¡QUÉ HORROR! 2018

The Wrap-Up

And there we are, this year’s 10(+1) titles.

I can only hope that the next 12 months will result in enough Candidates to give us back our usual 13 slots.

In the meantime, those titles that I watched in the past 12 months that didn’t quite cross completely over into “horror” territory, but nevertheless deserve your attention.

THOROUGHBREDS

(January 2017)

“First it was borderline personality, then severe depression, now she thinks I'm antisocial with schizoid tendencies. She's basically just flipping to random pages of the DSM and throwing medications at me.

“But at the end of the day, I have a perfectly healthy brain. It just doesn't contain feelings. And that doesn't necessarily make me a bad person. It just means I have to work a little harder than everybody else to be good.”

Think of this black comedy as the brainier, more class-conscious cousin to Tragedy Girls.

It’s a laudable debut by writer/director Cory Finley, who’s got quite the cast here: Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Anton Yelchin (R.I.P.).

MOTHER!

(September 2017)

“I’ll just… get started on the apocalypse.”

Aronofsky examines the deep, fundamental differences between men and women… by going totally nuts on domesticity!

(And that’s just one of the things this film is about!)

!

MINDHUNTER

(October 2017)

“If what we’re doing doesn’t get under your skin, you’re either more screwed up than I thought, or you’re kidding yourself.”

Diving deep into the toxicity of insanity and violence, Mindhunter is an excellent companion piece to Fincher’s masterpiece, Zodiac.

SANTA CLARITA DIET Season 2

(March 2018)

So.

Many.

Good.

Quotes!

But let’s go with this one: “If you f*ckers try to leave me somewhere I will track you down and give you so much sh!t it will make the time you didn’t take me to see One Direction feel like a walk in the godd*mn park.”

O, Season 3, where art thou?

SLICE

(September 2018)

“… once some people get an idea in their head, they just can’t shake it. Frankly, I still believe cats can speak English. They just choose not to.

“Heh. Clever sons’a b!tches.”

Delivered (har!) to us by writer/director AustinVesely, Slice posits a world where ghosts and humans co-exist (if by “co-exist” we mean, relocating all the ghosts to “fifteen city blocks of abandoned homes and businesses”--thereafter known as Ghost Town--all in the name of “beautification”).

Plus, werewolves, witches, and demons, too!

Vesely also gets plus points for unexpectedly sneaking in David Lynch; guaranteed to get my attention!

And so it goes.

Another October, another ¡Qué horror! rundown.

Let’s all have a Happy Halloween, yeah?

And if you’re in the mood for some Halloween viewing, feel free to check out this year’s batch.

(Thoroughbreds, Mother!, Santa Clarita Diet Season 2, Slice OS’ courtesy of impawards.com; Mindhunter OS courtesy of avoir-alire.com.)

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

A QUIET PLACE

(March 2018)

If you've seen the trailer, then you know the set-up: there are savage and lethal things that are attracted to noise, threatening to annihilate the human race.

To quote Elmer Fudd: “Be vewy vewy quiet.”

A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s third directorial feature, ropes in Krasinski’s real-life spouse, Emily Blunt, as the pair portray the Abbotts, Lee and Evelyn, trying to keep their children safe and (heh) sound in this taut, tense, and at times relentless crackerjack title.

As finely crafted a horror film as this is though, what breathes life into the scenario is the cast--which includes the deaf Millicent Simmonds--who all need to convey emotion largely through expression and (subtitled) sign language.

So that’s a huge part of the draw.

Oh, and of course, the creepy-a$$ creature design by ILM.

In the words of co-screenwriter Bryan Woods, A Quiet Place was partially born from a desire “… to do a modern-day silent film that lived in the suspense genre.”

Well, sir, mission accomplished.

With a sequel currently in development, there’s no better time like the present to catch this one.

(A Quiet Place OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

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

ANNIHILATION

(February 2018)

"Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?”

Alex Garland’s Annihilation (based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer) is heady, horror-tinged science fiction, the kind we need far more than the N^th iteration of some tired SF franchise.

And while some may wonder at its inclusion here, I think it’s quite clear to those who frequent the Iguana that my definition of “horror” has always been very broad, allowing for diverse moods and tastes, from quiet elegance to raucous bombast.

Think of Annihilation as the horror of science, of nature gone horribly awry.

And not in the ‘70’s “animals go wild, nature vs man” schlock cinema sense (though there are flitting shades of that sensibility here), but rather in the sense of the horror of chaos, of the terrible, maddening possibility of having everything we take for granted twisted into unnatural and terrifying shapes.

Garland captures a grotesque beauty here, the awful majesty of seeing the mundane transfigured into the bizarre and the alien, his vision helped along tremendously by the soundscape laid down by Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow (the duo also scored Garland’s Ex Machina and Black Mirror’s “Men Against Fire”).

Plus, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Natalie Portman.

Need I say more?

(Annihilation OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[8 of 10]
The TV Horror Slot

And it's a tie!!!

CHANNEL ZERO: NO-END HOUSE

(September 2017)

"God! I keep... waiting for one of you to understand how magnificent this place is!

"All the gifts that it can give you! Because memory is a disease!

“And then this house is the cure! How can you not see that?!”

One of the most amazing things about Channel Zero’s sophomore season is that, though it still fundamentally feels like a Channel Zero story (in so much as the Channel Zero logo doesn’t look out of place in the opening credits), it does so despite the fact that it has a different kind of horror at its core, compared to the horror of Candle Cove.

With its central themes of memory and loss and instinct and co-dependency, No-End House is also surprisingly moving, balancing out the horror with genuine emotion, thanks in no small part to a commendable cast, which includes the excellent John Carroll Lynch.

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.”

With both No-End House and Butcher’s Block making the cut this year, 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: No-End House OS courtesy of impawards.com; 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…

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

THEY REMAIN

(January 2018)

"History is so full of shadow.”

Opening with a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Hypnos” (“Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.”), Philip Gelatt’s They Remain deploys two elements from the horror arsenal--isolation and inexplicability--to excellent and unnerving effect.

Following a two-person, three month research mission to find a “… previously uncharacterized element--genetic, environmental or otherwise--one that might change the way we view our relationship to the natural world,” the film (based on the novella “—30—” by Laird Barron) is a slow burn descent that relies more on mood and atmosphere than narrative cause and effect, a refreshing change from Hollywood horror’s tendency to over-explicate, as if horror were made up of mere plot points in dire need of tedious exposition.

Gelatt made it onto the Candidates list for ¡Qué horror! 2012, for his feature directorial debut, The Bleeding House.

And now he's cracked into the main rundown.
Well-deserved applause all around...

“The world is large and unknowable.

“No one ever really knows anything.”

(They Remain OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[6 of 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.)

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

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.)