¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018 [2 of 10] THE ENDLESS (2017)

10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[2 of 10]

THE ENDLESS

(April 2017)

"Can you have power over yourself if you give up any amount of authority to something else?”

Okay, full disclosure, I have, thus far, loved all the cinematic work I’ve seen from co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead:

Resolution, which landed squarely in the ¡Qué horror! 2013 rundown (check out the original Candidate post for it here; check the Comments!);

“Bonehead,” their contribution to V/H/S: Viral;

And Spring, which I talk about here, a post where “Bonehead” is also briefly mentioned.

They’re back with their third co-directed feature, The Endless, and yes, indeed, I love it too!

“So a decade ago, I tell you that you’re livin’ in some sort’a death cult, and not only were you not bright enough then to figure it out, you actually came back.

“You are not smart. You never have been, no.

“I mean, all kids are dumb, but you’re like some sort of retarded hobbit or somethin’.”

Benson and Moorhead, playing brothers Justin and Aaron, escaped a so-called “UFO death cult” and have been trying vainly to reintegrate into society for years, but find themselves returning to Camp Arcadia for a “visit” in the hopes that it can help get Aaron out of his “slump.”

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), Aaron’s hopes for closure bear some bizarre and unsettling fruit.

For those of you who’ve already seen Resolution, the experience of watching The Endless will be enriched by that previous viewing of Benson and Moorhead’s initial co-directed feature, and what you saw in Resolution will likewise inform your viewing of The Endless.

Let’s be clear though: you don’t need to have seen Resolution for The Endless to make sense, but if you’ve seen both, it raises your appreciation for both films significantly.

And now, as usually happens here at the Iguana, I will need to leave it at that.

Best to come into The Endless knowing as little as possible, or, to co-opt a line from Hal (Quantico’s Tate Ellington), “Saying more would be like trying to explain an impossible color.”

“Don’t ever give in. Not once.

“The trick to this whole thing is to not be afraid of something that’s… horrifying. And everyone’s afraid of it.

“But if you let it control you one time, it’s gonna f*cking control you over and over again.”

(The Endless OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[1 of 10]

TRAGEDY GIRLS

(March 2017)

"I'm not a CSI person, but it looked like he was murdered."

This was a tricky one, in that for the most part, Tyler MacIntyre’s Tragedy Girls is a biting satire of today’s social media-obsessed youth.

But what convinced me that the film deserved a spot on this year’s ¡Qué horror! list, is the persistent streak of vicious, vicious Vantablack humour that rushes with gleeful malice through its runtime.

For its initial three and a half minutes, Tragedy Girls plays like your standard slasher piece, as we bear witness to a teen couple making out in a car in a lonely isolated locale.

But just before we’re treated to the oh-so-elegantly-‘80’s title card, Tragedy Girls lifts its mask and reveals its subversive, blackly comedic self.

This is a world where the only things that truly matter are hashtags, retweets, and Followers, where the monsters can be found in classrooms, on the football field, and on the screens of your laptops and phones.

Where the adults are incompetent and oblivious, and the youth are at best, callow, self-involved sheep and at worst, sociopathic, narcissistic murderers.

It’s telling that the households of the titular Tragedy Girls aren’t run by abusive parental units from Hell, but rather, well-meaning adults who nonetheless have no idea what their kids are really up to.

It’s like the film is saying, it doesn’t matter how a child is raised anymore; they will be exactly what they choose to be, paving the road to their own personal damnation, one retweet at a time.

"Okay. Well... ummm... if, if Sadie needs like an alibi or, or something just to get her out of a jam, just tell her she can say she was with me watching some Dario Argento movie, okay?"
"Dario DiGiorno."
"Da... Dario Argen... Argento."
"Dario Arpeggio. Mario Wario. I don't know. I don't care. Byezies."

Parting Shot:

There’s a bunch of genre faces in this one, among them: Brianna Hildebrand, Kevin Durand, and an uncredited Josh Hutcherson.

(Tragedy Girls OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018

The Preliminaries

If you've been keeping track of the Candidates list this year, you'll have noted that we didn't even get to a baker's dozen.

To address that, let's go with the word "trying."

As in, "September--the month that he'd planned to catch up on his viewing--turned out to be a particularly trying month, in an already particularly trying year..."

 

So, yeah, that plan fell through...

Thus, we're going to have to go with the more traditionally accepted number of 10 for our slots this year, and then wrap up with a bunch of titles that didn't quite cross the line into "horror," but are nonetheless worthy of your attention.

(Hopefully, those will make up for our not hitting 13 titles this year...)

 

Without further ado...

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018

Candidate #12

MUSE

(October 2017)

“The saddest of all stages for the saddest of all endings.”

One year after a personal tragedy, Professor Samuel Salomon (Da Vinci’s Demons’ Elliot Cowan, currently appearing on Krypton) has a premonitory dream of a ritual murder, and faster than you can say “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here,” the hijinx of an occult investigation ensue.

Based on José Carlos Somoza’s novel, La dama número trece, Muse is Jaume Balagueró’s latest, and for those of you who frequent the Iguana, you’ll be familiar with my long-standing yen for Señor Balagueró’s work.  

Delving the way it does into the supernatural potency of words (with a brief aside to the explosive potential of Neruda), Muse plays almost like a love letter to poetry, but in the form of a dark fantasy/horror movie.

Anyone who favors the structures and conventions of a traditional occult tale will also find a lot to love in Muse…

Plus, Franka Potente, Christopher Lloyd, and Joanne Whalley are in this too, so, yeah, give this one a look-see!

“The end of this story has already been written.”

(Muse OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; Musa Spanish OS courtesy of screenanarchy.com.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018

Candidate #11

CHANNEL ZERO:
BUTCHER'S BLOCK

(February 2018)

“... this is the city I come home to.

“When I walk here, I’m in two worlds at the same time. The one you see, and the one I remember.”

No, you haven’t experienced a time slip.

There are indeed two seasons of a TV show that have staked out Candidate slots in the same year, a ¡Qué horror! first!

With Butcher’s Block, it has become pointedly apparent that Channel Zero is where the best of current television horror can be found.

“You were so scared of losing your mind and then you just gave it away…”

With the insidious spectre of mental illness and the desolation of sacrifice zones some of its preoccupations, Butcher’s Block is “… particularly inspired by Argento films, by Candyman, by Nicolas Roeg films” (in the words of Channel Zero’s creator and showrunner, Nick Antosca).

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson (who brought Lynch to the, ahem, table), Butcher’s Block makes it three for three for Channel Zero, and, once again, the ante is upped for its next season, The Dream Door, directed by E.L. Katz, no stranger to these parts due to Cheap Thrills.*

With reversals, a motley crew of protagonists, and a steady, occasionally hallucinatory build to a Grand Guignol climax, Antosca, Stevenson, and company have brought us a “… particularly bizarre flavor” of horror in Butcher’s Block.

Oh, and did I forget to mention?

Rutger flippin’ Hauer is in this one!

“You know, if you don’t eat enough protein, the body just starts to eat itself. Yeah, I read that in a Reader’s Digest.

“You just get so hungry, your heart will just up and eat itself! And then it moves on to your brain, and then it goes down to your spine, and suddenly, you’re just dead!

“Happens to vegetarians all the time.”

(Channel Zero: Butcher’s Block OS courtesy of dreadcentral.com.)

*Katz also directed “A is for Amateur” for ¡Qué horror! 2015 title, ABCs of Death 2, and was an associate producer on Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way To Die, one of the Serial Killer Thriller runners-up on the 2012 rundown.

He was also co-producer on the non-¡Qué horror! title, The Aggression Scale, so, yeah… Katz has been ‘round these parts a lot, even when he wasn’t fronting a film.

Here’s hoping he comes back for The Dream Door…

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018

Candidate #10

HEREDITARY

(January 2018)

"My mother was a very secretive and private woman. She had private rituals, private friends, private anxieties.”

Annie (the always amazing Toni Collette) reads the above as part of the eulogy for her mother, Ellen.

The fact that

A) this takes place less than 5 minutes into Hereditary’s running time, and

B) the film actually opens with Ellen’s obituary

should be a clear sign that one of the movie’s main themes is the desolation of familial loss.

It’s a difficult film to get through, particularly if you’ve slogged through that brutally vicious type of grief yourself.

But of course, what writer/director Ari Aster does in his feature debut is to use that emotional wrack and ruin to delve into the secrets that gradually accrete onto any family tree, all the unspoken and repressed feelings that only manage to fester and insidiously poison if kept in the darkness of silence.

And all that is made even worse if some of those secrets are, let’s just say, not your run-of-the-mill garden variety domestic dramas…

So long as you’re prepared for the tragic and emotionally gut-wrenching aspect of Hereditary, you’ll find this to be an astoundingly solid feature debut by Aster, with a killer cast; Collette is joined by Gabriel Byrne (both of whom double up and executive produce as well) and Ann Dowd.

Plus, Alex Wolff and newcomer Milly Shapiro (who play Annie’s children) acquit themselves commendably in the shadow of that intimidating acting trio…

And how messed up is it that even after that mondo bizarro third act (which manages to capture the unsettling nightmare idea of waking up to find the sanctity of home transmogrified into a perverse charnel house, all that rot finally blooming into a pervasive malignance), I still ended up snuffling when “Both Sides Now” (the original Judy Collins recording) plays over the end titles?

Man, this movie…

“But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads,
They say I've changed,
But something's lost, but something's gained, in living every day…”

--“Both Sides Now”

(Written by Joni Mitchell)

Parting Shot:

So looking forward to Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar…

(Hereditary OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

THE BLACK BESTIARY: An Alejandro Pardo Compendium

Okay, below is a list of the National Book Store branches where you can pick up a copy of The Black Bestiary: An Alejandro Pardo Compendium now!

Click to embiggen! ('Coz, you know, otherwise, it's teeny...)

Please feel free to repost the images or to link back here, so we can spread the word about The Black Bestiary: An Alejandro Pardo Compendium (the follow-up to The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo).
It contains a new batch of creature entries (written by Budjette Tan), and a whole lot more narrative stuff, written by yours truly, with illustrations by Kajo Baldisimo, Bow Guerrero, and Mervin Malonzo.
(A closer look at the Table of Contents can be found here.)

If you haven't picked it up, please do so.
And if you've already got a copy, please tell your friends and family to pick up their own copies as well! Get extra copies too, if you can!
Spreading the word about the book will not just help with the chances for more future Alejandro Pardo compendiums, but will also serve as a rallying cry for the printed word.
I don't know about you, but I definitely prefer a world where people aren't just reading tablets or their phones, but are actually holding books, with covers and pages (and that awesome new book smell!), in their hands.
Power to the Printed Word!*

For more on The Black Bestiary: An Alejandro Pardo Compendium, an article can be found here.

My complete and unedited answers to the Q&A used as a basis for the article can be found here.

A 15-second video can be found here.

Another article can be found here.

Brief glimpses of some of the new creature entries (art by Mervin) can be found here.

And, for those of you seeking out copies of The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo, these are the NBS branches that currently have the title in stock.

Happy hunting, and remember, if you don't see it on the shelves, please ask for it.
And please spread the word, people!
The sooner we get those copies flying off the shelves, the sooner Summit will look at getting another Alejandro Pardo compendium out there...

you can’t drink just six,

Dave

* Neil Gaiman makes some excellent points about printed books (and libraries) here.