Written by contributor Christina ‘DZA’ Marie
Ah, spooky season. The best time of the year. (Fight me, Christmas.) One of the reasons October is the best month of the year is the surplus of horror movies. You can’t change the channel without seeing a grisly murder or demonic possession, and it’s beautiful.
We all know those old classics: Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, all those overblown 80s creations that all have a gazillion sequels and remakes. With this list, and in no particular order, I’m choosing movies exclusively from the year 2000 or later, and none of them are remakes. (Well, one of them is an Americanised remake of a Japanese classic, but that’s it.)
Get Out
I’m writing this before watching Antebellum, so I can’t form an opinion on that particular Jordan Peele film. However, Get Out will always be one of my favourite horror movies.
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid hearing about it, Get Out is the story of a Black man going to visit his White girlfriend’s parents for the first time. Turns out, they plan to harvest his body. The whole thing is a commentary on race in America and the insidious nature of White moderates, and it’s got a whole creepy factor that gets under your skin.
The Cabin in the Woods
A horror movie that makes fun of horror movies, written by the guy who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Sigourney Weaver as the villain. There is nothing I don’t love here. This is one of those films that you either put on your Top 10 Modern Horror Movies list or think it’s the dumbest thing ever. There is no in-between, like with pineapple on pizza.
The basic premise is that five twenty-somethings go to a Cabin in the Woods, where a group of government-type people send zombified monsters to kill them. Except the “villains” are a lot more morally complex than we’re initially led to believe—and hilarious. Think of those goofballs who work at the office, constantly making jokes and having fun, except their office environment includes brutally murdering the guy who plays Thor.
It
I never read the book. Or any of Stephen King’s classic horror books. Don’t judge. I personally preferred Part One over Part Two, although they were both great. I can’t tell who’s scarier: Pennywise the clown, or the creepy abusive adults.
Both? Both. Both.
Before I Wake
An eight-year-old boy’s dreams—and nightmares—become reality.
The boy is an orphan and gets taken in by a foster family, two parents whose own son drowned. At first, when they realise the boy’s gift, they use him to try to get their own son back (the dreamer sees a picture of the dead son, dreams of the dead son; the dreamer watches a video of a past Christmas, and the dead son can now talk), but they quickly realise that that’s A Bit Not Good, right around the time the dreamer has a nightmare.
This movie is genuinely creepy, building dread and suspense until the boy’s personal monster comes to life and starts killing people. But it’s also weirdly uplifting, with a hopeful ending.
Resident Evil
The first rated R movie I’ve ever seen. Good times. Based on the video game, Resident Evil is a zombie action franchise. We follow Alice as she unravels the secrets of the Umbrella Corporation. In the first movie, she and a SWAT team of sorts go into the Umbrella Corporation’s underground lab, where the computer program murdered everyone after they were exposed to a virus. Turns out, this virus brings them back to life as zombies.
In the sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the zombies have escaped the lab and gotten into Racoon City, where officials desperately try to keep it contained. In the next movies…you don’t have to watch the next movies. Let’s just pretend there are only two.
The Ring
An American remake of a Japanese classic, The Ring is about a haunted videotape that kills people in seven days. Our main character is a reporter who catches wind of this, watches the tape, and then spends the next seven days unraveling its secrets.
Unlike most horror movies, this one is rated PG-13. Meaning it doesn’t rely on blood and gore for horror effects. It uses suspense and dread to rachet up the tension until the true horror is revealed.
A Quiet Place
Some sort of aliens/monsters that hunt by sound show up and kill any humans they find. The story follows a small family as they struggle to survive in this post-apocalypse, made complicated by the fact that the mom is pregnant, the eldest daughter is deaf, and everyone’s blaming themselves for the death of the youngest child in the opener.
Fun fact: the deaf daughter is played by an actually deaf actress. Which is great, because Hollywood has a hard time hiring actors with disabilities, even if they’re portraying those actual disabilities on screen.
Train to Busan
A 2016 Korean zombie movie about family and fatherhood. A zombie outbreak in Korea prompts the government to herd the refugees to a train leading to the fortified city of Busan. Except the zombies get on the train, so the refugees struggle to survive as they creep from car to car. It doesn’t help that a lot of the refugees are self-centered assholes who are happy to sacrifice their fellow humans for a slightly greater chance of survival.
It’s one of those “humans are the real monsters” metaphor, but also highlights some of our greater qualities, too.
Ready or Not
This one’s a horror comedy about a bride who marries into a…very unusual, rich family. This family has achieved great fortune through a deal with a demonic figure. Every time someone else marries into the family, they have to play a game on their wedding night. Most of them are harmless. But if the game is Hide and Seek, that’s the cue for the family to kill them. If the family doesn’t kill the bride before sunrise, they all die.
The family is totally dysfunctional, and darkly funny. Think Cabin in the Woods, but without the explicit commentary on horror movies.
The Boy
An American woman takes a nannying job in England, where she’s told she’ll be taking care of a porcelain doll. At first, she thinks it’s a joke, and then after some Paranormal Activity-style shenanigans, quickly realises that this is a deadly situation.
What’s interesting here (other than the third-act twist) is that the woman is a domestic abuse survivor. That’s the whole reason she’s in England in the first place: she’s running from her ex. Once she realises the danger of the haunted doll, she immediately switches to survival mode, creating stark parallels between the story and domestic violence.
(So, uh, trigger warning for that.)
