A Rundown of the 13 (plus) Best Horror Movies I've Seen in the Past Year
[8 of 13]
The Serial Killer Thriller Slot
I find it
interesting that I saw a surfeit of exceptional serial killer features in this
past year, just as Hannibal Lecter and his gruesomely fascinating brethren are
about to descend on the small screen in a very big way.
On tap for this
season’s freshman TV titles are: Bryan Fuller’s take on Hannibal, Carlton Cuse’s Psycho
prequel, Bates Motel, and Kevin
Williamson’s The Following, while Dexter is winding down, on its way towards
its last two seasons.
There’s also Clarice, in development at Lifetime,
about Clarice Starling, which will cover the period of time between the film
adaptations of The Silence of the Lambs
and Hannibal. I can only assume, if
this show comes to fruition, that she’ll be running into other serial killers
who she may or may not become bizarrely attracted to.
So, yeah, not
since the serial killer-of-the-week heyday of shows like Millennium and Profiler
have we had this much TV attention on the serial killer
So in that
light, let’s take a look at the best of their big screen brothers.
And when I said
“surfeit” above, I wasn’t kidding. This is the category that’s got four
runners-up.
And the big kahunas tied for the top slot?
SNOWTOWN
(May 2011)
As a feature debut, Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown--which
chronicles the crossing of the paths of “Australia’s worst serial
killer,” John Justin Bunting, and young James Spyridon Vlassakis--is an
astoundingly self-assured piece that is a particularly difficult
cinematic experience to sit through.
And I mean that in the best possible way.
This
one has a profound sense of disquiet and unease that permeates its
nearly two-hour running time, with riveting central performances by
Daniel Henshall as Bunting, and Lucas Pittaway as Jamie Vlassakis. The
fact that this is Pittaway’s acting debut (he was spotted at a shopping
center and asked to audition for the role) makes his on-screen
achievement even more noteworthy.
Fair
warning though, as I said earlier, this one’s tough to get through, but
what Kurzel manages to capture here is a level of disturbing that many
straight-forward horror films never even come close to.
Parting shot: Snowtown was known in its US release as The Snowtown Murders, actually the title
of one of the books Snowtown’s script
was inspired by.
CHAINED
(August 2012)
Now, for those
of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.
“But what about
his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.
Fine.
The Jennifer
Lynch Scorecard:
I wasn’t overly
fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena,
but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance,
so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror!
2009 list.
While I
appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still
waiting to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production,
Despite the Gods.)
And now, we come
to Chained.
In the past
year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial killer
thrillers, Chained stands out because
while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing Carl
Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply just
wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really
about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and
the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the
child’s mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance
star, Julia Ormond).
There’s a
searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s
94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’
oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.
As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing
script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping into
the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re witness
to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of their
motivations.
This is a
disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that
plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.
Here’s hoping
Lynch keeps on keepin’ on…
(Snowtown OS’ courtesy of
impawards.com; Chained OS courtesy of
bloody-disgusting.com.)
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