Although Halloween has come and gone, this year has experienced pretty slim pickings in terms of horror movies. If Final Destination 5 or The Human Centipede 2 aren’t to your taste and you’ve seen all the venerated classics that get trotted out for every ‘Best Of’ list, here are a few off – or underneath – the beaten track.
Horror movies are particularly difficult to recommend because tolerance for gore, corniness, and special effects failure will vary vastly. These are five of my personal favourites that nobody talks about anymore. Of course, if I weren’t just counting “underappreciated” movies then Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead would have a perpetual spot on this list, but zombies are still a hot commodity right now.
Final Destination (2000)
If you’ve seen any of the inferior sequels, you’ll already know that Final Destination follows a group of teenagers trying to avoid execution by Rube Goldberg machine by finding signs in reflections, stick arrangements, and creepy breezes.
Full disclosure – This is one of my favourite movies of all time. The original instalment is remarkably enthusiastic in its execution. The teenagers on metaphorical death row speak earnestly of fate, horror tropes, and existential crises in a way that is neither completely serious nor self aware. Somehow, as the film unfolds and the inevitable draws near, I always find myself hoping against hope that they survive.
Watch it with the original ending if you can, because the theatrical edit is deeply unsatisfying and doesn’t fit the mood of the rest of the film.
Ravenous (1999)
A cowardly 1840’s American soldier reassigned to a camp in the scenic middle of nowhere encounters a survivor of a botched attempt to traverse the Oregon Trail and is thrust into the Wendigo legend that consuming human flesh will grant the eater superhuman strength and rapid healing.
Ravenous performed poorly in theatres due to an awfully misguided ad campaign suggesting vampirism instead of, oh, the Donner Party served with a heap of black humour and an absolute kicker of an ending.
Watching it in tenth grade math class was an unforgettable experience.
Tremors (1990)
Perfection, Nevada, is a town of about ten people being besieged and eaten by underground creatures. Since this is in the pre-cell phone era, they’re on their own.
Tremors falls toward the comedy side of horror-comedy. I’m told it’s also well-loved by the paleontological community for its straightforward treatment of the monsters as forces of nature rather than as metaphors for social issues, but by now I hardly care about the whys and wherefores. For a B-movie it has a surprising number of recognizable actors, all of which seem to be enjoying themselves at least a little bit. The survivors are also surprisingly logical in their actions – you can nearly see the gears turning in their heads as they test the monsters’ capabilities and systematically exhaust their escape options in a logical order.
Also, Reba McIntyre and Kevin Bacon are adorable together.
Ginger Snaps (2000)
Ginger, sixteen, gets her period and is mauled by a wild animal on the same night. Then she sprouts hair in unusual places, develops an aggressive sex drive, and grows a tail, forcing her sister Brigitte to search for a cure.
Lycantropy-as-puberty metaphor aside, Ginger’s gradual transformation from goth girl to fille fatale to werewolf is as fascinating to observe as Lindsay Lohan’s career train-wreck. But this is in no way Mean Girls with werewolves. Both sisters, who are cast to look as young as “they” say they are, are a pair of morbid misfits in a Canadian suburb. They stage death scenes, have a suicide pact, and plot to kill a popular girl’s dog well before lycanthropic infection. But it’s more satisfying that way, when nobody has a sudden mid-movie or mid-transformation change of heart. The movie keeps them bracingly true to character to lead the film to its bitter, logical conclusion.
(I felt like I was watching Heathers with more blood and less eighties hair.)
Daybreakers (2010)
In 2019, 95% of the population has transformed into vampires and the remaining humans are being captured and farmed for blood. This is clearly a very unsustainable practice. Meanwhile, a vampire researcher looking for a blood substitute instead uncovers a human resistance that might have a cure for having no reflection, being immortal, and exploding when staked.
Most of the delight is in the details of the first half of Daybreakers – trendy cafes serve 10% blood with coffee, all business is conducted in the nighttime, and SUVs are outfitted with opaque windshields prone to technical failure at inopportune moments. Everyone seems to be wearing suits or houndstooth coats. In fact, I have never seen a more stylish vampire movie. The supposed “cure” for vampirism is ingeniously symmetrical and rather ironic. But alas, all good things come to an end. The elegance in Daybreakers goes to hell when starving vampires turn into a horde of flying, shrieking orcs clad in houndstooth tatters and begin exploding. Then a lot of side characters get eaten. Twilight, this ain’t.
Watch the director’s cut if you can.
Horror Movies
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