With a lineup ranging from timeless genre staples like Halloween to modern classics
that include Mandy and The Wailing, it's not exactly a challenge to find a winner among
Shudder's unhinged offerings.
The bigger problem is knowing where to start.
Given the stigma that's generally accompanied the vampire genre since a certain sparkle-skinned
seed of night gained pop culture infamy, we'll go ahead and give you a free pass for having
likely missed Michael O'Shea's relentlessly bleak The Transfiguration.
O'Shea's genre-redefining debut follows a desperately lonely young New Yorker with a
seriously misguided affection for vampire fiction.
Gritty, ponderous, and altogether mystifying, The Transfiguration is at once a daring, wildly
insightful examination of inner city alienation, a torturous exploration of post traumatic
stress, and an obsessive exploration of a fantasy life taken far past the edge of sanity.
For the record, The Transfiguration is also a gruesome, bloody exploration of urban decay
that's wholly unafraid to dwell in scorched shadows and filthy back alleys.
Pitch-perfect performances from newcomer Eric Ruffin and up-and-comer Chloë Levine help
ground this moody, profoundly unsettling tale in a heightened state of reality that often
feels a little too real for comfort.
There are horror movies that indulge in the fleeting pleasures of jump scares and blood
lust, and then there are movies that seek to expose you to things that will unnerve
you in ways you didn't think possible — the sorts of things that stay burned into your
brain for months and years after you've seen them.
Hagazussa is 110% of the latter school.
If you've yet to experience Lukas Feigelfeld's gothic folk nightmare about an isolated woman
struggling to maintain her sanity and raise her infant daughter in the wilds of 15th Century
Europe, now's the time to dive in.
Just know that the film isn't tailored to horror fans who get their kicks from cheap
scares and buckets of fake blood.
Truth be told, there's hardly an ounce of fake blood to be seen in Hagazussa's 102-minute
runtime.
But what it lacks in gore-fueled mayhem, it more than makes up for in ominous energy and
gothic imagery.
Feigelfeld uses a heavy dose of both to lull you into a trance-like state before bringing
the hammer down with a shocking finale that's certain turn the stomach of even the most
hardcore horror fan.
Consider yourself warned.
Anna Biller's pseudo-horror spoof The Love Witch is the very definition of a breakthrough
film — though it's admittedly not the sort of classic horror schtick some would expect
in a genre breakout.
Set in the modern day, The Love Witch tells the tale of a beautiful young witch named
Elaine who's determined to use her spells, magic, and callous gender-centric fantasies
to make a man fall in love with her.
The problem is, her spells and magic work, and they tend to leave a love-addled dead
man in their wake.
When the bodies start piling up, locals start to take notice of Elaine's bewitching ways,
and the young sorceress' life begins to spin out of control.
Biller takes a bracingly original approach to this deceptively simple witch's tale, pitting
Elaine's '60s-esque style and persona starkly against The Love Witch's modern day setting.
The result is a dizzying, often hilarious, frequently unnerving film that finds Biller
telling a bold little anti-horror tale with some refreshingly insightful views on gender
roles.
Holiday horror has been a tradition for years, with filmmakers, studios, and streaming services
using the concept to reign bloody terror over every holiday from Thanksgiving to April Fools'
Day.
But back in 1974 — a full four years before Halloween helped make holiday horror legit
— that was not the case.
So it's no surprise that not many people really knew what to do with Bob Clark's menacing
holiday slashterpiece Black Christmas upon release.
35 years later, people still don't quite seem to know what to make of Clark's wicked little
holiday nightmare.
And okay, that may be because Clark's name is typically associated with a holiday film
he made a decade after Black Christmas — a yuletide charmer about a boy who really, really
wants Santa to leave him a carbine-action Red Ryder B.B. gun under the tree.
Yes, the guy who directed Black Christmas also directed the iconic, family-friendly
holiday fable A Christmas Story — though we'd argue that Black Christmas is the better
movie.
"Isn't Santa naughty?
Oh, ho ho f---."
It's also widely regarded as one the first full-on slasher flicks — one that finds
a bevy of sorority girls who are being terrorized by a madman over Christmas break.
From that now-classic slasher setup, Clark and screenwriter Roy Moore craft a bleak,
breathless, socially-conscious drama overflowing with the sort of shocks and genre staples
that have been copied over and over in slasher movies — only Black Christmas is so much
smarter.
If the past few years have taught us anything, it's that the so called "Hollywood dream factory"
is an absolute nightmare for aspiring young actresses.
Even still, thousands of would-be starlets flock to Tinseltown every year in hopes of
becoming the next big thing.
Most of them will fail miserably.
And those who make it may be forced to sacrifice parts of themselves they cannot get back.
"Dreams require sacrifice… and so do we."
Released in the fall of 2014, Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's harrowing Hollywood drama
Starry Eyes is a film painfully aware of those facts.
As such, it now plays as a near-prophetic piece of horror fiction that — even in its
unbridled, brutalistic insanity — somehow doesn't feel like it's all that far off the
mark.
On the surface, of course, Starry Eyes really could not be more realistic, as it follows
the talented young Sarah who, on the verge of finally landing her big break, has the
proverbial rug pulled by a sleazy producer with ulterior motives.
Turns out those motives are far more devious than anyone might've expected — a fact Sarah
learns the hard way when she eventually succumbs to his advances.
What follows is a ruthless fever dream that's part body horror nightmare, part occult drama,
and part vicious Hollywood satire.
All of which likely makes Starry Eyes sound a bit nutty.
Believe us when we say it is — and in all the best ways.
If Repulsion-style psychodramas are your cup of tea, Robert Altman's Images is a legit
must see.
Released to little fanfare in 1972, Images was the middle film in Altman's unofficial
"Gothic Trilogy," sandwiched between two deeply simpatico female-centric character studies
That Cold Day in the Park and Altman's overlooked masterwork 3 Women.
Like those films, Images puts a disturbed woman center stage and surrounds her with
Altman's signature style.
Unlike its sister films, Images utilizes style and setup to cast an unflinching sense of
anxiety over the action, fleshing out the dark impulses awakening within a tragically
fractured psyche.
As for the story, we'll simply tell you that it plays out like a schizophrenic doppelgänger
nightmare with the woman in question losing her grip on reality, and finding men from
her past and present blurring in and out of seemingly dual realities.
If you're anything like us, your life was never quite the same after experiencing the
visceral, relentlessly brutal freak show that is Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Shot with virtually no budget on gritty 16 mm, featuring no name actors, and possessed
of a near suffocating sense of hyper-reality, Hooper somehow created a horror classic with
his twisted tale of cannibalistic hillbillies out to snack on an unwitting group of youngsters.
There are some things in this film you just can't unsee.
As for the things you simply can't unsee, well, if you've already experienced The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre, then you hardly need us to tell you about them.
If you haven't, we wouldn't dream of spoiling the grisly horrors that await you within the
movie's sweaty, white-knuckled 83 minutes.
Over the years, there have been a handful of legendary actor and director pairings in
the world of cinema.
One of the more unsung pairings is that of Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon.
To date, Shannon has featured prominently in all five of Nichols' features, and if you
want to see the duo at their absolute best, look no further than their chilling, apocalyptic
psychodrama Take Shelter.
Part rural family drama and part doom-fueled psychological thriller, Take Shelter follows
a farmer plagued by horrific visions of a coming cataclysm.
Fearful of what lies ahead, the man's hard-wired paranoia leads him to build an elaborate shelter
in his back yard — a course of action that threatens to tear his family apart before
the end of days can.
Featuring career-best work from Shannon and a star-making turn from Jessica Chastain,
Take Shelter finds Nichols playing in genre tropes with the precision of a horror master,
building the madness to fever pitch that'll leave your heart in your throat and your jaw
on the floor.
You should know up front that the first 30 minutes of Most Beautiful Island will feel
a lot more like a deeply personal indie drama than a full-blooded horror film.
Stick with it, because as the action moves along, this "inspired by true events" tale
of a doomed American dreamer morphs into a neo-noir nightmare that will leave you shaken
to your core.
Written and directed with visceral intensity by first timer Ana Asensio, who also stars,
Most Beautiful Island follows the travails of the troubled, undocumented Luciana who
— in desperate need of cash — takes a mysterious job that pays a large sum of money.
It seems too good to be true.
And it is.
Asensio wisely makes you wait to see what the job is, instead using her film to depict
the day to day nightmare that is immigrant life in America.
We find out about that job in film's final 20 minutes, and we can say with all confidence
that you'll never see it coming — and that you'll spend the pulse-pounding final moments
of Most Beautiful Island on the verge of a fear-induced nervous breakdown.
Sounds like fun!
Few horror sub-genres have cast quite as long a shadow as that of Giallo Horror, a stylized,
slasher-centric genre that's given us horror fare like Dario Argento's Suspiria and Sergio
Martino's All the Colors of the Dark.
While Shudder rightfully sports one of the more impressive slates of Giallo flicks, we'd
urge you to forgo revisiting those until you've seen the Giallo entry most commonly credited
with birthing the genre.
That flick is Mario Bava's stylish, visually arresting murder mystery Blood and Black Lace.
Set largely within the confines of a posh Italian fashion house, this crafty, blood-soaked
thriller takes a relatively formulaic "whodunnit" narrative about a killer offing models, and
spins it into a savage takedown of the world of high fashion.
Along the way, Bava employs all the trappings we've come to regard as Giallo staples — expressive
photography, bold use of colors and lighting, and a masked psychotic killer with an affinity
for leather gloves — and almost unwittingly transcribes the formula for Giallo horror
as we know it.
In doing so, Bava also made a first-rate slasher flick that influenced every genre gem that
came after.
Over the past eight years, writer-director Mickey Keating has quietly crafted one of
the more intriguing genre resumes in the movie biz.
2015 alone saw Keating release two feature films.
The first was a flawed but fascinating family drama/sci-fi confection by the name of Pod.
The second was a brooding, black-and-white beauty about a young woman's spiraling descent
into murderous madness.
Titled simply Darling, that film is as close as Keating has come to a legit horror masterpiece
in his still young career, and it features a positively electrifying performance from
up-and-coming star Lauren Ashley Carter.
As for the Darling's plot, it first presents itself as a simple haunted house chiller following
Carter's Peggy as she signs up to play caretaker to a gothic-styled brownstone — which naturally
sports all manner of creepy backstories about hauntings and occult activities.
There's even a locked room that Peggy is forbidden from entering.
From that admittedly cliched setup, Keating spins a sinister, surprisingly gory, and wonderfully
complex psychological thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Shining.
While Darling doesn't quite reach the iconic level of those films, when a horror flick
looks this good and is so lovingly assembled, it hardly needs to.
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