3: Let The Right One in; Let Me In

American remakes of foreign films are usually terrible. They are the most sleazy kind of cash grab, taking a great movie that isn't widely seen in America and trying to make lightning strike twice. The people assigned to make the movies are usually poorly equipped for the job, people who don't understand what made the original so unique in the first place. So, when I heard that the director of Cloverfield made an American remake of the incredible Swedish vamprie romance Let The Right One In, I immediately wrote it off as one of “those films” and didn't bother going to see it in theaters. That was a mistake.

Both films are amazing. They both tell the same incredible tale well, in their own unique styles. The director of the remake, Matt Reeves, stunned me with his great directing. He kept in nearly everything that made the original unique while presenting it in his own unique style.. Let Me In has humbled me.

Both films star a 12 year old boy who is constantly bullied and dreams of revenge. He manages to be both endearing and creepy, a tragic character. In time he befriends a young girl who moves in next door, who is also endearing and creepy. And a vampire, as it turns out. In time, they grow closer and closer, until they eventually fall in love.

But this isn't like the teen vampire romance stories that are popular right now. The inherently disturbing aspects the concept, the things the other films shy away from, are embraced in this film. The vampire character is eternally 12 years old, rather than 19. She comes off as alien and creepy, possibly even manipulative. The vampire rules she has to follow are portrayed as mysterious and dangerous. We don't really know anything about her for sure by the end of it. But you still like her.

That is what this film does so well, it pits you against yourself. Intellectually, you might know that the She is dangerous and bad for our main character, but watching the two of them together makes you hope that they work out. The main character's might creep you out in one scene, but in the next you try to forget about that as you watch their story unfold. You wish for a happy ending when you know no happy ending is possible.

The main differences between the two versions are stylistic, while the plot and dialogue is nearly identical in both versions. The new version, Let Me In, does shy away from a few plot points the original mentioned, while emphasizing others. But they are minor points in the grand scheme of the film. The real differences come in with the camerawork. Let Me In's camera is hyper-focused. It really shows you the world from one character's perspective, and it is extremely effective. You feel like you are right there with the character's as they go about their day. The directing of Tomas Alfredson is more traditional. It was competent but unremarkable. In the end, if you really despise subtitles, you can watch Let Me In without missing out on much. If you can stand subtitles, however, then I would recommend that you watch the original.

Then watch the new one afterward. They're worth it.

Brief Aside: Ironically, the freedom Matt Reese had in this film allowed him to make the film even more claustrophobic and personal than his last film, Cloverfield, even though that film was shot in first person perspective (which really makes me question why found footage films exist in the first place)

4: Pan's Labyrinth

The spiritual sequel to The Devil's Backbone, Pan's labyrinth is even better than its predecessor. Taking place after the end of the Spanish Civil War, the film focuses on Ofelia (Ivana Barquero), a young girl using her imagination to escape the bleak world around her. Her mother married a terrible man, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), and is sick with his baby. Ofelia sneaks around, constantly hearing whispers of the big nasty world around her, but being unable to do anything to help.

So Ofelia makes her own world. She goes and visits with faeries and fauns. She is a hero, who can do anything that is required of her. She is a princess, working to win back her throne and escape her life forever. In her world, anything is possible. When her mother is sick, she can heal her. She is in control there. The tale is told from Ofelia's perspective, so it is often jarring to see her behavior from the perspective of one of the adult's. In Ofelia's head, it all makes sense. Objectively, it is absolutely bizarre.

Just as The Devil's Backbone was about helplessness, Pan's Labyrinth was about hopelessness. The war was already over. The “freedom fighters” fight for vengeance, not freedom. Every death was unnecessary, all the suffering was for nothing. If The Captain died, he would be replaced by a different captain. That is what struck me the most about this movie; there was nothing worth fighting for anymore, but people kept fighting and dying for nothing. No wonder Ofelia dreamed of a better world.

The Captain is another one of Guillermo Del Toro's trademark scummy villains. He is obsessed with honor and the family name above all else. He desires order and obedience from his servants and family members, and nothing else. He is cold and uncaring towards his wife, and he only seems interested in his son to keep up his legacy. He has no feelings towards Ofelia at all, unless she misbehaves. Add on to that that he is a war criminal working for a fascist regime, and you have a great bad guy.

But the true star of the show is Ofelia. She is perfectly acted. You feel her earnestness and her innocence. You see her happiness and her desperation. She loves her baby brother and is scared for her mother. You want to protect her, but it is clear that no protection is possible. One by one, the people who are supposed to keep her safe fail her.

Pan's Labyrinth is probably the darkest fairy tale you will ever see. Even Ofelia's imaginary world isn't nice, with nasty beasts waiting, hungry and anxious. It really hammers home that there is nowhere safe.

Between the eerie Faun and the monstrous child eating Pale Man, Ofelia's world is a reflection of her surroundings.

After watching the film, I am tempted to imagine just as she did. I want to believe that what she saw was real. That magic exists, and she escaped the mortal world to live forever as a princess. I wish I could believe it.

5: Trick R Treat

I'm not sure I have ever described a horror film as delightful before, but Trick R Treat is absolutely delightful. A horror anthology in the vein of Creepshow, focusing on the best night of the year, October 31^st. It combines a sense of fright with a sense of fun. This film channels the spirit of Halloween effortlessly. Its like the horror A Chrismas Story.

In the world of Trick R treat, everyone has a dark secret, and nothing is what it seems. All of the customs we observe for Halloween aren't just for fun, but are also for survival. Creatures stalk the night, and if you break the rules you will fall prey to them. The film is almost reverent of Halloween. It has a lot of respect for the holiday and it's history, the old tradition's and what makes it still popular today.

The film is excellently plotted. Rather than being a traditional anthology, all of the stories are connected to the others in some way. It gives the world a sense of discovery, seeing references to the other stories, and having character's from both stories cross. Some of them are extremely subtle, to the point where you only notice them after repeated viewings. The stories are all connected through a central character, Sam, the spirit of the holiday. Sam watches everyone as they go about their business. As long as they uphold the tenants of Halloween, they are free to do whatever else they want.

All of the stories focus on common themes, but shift dramatically in tone. The first, the tale of a sadistic principal who kills people with poisoned Halloween candy, is darkly comic throughout. A lot of the Principal's action's are over the top to the point of hilarity. The next story is genuinely creepy. It is the tale of a group of kid's visiting an allegedly haunted quarry. A flashback sequence features kids in the most inexplicably terrifying costumes I've ever seen. The third story is interspersed between the others. It's the tale of a group of teenage girls going to a party and having fun, and trying to get their friend laid. They leave her alone to find a date, and she is stalked by a mysterious stranger. The final story is the tale of an old, bitter man who is does not respect the Holiday. He is haunted by Sam, who turns into a genuinely disturbing villain in this story. All of the main character's in these stories have dark secrets, and watching them all twist and turn around each other is an absolute blast.

This film is an absolute joy to look at. The special effects are all unusually good for a direct-to-DVD film. One transformation sequence in particular is probably my favorite transformation sequence of all time. The final scene with Sam is incredibly engaging. Sam fills staircases with candy. Marbles, and glass. He writes creepy messages on the walls, fills the yard with jack-o-lanterns. It is really beautiful. Even the more grounded stories are well-directed.

It takes everything that is great about the holiday and encapsulates it. Watching this film makes it feel like Halloween. It touches the slightly demented child in all of us. Is it scary? Not really. And yet, that doesn't matter. Sliding this DVD into my player is a Halloween tradition for me, just as much as passing out candy and carving jack-o-lanterns.  

6: The Others

The Others has one of the best horror premises for a horror movie I've ever heard. Nicole Kidman plays Grace Steward, an extremely strict and protective mother of two children. The children in question suffer from a severe allergy to sunlight, so they must be kept in near complete darkness all the time. They cannot leave their house, and an incredibly complex series of rules is maintained to keep them in near perfect darkness at all times. The children are worried that their mother is going mad, and the mother is worried as well. Meanwhile, the house is being haunted, and they can't leave.

This is the greatest setup I have ever seen. There is huge conflict from without and within. There is the question of what is and isn't real. The classic problem of film's being scariest in the dark when the vast majority of people's time spent awake is during the day: Solved. The eternal question “why not just leave the house if it is being haunted?”: Answered. It would take a considerable amount of time and work to make a film like this bad, and the people who made the film used that time to make it amazing instead.

Nicole Kidman's character is really put through the wringer in this movie. Her husband had just died in the war, and now she keeps hearing things in their house. The new servants she hired seem to be up to something, but she had no evidence but her sneaking suspicions. She has no one to talk to, she can't leave her children alone. They even seem scared of her, because she lost her temper with them once or twice. She can't hide behind her rigid facade forever, something has to give.

This really is a film all about its main character. Yes, there are sneaky servants and nasty ghosts, but it is Grace's reaction to these events that make the movie. Her melancholy infects the rest of the film, giving it a grimness that it would not otherwise have had. Strip it of all its supernatural elements, and you have the story of a mother who has to take care of children even when she can't take care of herself. That is as compelling and unpleasant as the ghosts themselves.

When the film finally get's going, it goes off in a completely unexpected direction. When they finally give an explanation for all of the supernatural goings-on, it is not at all what you expect. But it is the perfect twist: shocking yet inevitable. After having seen it, I could not imagine the film ending any other way. This film manages to be even more powerful each time you watch it, and a lot of that comes down to the ending it has.

The Others took a great premise and went off in a completely different direction. A character driven ghost story, light on frills and thrills. A spellbinding look into a state of mind most people would rather not see. A meditation on duty and dependence. A slow-burning, creepy, dread-filled, tragic, subdued, and, most of all, smart supernatural thriller.  

7: The Devil's Backbone

People often remember childhood as the best day's of their lives. It was all just running around carefree and playing. Every day was adventure, and the worst conceivable atrocity was sitting in school on a nice day. Whatever problems you had seemed trivial looking back through an adult's eyes. In the Devil's Backbone, Guillermo Del Toro tries to remind us all just what it feels like to be a child.

The film takes place near the end of the Spanish Civil War, in an orphanage for the children of dead soldiers. In the center of the orphanage is a bomb that had failed to go off. Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is left there by his mentor (for his own safety, but from a child's perspective it feels like being abandoned). The other kid's start picking on him, and every night he sees the ghost of a dead boy trying to scare him off. None of the adult's will believe him, and none of the children like him enough to care one way or the other.

The Devil's Backbone focuses on one aspect of childhood that is rarely shown in film: powerlessness. These kid's are pushed and pulled by adult politics they have no influence over. They barely understand what is going on. There is nothing they can do to prevent what is happening. And it's not just the children that are powerless. The adult's of the orphanage are on the losing side of the war. If they were discovered, they and the children they are responsible for would be shot as traitors. They are pushed and pulled by national politics that they have no influence over. The world of The Devil's Backbone is one of helplessness and dread.

The film never shies away from the wrongness of its premise. Children die. The first shot of the film is the death of a child and the hiding of his body. When he comes back as a ghost, the makeup effects only serve to make him appear more childlike. They act like kid's act and talk like kid's talk. The film's ending evokes William Golding's Lord of the Flies, with the children's innocence lost.

The thing that really makes the film work is how good the adult character's are. Dr Casares. (Federico Luppi) is a simple man of science who doesn't believe in any of that superstitious nonsense. He is fiercely dedicated to the children and his wife. He is the clever and inspiring and protective, the perfect father figure for all of these children. Then there's Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who isn't so perfect. In fact, he is absolute scum. He might be the antagonist who has angered me personally on this list. He is a man who never grew out of bullying to get his way, stuck raising orphans for a lost cause. He becomes increasingly deranged and desperate as the film goes on. Just when you think he is as bad as he could possibly be, he becomes much worse.

Guillermo Del Toro is a complicated, almost paradoxical director, and this film is the perfect example of that. A bleak story told stylishly. The film at times is genuinely beautiful, which makes the rest of it even more disturbing by contrast. He makes you care about the people, but then does horrible thing's to them. His horror film's feel more like Greek tragedies than the exciting, frenetic slashers you so often see from other filmmakers. That's what makes them so compelling.

8: Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity is a found footage film without all of the baggage that has traditionally become associated with the style. For the majority of the film, the camera is mounted on a tripod, looking over the film's two reasonably interesting character's. There is no anonymous cameraman, no pointless shaky-cam footage, and no filler footage of people running from place to place. Even more important than that, things happen in this movie. Rather than the camera spinning around furiously trying to catch shadows of something on film, the stationary camera catches all of the events as they occur.

The film spends most of its time on one image that has since become synonymous with the film: the camera dutifully watching over our main character's as they sleep. That stationary shot builds a tremendous amount of tension even when nothing remotely scary is going on. When a camera lingers on something, it is universally understood that that thing is important. This camera does nothing but linger on things, we are absolutely ready for something exciting to happen throughout the entire film. It gets to the point that the door creaking is just as terrifying in this film as a serial killer running in with a machete would be in any other.

But the film doesn't stay at the doors creaking stage for long. Before too long, bangs, loud noises and moving furniture become the norm. We see ghostly footprints, unnatural fire, and even possession. Originally, the thing seems to be a simple ghost, but as the film goes on it becomes more and more clear that it is a demonic entity. Rather than simply haunting a house, it is after our main character, and it has been for a long time.

The main character's in question are fairly well done. There is Katie (Katie Featherson), a superstitious but otherwise extremely likable person who basically drags her boyfriend (Micah Sloat) into her quest to prove the house is haunting. I particularly liked Micah's story arc, the boyfriend who goes along with all of the paranormal stuff to protect his girlfriend's mental well-being, until he realizes it is her physical well-being that he needed to be protecting.. The character's are simple archetypes, well done, which lets the film focus on all of the supernatural elements.

It is not an exaggeration to call this film the next Blair Witch Project. Both film's are simple stories about thing's that go bump in the night. Both film's made legendary profits off the backs of interesting marketing gimmicks. Both reinvigorated the found footage genre when they were released, spawning hordes of imitators. Both give hope to young genre filmmakers everywhere, standing tall as proof that you can succeed without a budget.

The only difference between this film and Blair Witch was that Paranormal Activity was actually good.

9: The Devil's Rejects

I wouldn't go so far as to call Rob Zombie's first film, House of 1000 Corpses, good, but it was quite entertaining. A family of serial killer's having fun doing what they do best. The entire film looked like an album cover with it's use of intense colors and imagery. It was a popcorn flick, something to stick in the middle of a horror marathon to lighten the mood a bit. I was surprised to learn it had a sequel, and even more surprised by what the sequel ended up being.

The Devil's Rejects takes the family from House and throws them harshly into the real world. The opening scene really says it all: a massive police renders almost half of the family dead or captured in the first ten minutes of the film. After the rest of them escape, the police search the house. They discover cages filled with people, bodies in varying stages of dismemberment pretty much in every room. The film cuts to a news station covering as bodies begin being pulled out of a mass grave. The opening makes one thing abundantly clear: this film was going to have a completely different tone from the first.

The thing that makes this film stand out is how tight the focus is on the villains. The film follows the rest of the family and never tries to make excuses for them. They don't just steal a car because they are desperate to get away they gleefully murder the car's owner first. They need a room to stay in for a while until they can escape, so they talk their way into the first room they can and immediately start tormenting the people there in any way they can. These aren't desperate criminals struggling to survive, they are sadistic killers who don't care if they get caught. They're like a Manson family Bonnie and Clyde.

But by the end of the film, you are rooting for them. The supposed good guys are just as bad, just as sadistic. He wants to give the family their just desserts. And you can't stand him. You love baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig). You even grow a soft spot for the way Otis (Bill Mosely) bickers with the rest of them. They are a close family that you don't want to see torn apart, even after they start skinning peoples' faces off to make face-masks. Seriously, it is hard to describe just how messed up these guys actually are. It is hard to make you genuinely care about likable character's, and this film has you feeling afraid for a family that calls themselves the Devil's Rejects.

Technically, the film holds up well. Rob Zombie shows a mastery of using the soundtrack to show theme and setting. He seems to understand the mechanics of horror film; he knows the reasoning behind convention and he knows when to break it (and, almost more importantly, when not to).

The film ends in basically the only way it could have, but it is somehow completely alien. The events that happen are basically the events you would expect after the film's opening, but the way you feel about it has completely changed. It is us, the audience, who changed from the events in the film, rather than the character's themselves.