Whether it’s a zombie movie with the heart of a romance or a look at the terrors of being
a parent, these horror flicks aren’t properly understood by many of the people who watch them.
Based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Alex Garland's "Annihilation" has one of the most
confusing — and thought-provoking — movie endings of the last decade.
Biologist Lena takes a journey into the unknown after her husband Kane returns
from a three-year disappearance with some rather strange changes.
She and a team of women enter the mysterious meteor fallout zone known as "the Shimmer" to
try and find out what exactly happened to Kane while he and his team were inside. If you are
looking for a straightforward answer to this setup, "Annihilation" won’t exactly deliver.
Instead, "Annihilation" skirts the fine line between horror and sci-fi as Lena and her crew
discover the DNA-mixing properties of the alien presence. When Lena arrives at the lighthouse
at the center of the Shimmer, she has an encounter that leaves her a changed woman — quite literally.
The ending of "Annihilation" has sparked a lot of debate. Some believe it to be a metaphor
concerning death or disease, but Garland has said that it has to do with "self-destruction."
"Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?"
Whatever the meaning, it’s an ending that’s nearly impossible to forget.
Considered by many to be director Dario Argento’s magnum opus, "Suspiria" takes on
the occult in a manner that has inspired countless copycats since the film's 1977
release. "Suspiria" is a visual spectacle first and foremost — and that's far from a bad thing.
Told in Argento's signature Grand Guignol style — which relies more on ultra-violence and
brooding tone than telling one cohesive story — "Suspiria" follows dancer Suzy Bannion to Germany,
as she joins the prestigious Tanz Dance Academy to perfect her ballet abilities.
It’s impossible not to be drawn into Suzy's surreal new world as strange things begin
happening around her. She gets sick, the school suffers a maggot infestation,
and the blind pianist is killed by his own dog — so it’s no real shock when
Suzy discovers that this illustrious dance school once was, and still is, a witches'
coven. While this is the first entry in Argento’s "Three Mothers" trilogy,
"Suspiria" is a delightfully cryptic watch that’ll stick with you long after the credits roll.
At 23 years old, director Don Coscarelli kicked off his filmmaking career with a
head-scratcher that's equally imaginative and horrific. "Phantasm" follows a boy named Mike,
who witnesses a body being stolen from the local cemetery.
This leads Mike and his brother Jody on an investigative mission to check out the mausoleum,
where they happen upon an evil mortician — better known as the Tall Man — who
has the power to reanimate corpses. This discovery sends the Tall Man on a mission
to capture Mike and Jody, birthing his iconic horror movie catchphrase.
"Boy!"
Of course, you can’t forget about the murderous silver ball that flies into people's skulls with
the sole purpose of retrieving brain meat. For the late '70s, "Phantasm" was definitely
a horror film that left audiences wanting more. The third act falls apart a bit,
leaving audiences wanting to know exactly why the Tall Man is doing what he's doing.
Thankfully, Coscarelli returned to the world and characters he created
nine years later with 1988's "Phantasm II," kicking off a
quirky — and gory — little franchise beloved by many diehard horror fans.
When it comes to style over substance, "Beyond the Black Rainbow" is a poster
child for the phrase. Panos Cosmatos’ 2010 debut is chock full of trippy visuals and
synth-filled soundscapes — but when it comes to story, there’s not much of one at all.
Elena is a mute girl with psychic powers, kept prisoner in an institution by a crazed doctor
who loves watching her melt down on his many windows and monitors. Of course, once she’s
figured out how to harness her abilities, she escapes in a mind-bending extended sequence.
Overall, the narrative of "Beyond the Black Rainbow" boils down to the conflict between doctor
and patient, using its surreal futuristic-looking hospital as a unique backdrop. As surreal as the
imagery is, though, nailing down an actual plot becomes quite difficult when pressed.
Cosmatos' stylistic slow burn was undoubtedly meant to appeal to audiences on a more
subconscious level. When viewing "Beyond the Black Rainbow" with those expectations in mind,
one may finish viewing the movie in an altered mindset — but if you're looking
for a clear-cut first, second, and third act, it might be best to look elsewhere.
After the break-out success of "Drive," many anticipated Danish filmmaker Nicholas
Winding Refn to go on to make some of the next decade's action classics. Instead,
Refn followed up the stylish thriller with two much more baffling films,
the second of which was the Elle Fanning-led fashion horror flick "The Neon Demon."
Fanning plays Jesse, a young fashion model who has recently moved to Los Angeles. There,
she meets models Gigi and Sarah and their makeup artist Ruby,
who immediately take an interest in her. As Jesse gets closer and deeper,
she finds something extremely dark hiding beneath the beautiful facade.
"What’s wrong with that, anyway? Women would kill to look like this."
As weird as things already were, the ending really takes a turn
when Jesse finds herself the victim of her new peers’ cannibalistic impulses.
On the surface, the twist in "The Neon Demon" serves as a metaphor for the pain you face if
you’re a model or actress: the system will change your values and then eat you alive. However,
there is also a deeper layer here. Gigi's body rejects Jesse's organs, which symbolizes how she
had become rotten or impure. In the process of entrapping and capturing their prey,
these siren-like predators have ruined what made Jesse desirable in the first place.
Long before Peter Jackson made a name for himself with the "Lord of the Rings" movies,
he brought 1992's bonkers horror goodie "Dead Alive" — originally titled "Braindead" — to the
world. "Dead Alive" is a simple New Zealand love story buried deep inside a zany undead apocalypse.
Hapless hero Lionel Cosgrove struggles to keep his suburban family together after a
disease from a Sumatran rat monkey starts to turn normal people into flesh-eating zombies.
Of course, things don't go according to plan,
meaning it's not long before he has to take things into his own hands — shedding
tons of zombie blood along the way — to save Paquita, his one true love.
You can easily bypass any confusion by looking at "Dead Alive" as a story
of love and redemption — but there's a whole lot of family drama included in
Jackson's tale that gives the story some weird, uncomfortable layers. The gory
combination of humor and horror puts this gross-out flick in a category all its own.
Stephen King may have gone on record many times regarding his disdain for
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of his classic story "The Shining," but the Jack
Nicholson and Shelley Duvall-starring film is a classic for good reason.
Intense performances, disturbing imagery, epic camera work, and twists galore make this movie a
one-of-a-kind masterpiece. It's inspired so many wild theories that it'll make your head spin.
On the surface, King's tale explores the story of a fractured family on a descent
into madness. Jack Torrance and his son Danny share telepathic abilities — Danny's aware of it,
but Jack is not. That brings things to a chaotic and bloody crescendo as
the family takes root in the haunted Overlook Hotel in the dead of winter.
As a horrific ghost story, "The Shining" works wonders — but if you go deeper into
the theories about the film, many of which are outlined in the documentary "Room 237," you'll
start seeing odd narrative layers you may not have recognized before. It’s impossible
to watch "The Shining" without having some kind of lingering, distressing question.
"I’m very confused… and I just need a chance to think things over!"
Darren Aronofsky isn't the type of director to pander to the box office. He makes the
movies he wants to make and doesn’t seem to care what audiences think. That’s definitely
a good thing — because audiences didn’t really care for "mother!," to the point
that it became one of only a few movies to earn the lowest possible CinemaScore grade of F.
What exactly is this movie about,
and why did so many people hate it? The latter question is much easier to answer.
Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem star as a married couple looking to rebuild their lives
after a tragic fire. As Lawrence attempts to resurrect the home from the ground up,
odd events begin to occur that seem to link her own health with
that of the house. After an unexpected encounter with a family of strangers,
Lawrence becomes pregnant with Bardem’s child, inspiring him to write a poem.
The poem resonates with the people — a bit too much. Soon, the house has turned into a
battlefield, featuring cult members, looters, and riot police — and by the end, nothing is left.
It’s a visual onslaught that's anxiety-inducing, deeply upsetting, and downright confusing.
Is Jennifer Lawrence's character the symbol of mother nature? Is Bardem's poet really a look
at the power of humanity in relation to Earth's slow destruction? There's a lot to unpack here for
sure, but in a world of formulaic films, "mother!" is certainly unique — for better or for worse.
After the breakout success of Jordan Peele's "Get Out," horror fans knew to expect layers
of metaphor and social commentary from the director's next venture. What they didn't
expect was that "Us," Peele's second feature outing, would be even denser in its construction.
While it starts off as a home invasion movie about a Black family being invaded by a family
of doppelgangers known as the Tethered, "Us" slowly unravels its layers of meaning.
On a surface level, "Us" is relatively easy to understand,
with a final twist that changes everything you thought you knew
about the Wilson family. According to Adelaide Wilson’s doppelganger Red,
the Tethered were developed in a failed government experiment and sealed underground for generations.
Red was able to convince the other Tethered to rise to the surface
world and take down their lookalikes — and for a shocking reason. Of course,
the true message of the film ended up going over a lot of people’s heads.
Beneath the rabbit-eating and scissor-stabbing, "Us" is actually a metaphor about inequality
and class struggle. As the Tethered join their hands across America,
they unite forces in a way that our petty human squabbles would never allow us to do.
Every David Lynch movie is confusing — and to some extent, every David Lynch movie is a horror movie.
That’s why picking just one to represent his entire filmography is a nearly impossible choice.
While "Mulholland Drive," "Inland Empire," and "Lost Highway" could all fit on this list,
it’s Lynch's debut feature that still mystifies and puzzles viewers after over
45 years. "Eraserhead" is a surrealist black-and-white film that investigates
the horrors of domestic life in the most extreme ways possible.
Henry Spencer lives in a suburban industrial wasteland. One day, he is informed that his
girlfriend has had a child — but what they have created is anything but human. When she
hysterically leaves him to take care of the child for what feels like an endless amount of time,
Spencer brings us into his hallucinatory world filled with metaphorical visions and characters.
"Eraserhead" ends with Spencer killing the creature to put it
out of its misery and meeting his own strange fate — but taking these
events at face value is the wrong way to look at this deeply metaphorical film.
The main theme "Eraserhead" reinforces is the anxiety of parenthood. Lynch — whose
daughter was nine years old when the film was released — seemingly channeled his worries into
one of the most daringly cryptic films of the ‘70s. Some of the weirder parts
of the movie will never be explained, and that's just the way the director likes it.
"Believe it or not, ‘Eraserhead’ is my most spiritual film."
"Mhm. Why, elaborate on that."
"No, I won’t."
If you’re looking to dip your toes into the world of Japanese experimental horror,
then 1977’s "House" is an ideal first step. This Japanese horror movie from
1977 operates almost entirely in dream logic,
making for 88 of the most entertaining and confounding minutes ever put to film.
In "House," a schoolgirl called Gorgeous takes six
friends to her aunt's rural home for summer vacation. Once they arrive,
the house reveals itself to be a wacky haunted mansion that starts eating the girls alive.
One girl is eaten by a piano fingers-first. Another is beaten up by flying mattresses.
Those aren’t even the strangest things to happen in this "House" — there’s plenty of crazy
occurrences involving Kung-Fu, watermelon, and a cute, yet sinister cat. While it is easy to enjoy
"House" for its visual splendor and absurdity, there’s some real depth to its content as well.
Director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who was born in Hiroshima in 1938 and lost his
childhood friends to the atomic bomb, would go on to make very explicit anti-war movies
like "Hanagatami" in his late career. These themes of the ways war can haunt both people
and an entire nation are present in the subtext of this 1977 surrealist nightmare.
Luca Guadagnino's "Suspiria" is a completely different movie than Argento’s 1977 original,
both tonally and thematically. While the basic plot remains the same — Susie Bannion
attends a dance school in West Berlin in 1977 — Guadagnino weaves a tale that has
historical meaning on top of the already confusing story of the surreal original.
There’s a number of things the remake has that the original doesn’t,
like Tilda Swinton in three roles, a grotesque contortion sequence,
and an extra 50 minutes, to name a few. The biggest difference, though,
involves an entirely new side plot that changes the movie’s ending in a massive way.
While Susie still ultimately discovers the true identity of Mother Markos and the coven
of witches, much attention is paid to the investigations of one Dr. Josef Klemperer.
This might seem to distract from the horror and tension of the
2018 "Suspiria," but the addition of this character ties the surreal story to real
history. Klemperer's conflict revolves around losing his wife in World War II,
and the guilt and grief he feels are a metaphor for living in that time period in Germany.
At the end of "Suspiria," Susie visits Klemperer on his deathbed,
and she grants him what he has been searching for: the truth about his
wife. There is a touching, tragic story at the heart of this horrific historical epic.
"She was cold when she died… but she wasn’t afraid."
War is hell — quite literally, if you’re Jacob Singer. In his case,
seen in 1990’s "Jacob’s Ladder," it’s the Vietnam War, which haunts his dreams as he
tries to live a relatively quieter life as a postman. These nightmares ranging
from cryptic flashbacks to faceless demons, refuse to allow him to move on.
"Jacob’s Ladder" can be difficult to follow at times, but there’s never any
question that the monsters Jacob sees symbolize the post-traumatic stress
disorder that so many soldiers bring home with them — if they return home at all.
Jacob’s earlier life as a married father of three is clouded over by the stain of his
time on the Mekong Delta — but the reality of his present may be the most terrifying thing of all.
What begins as a psychological thriller steeped heavily in demonic symbolism quickly turns into
an allegory of heaven, hell, and the place troubled souls can get
stuck in between. What’s real, and what isn’t? Does it even matter?
You’ll probably have to watch it through a few times to find out.
Christopher Smith's "Triangle" is an odd movie,
for sure — one that feels like it may have worked better as an episode of "The X-Files."
This 2009 film centers on Jess, a troubled mother who goes on a yacht trip with a group
of friends. From the very beginning, she's under the impression that something is wrong.
After a storm hits the boat, her crew finds rescue in a passing ocean liner — and yet,
that foreboding feeling only gets worse for
Jess. That’s for good reason: there's a killer on the boat!
That reveal is the first in a long line of twists that throws Jess face-to-face with
none other than herself. While "Triangle" relies heavily on the trope of a horror film time loop,
it's intriguing — and entertaining — to watch Jess attempt to murder
every version of herself and her friends she comes across, with the goal of breaking the
cycle. But no matter how hard she tries, she never quite manages to break free.
The ending of "Triangle" may not provide audiences
with the clear-cut closure they expected or hoped for, but it's a thought provoking one
that will have you thinking about the hidden impact of everyday behaviors.
Christian Bale is unforgettable as Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic
yuppie at the heart of Mary Harron's adaptation of the Brett Easton Ellis
novel. Bateman lives a privileged life in 1980s Manhattan — privileged enough
that he routinely gets away with the murder of sex workers and colleagues.
By the end of "American Psycho," it seems like Bateman is a full-blown serial killer driven
to madness by the lack of consequences for his actions — or is he? The infamous
monologue that wraps up the film calls the reality of every earlier scene into question.
"My punishment continues to elude me… and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself."
The confusing ending of "American Psycho" left audiences stumped,
but it all boils down to one factor — the unreliable narrator.
On one hand, there is the interpretation that Bateman is powerful enough that he
can get away with whatever he pleases and his associates will cover for him.
As horrifying as that might be, the darker ending is that Bateman can no longer tell
the difference between his psychotic fantasies and realities. Ultimately,
it is left ambiguous as to how many of the killings in "American
Psycho" actually happened — and how much of it was in Bateman's head.