distinctive feature, the two men trapped in the bathroom, is often sidelined for the flashback sequences, which are, frankly, a rehash of the thriller Seven. But if there is film I don't mind seeing rehashed, that film would be Seven. Especially when it is this well-presented and effective.

The trap set pieces feel rusted out and cobbled together. You could really see someone making traps like this in their basement if they were motivated enough. While they don't really advance the main plot, they do serve to flesh out our villain, the sadistic Jigsaw killer.

Jigsaw was the real deal. He is a sadistic, judgmental, sociopathic monster. He targets people who he feels don't value their lives enough, and he sees just what those lives are worth to them. He tests people, he puts their lives on the line to see if they can stand up. If they can, then they are free to go and have learned a valuable life lesson. If they can't, he was right about them all along. Add in a bit of voyeurism and cruelty to make you question whether he is really in it to teach people a lesson, and you have a true monster on your hands. He has maybe a minute of screen time, but he still manages to be terrifying. What we know of him is secondhand, mostly from police reports, and the film lets us fill in the blanks on a lot of his personality. It couldn't be more different from Saw 2, where they wheel him out 10 minutes in and have him philosophize for half the movie.

You can really trace the decline of the saw series by examining how each film treats the Jigsaw killer. He started out as the unquestionably monstrous villain. Before too long, he was a sympathetic figure, a tragic character. A sequel later he was basically the protagonist, with the normal characters only serving as torture victims;. By the last few movies, he has become some kind of bizarre folk hero, whose message spreads far and wide and attracts followers whenever the writers need to cover up a plot hole or reveal a shocking twist.

The major twist in the original was great, and really brought the story together. It was both unexpected and coherent. It developed the character of Jigsaw. Revealing that he was a terminal cancer patient really helps to understand his character. It gave the whole film a new significance. And besides all of that, it was a moment of deep terror. The twist catapults the film past its other issues, and right into the best of the decade.