Episode 131: Twenty-Five from 2024- The Year in Horror

Hi, I'm S.A. Bradley and welcome to Hellbent for Horror, a podcast devoted to all things related to horror, where I remind you that you used to love horror movies and you secretly still do. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Hellband for Horror and welcome to 2025. Oh, my goodness. 2025. That sounds like science fiction to me. I guess I'm at that age where every year is going to sound like science fiction. Yeah, I'm old.

Anyway, I just want to look back a little bit this time, and we're going to look back at 2024, the 12 months that were full of really good horror movies. I will say that 2024 was a good year for horror. Also, I will say that 2023 was a good year for horror as well. I think we're at a very experimental and creative time.

There's a lot of different types of horror films that are coming out. Everybody's not trying to make the same kind of movie. We've got a lot of independent labels that are coming out, studios that are bringing up films that are medium budget to low budget.

that are really starting to catch on. Some of this is the advent of course of streaming. I'll get into that a little bit. But it's also the idea that they're giving something that's a little bit different than maybe what the big studios are trying to do. But we've got a lot of different types of horror films that are out there. And yes, I do feel it's a little bit experimental.

And with my saying that it's experimental, I'm not going to say that I like all these films. I think that they're all great. But I do appreciate the fact that they're trying something new. They're being experimental, and they're kicking at the walls.

And they're saying, hey, you know, there's some stuff that we like that's been done in the past. And there's some stuff that I think needs to be upgraded. Whether they're doing that, you know, as a kind of manifest or if they're just doing it unconsciously. I do think that the language of entertainment. changes.

I think that the language that I was speaking in 1982 was a lot different than the language people were speaking in 1972 or 1962. Monster Kids, the original Monster Kids, they're really not that big. into modern horror, but their idea of modern horror is like 1975 onward.

So the things that were speaking to me were kind of a little bit of a different language. And I think that that's something that happens. I think that the changes in cinematic tastes is really a lot like the annual report that comes out from the...

Webster's Dictionary, right? Where they talk about the words that are added or words that are lost to the English language inside of the dictionary. And it almost always causes some form of controversy. But it evolves. English evolves with the way that the culture... The culture's needs, the culture's interests. For most people, if you hear the new words, like this year, the new words were street corn is a new word, shadow ban. These are...

Not just words. They're like two words. But anyway, I don't want to get to our for you page. For you page. For you. page is considered a new word. So it's a source of amusement, maybe eye-rolling for guys like me, but they are being used so much that they now need to have their definitions inside of the Webster Dictionary. On the other side, you have some that disappear. This year, we lost Snollygoster, Hodad, Frutescent, and Sternforemost.

All of those went down hard, I guess. And there are some people who will say, you know, this is a sign of the weakening of the language, but I don't think so. The same with horror. I don't think it's a weakening of horror. I don't know if it's a weakening of storytelling. I think storytelling is just changing. Perhaps some of the things that are... There are Snollygosters that are not hoedads that are made for me.

And I'm completely okay with that. Anyway, back to where I was going with some of this, the idea that we have a whole bunch of different types of styles that are going on as of right now. There is this division that's happening between groups. at least two or three movies every year that are really loved by one group and really despised by the other, where there's actually loud conversation about it. You can't just dislike it. You can't just... You have to really let everyone...

Everybody know what side of the fence you're on and what you normally hear when there is this kind of moment in time where there's such a split. between the fandoms. It's usually something where they're not able to articulate why they love it, and they're not able to articulate why they dislike it. But anyway, the reason that I bring all of this up is because...

This year, I'm going to do something just a little bit different. Instead of talking about just the movies that I think are the best movies of the year, I'm going to talk about what I consider the significant movies of the year. There are some movies that I really, really like that are on this list. In fact, most of the movies that are on here are going to be ones that I highly recommend.

I may say that they're not going to be for everyone. I will say that they're a little bit twisted, perhaps. There will be movies that are on here, just a few of them, that I can't really say that I liked, but I appreciate what they were trying to do.

to do that because I... have come to realize, especially when it's some of the bigger movies that are out there that just kind of take over the headlines for a while, if I don't talk about them because I didn't like them, I'm not really giving a good representation of the year. So, what I've also decided to do is not sit there and trash the movies, but what I want to do is...

Find the things that I think are significant about them, something that is interesting about them, if there is anything. I'm doing this as well because there's so many movies this year. I spent a lot of time watching films, and I still didn't get to everything. I'm one of those... guys, it tends to go for the ones that are a little bit off the beaten path first, which means that some of the bigger ones, it took me some time to get to.

Maybe one that you like might not be on the list. I'm not going to say it. I'm admitting that because I didn't like it. I'll be honest with you and tell you if I didn't see it. So I did not see Smile 2. Just letting you know, I did not see Smile 2. I apologize for that. But I just could not get to it. It's an interesting thing because streaming saves the business, right?

There's just a few movies that are in the can when the world shuts down. Streaming has so many different services out there. Its worst part is its best part. The best thing about it is that there are so many places. for movies to be shown and movies to be made. The money is coming in enough that Shudder and stuff like that are making their own films or buying films from other countries and bringing them over and distributing them. All of that is happening. The bad thing is

that, it's really hard to see them all because nobody has the money to be able to be on all of those services, right? So... It is interesting because artistically, or at least story-wise, we're able to get a whole bunch of different types of stories. So because of that, we've got a lot going on in this show. I'm going to see about keeping the exposition to a minimum, because we've got a bunch of movies here, folks, and I don't want to make this a five-hour thing. So when I get out of the way...

I'm just going to try and streamline this as much as possible and talk a bunch of movies. Talk about the ones that I thought were really good this year, ones that I liked. Talk about ones that maybe didn't hit the mark exactly, but have wonderful nuggets inside of them. And then some that I... I think talk to a trend that I may not quite understand, but I'm fascinated by.

So to be able to keep myself from being the long-winded guy that I usually am, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down this list of movies and I'm just going to give a short synopsis. We're going to try and just go with like the IMDb synopsis. I'm going to try not to blow it.

for people who haven't seen these movies, so I don't give too much of the plot. But I'm going to give you a little bit of a flavoring of why I thought these movies were great. And with that, let's see about moving on into this. So, I was talking about movies that I...

appreciated, but I can't say that they were really good. And I don't want to start with a downer, but at the same point, I want to give a little bit of an example of what I'm going to try and do. So early in the year, not super early, but in March, a movie opened called Late Night with the Devil.

And I really, really wanted to like this movie. First off, I loved the way that it looked in the posters. I liked what it looked like in the trailers, that very 70s style. And I liked the idea that it was going to be a kind of a found footage film. Now, what I liked about the movie was I liked the idea of the limitations that they were putting on themselves. So this is kind of like a found footage film. It's pretending to be a long lost show that was on TV.

broadcast live. The tapes were found and they were edited together to be able to show it as a narrative. And this was a very famous, tragic thing that happened in the history of television. And so I liked that they were playing with that. It was a little bit like Ghostwatch, the BBC live-to-tape show that people thought was absolutely real in 1992, and people were freaking out. And it was also very much like the WNUN.

special Halloween special the WNUF was very low budget and I thought huh this could be an interesting experiment where you take the uh the stylistic idea of the 70s and put it to this kind of story and see where it goes. So the story is really simple. I'll give the IMDB summary. October 31st, 1977. Johnny Carson rival Jack Delroy hosts a syndicated...

talk show Night Owls that has long been a trusted companion to insomniacs around the country. A year after the tragic death of Jack's wife, ratings have plummeted Desperate to turn his fortunes around, Jack plans a Halloween special like no other. Unaware, he is about to unleash evil into the living rooms of America. So, pretty good idea that we've got going there.

This is one of those things where the execution left me lacking. And I wish I didn't have to say that. But I think this is a movie that really needed a few more rewrites. It didn't have this immediacy. I think one of the big things was they forced themselves into a limitation and then they didn't respect that limitation. So the idea was that these were A and B roll cameras. These things were brought back and edited.

So they have scenes where they leave the live set and they go into the back rooms and they're talking to each other. And it's more exposition. Exposition. kills this movie. The thing that works really good and where it really pops is when you're learning stuff while the audience is learning and the guests and the host of the show are learning. So there is this...

wonderful tension to a live show being broadcast in front of people. A mistake you may not want to call out. Somebody is fumbling. You try to help them. There's that weird tension that happens if the unexpected It happens in a live broadcast or a live to tape broadcast. The audience is right there. You're being watched. And that tightrope is where this movie is really strong. You get that feeling.

But once it leaves or it goes into like, I won't call it a flashback, but there are things where they talk about the past quite a bit. And I think that that's where it kind of loses its momentum and doesn't trust. in the power of its words. And I think perhaps a few more rewrites might have helped. I mean, I think of a movie like Talk Radio, Oliver Stone's Talk Radio, which is almost entirely a radio station and a monologue, right?

Inside of a radio station booth. That crackles because the dialogue is good. And it continues to allow for surprises. Instead of going into the back for some of the things that happened in the movie. It would have been great if they just stayed on camera. found these things out. It can be done, but it is harder to do. So I think that this movie was really good in some spots. I love the supernatural aspects of it. I liked where it started going towards the end. For some people, that was

a problem. They liked the beginning and they didn't like the end. But I will say that I just wish it had done a little bit more on that. With that said, the performances are really good in it and it might be something that you really love. that I just am nitpicking on. So anyway, the next movie I'm going to talk about, and it's partner film, unintended partner film, came out the same day.

as Late Night with the Devil. And the partner film came out the week after. So these two movies that are somewhat similar in many ways, they came out a week... between each other, and it's not quite Dante's Peak and Volcano. But there are some similarities that had some of the critics out there and some of the fans out there saying that they were kind of sister films. I'm not necessarily sure I would call them sister films, but I will say that there are similarities.

One that I want to talk about first is Immaculate. So I'll give the IMDb storyline synopsis for Immaculate. Cecilia, an American nun of devout faith, embarks on a new journey in a remote convent in the picaresque Italian countryside. Cecilia's warm welcome quickly devolves into a nightmare as it becomes clear her home harbors a sinister secret.

and unspeakable horrors. That's the official synopsis, folks. And it just gives a little bit of a hint of the story. It gives you an idea that this is going to take place in the convent. This is going to be a religious horror film. And it...

starts with a bang, where we see a nun trying to escape the convent, stealing keys, running to the front gate, trying to get out, and there are these four hooded figures that come towards her. They don't just grab her. They grab her, they break her leg, and then... they beat her into unconsciousness. And when she wakes up, she's in a shallow grave. She's in a casket being covered. And we're like, okay.

How is she going to get out of here? And then you realize this is not going to be the main character. We just spent some serious time with someone who is not going to get out of that casket. So foreboding starts the film. Really interesting start. I really did like Immaculate. I thought it was bold and I thought it went places that I really like in movies. We're going back into like a 70s mindset. You haven't really seen that much.

And really, this is a movie that I consider nonsploitation, except it is missing one key ingredient in nonsploitation. So if you don't know anything about that kind of, it was a subgenre that didn't last a super long period of time. but it's cinema that typically features nuns as a central character.

Kind of makes sense. Usually takes place in convents. There's a religious theme that's running through it. There's a lot of sexuality that runs through it. And there's tons of violence and horror. The gothic elements of horror really exist. exaggerated. The violence is usually pretty rough. And there's usually, I mean, if you're going to be in this...

Mill you talking about this kind of thing, you're definitely of subverting authority. So there's a lot of subversion that's usually in men's exploitation films. There's a lot of psychological conflict. This is stuff that you find when you're, maybe if it's not.

psychological, I'd say it's philosophical. The idea that going against someone's philosophy, the deep-seated philosophy of religion, of course, that allows for a lot of taboos to be broken. So this is the kind of thing that's usually in a non-sploitation. And this has all of it in spades except for one, which is sexuality. This is not a movie that does what most people who are fans of the 70s versions of nonsploitation.

watch non-exploitation for. They are kind of lured in the sexuality, usually lesbian sex, usually a lot of nudity. The kink factor is usually in there. And this movie doesn't have that. Almost. To a perverse level, it seems to reverse that kind of thing. This movie is all about body autonomy. This movie is all about the anxieties of birth. It's all about church and state getting in the way of people's ways of living with.

their bodies. It is about birth. It is about abortion. All of those things are in there. So it is very nerve wracking in that way. So sex is... definitely a part of it, but it is not a nudity film. It is not a titillation film. If there's anything that's missing out of this nonsploitation film, it's actually the male gaze, as it's called. The idea that you're going to have these...

These certain camera angles and these extended looks at the female form that are there for titillation of a specific area of the audience. This movie subverts that completely. In fact, there's a scene that I was like going up. well, here's our nunsploitation scene where all of the nuns are bathing, right? So you're like, okay, they're all taking baths. This is the scene. But they're actually wearing vanity coverings, these cloths that go over them. So there is no nudity.

There's, I guess, a wet t-shirt contest, if you want to look at it that way. And I thought that that was actually kind of clever. Now, the movie has some improbable stuff in it. I would say that there's a portion of it that is a little soft in the center. But I thought that... where it went from point A to point B to point C was really strong. I found myself kind of jaw dropped at certain points. And I will say that the end is absolutely...

The Showstopper. It is what you would want to go see this movie for if you are a horror fan and you weren't even sure if you wanted to see it. That end will stun you. They do it. all the way. This is a movie that goes all the way. So I give a recommendation for Immaculate. Now, the second movie that's in this...

opened the next week, and I got to see it with a bunch of friends at Cinema Wasteland. I, quite honestly, I'm not a big prequel fan, and so I was like, eh, this might not be my thing, but hey, I'm with my my friends. So I was really surprised at how good I found the first omen. It's got some issues. People who are fans of the original have voiced their opinions about how this movie kind of fucks with canon.

in somewhat nonsensical ways. But I have to say, I really liked it. And I liked it because it had the conviction of its philosophies. It's going in there. trying to be this, look at where evil comes from. Now, with that said, Prequels are tough, man. They're just tough. I've seen most of the prequels that I've seen are terrible. They're just really bad because all of them cannot help. They're like magnets to iron ore in the ground.

The Iron Ore is the original movie that they're making a prequel for. So they've... got to somehow, no matter where the movie goes, it's going to have to end where everything is stacked and racked for that first movie. So you can see the curbs starting to come. You start seeing how they're putting together visual motifs to make You go, oh, so that's where that's coming from.

And that's usually boring as hell for me. I like to be surprised in movies. And so I didn't expect to like this one. And I have to say this one really worked pretty good. So the storyline, when a young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life sentence to... So one of the things that's pretty cool about this movie is it basically says that...

In a secular world, if religion starts to feel threatened, it will cause the thing that it's there to defend you from. It will make sure that you realize you need their protection. So it's controversial in that way. It's got some nasty ideas in it. There are some good scares. It looks good. The pace is really nice on it. And I will say that it has a showstopper scene. In fact, that showstopper scene, to give you a little bit of an idea, that one scene...

And I'm not going to say which one it is. You'll know it if you see it. That one scene got an NC-17. And the producers and the director and the writer had to go to the MPAA three, no, five times. before they finally got an R to debate what was going on. Yeah, they're saying this is movie is all about body autonomy and the idea that men somehow of power are going to control a woman's body. And here you are in this.

scene doing the exact same thing by being censors of it and so they finally won out in the debate and they got it uncut to go into the movie. And I have to say, when I first saw the film, I gasped and went, holy shit, they went there. So, Immaculate and The First Omen are two movies that go there, and they're well worth your time. So, since we're talking about religious horror so far, I will go to our next film, Heretic.

And this is the one that stars Hugh Grant, and that's really the thing that got it where it opened in a whole bunch of theaters. I really like this movie. It's not for everybody, though, because it is very talky, and it's meant to be very talky. This is a movie that you kind of have to immerse yourself in the situation. It's a little bit like Death Trap, the movie with Christopher Reeve back in the early 80s, where you have someone walk into a room and as soon as they get in...

they know something's wrong. And the rest of the time is them trying to leave without getting themselves killed by someone who may or may not be really dangerous. And that's pretty much the synopsis for this. film. I'll read it from IMDb anyway. Two young religious women are drawn into a game of cat and mouse in the house of a strange man. And yeah, it's a strange house, strange man. And these... women are LDS, Latter-day Saints, and they're out on the mission. They've been told...

to go out and follow up with people who are interested in the religion, said they'd be more than happy to talk again. And as a terrible storm starts outside, hint, hint, hint, they find themselves at this house at the edge of it. everything, it seems, at the edge of a cliff. And they knock on the door, and the head of the house opens the door and asks them what they want. They say that they're missionaries. They want to talk about religion. He goes, come on in.

and then starts the interesting cat and mouse. What I really liked about this movie really is the acting performances. Hugh Grant is really good in this, as well as Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton. They take something that's a little bit preposterous, you know, something like this, which I think I don't know because I didn't write it, but it sure feels like this was a late night debate between people who were religious and people who were not.

religious about the nature of belief. And so it could have been dry as toast, but they come up with really interesting ways to talk about it. So these women are inside of this house and they find that they can't leave very easily. And they're asked a bunch of questions in a...

a way that feels a little threatening. There are a couple things that feel a little bit off when they first get in there. Being missionaries and they're walking into a man's house, they need another woman present to feel comfortable. And he says, Says all my wife is inside baking some pie and I'll see about getting her to come out. She's a little shy and becomes apparent reasonably soon that everybody here seems to be playing liar's poker. and they kind of know that there's not a wife.

And he's kind of not telling. But there's this whole thing of trying to get out of there without causing any issues. There's something about how really sweet he is. That feels very aggressive. In fact, the questions that he asks are pretty aggressive questions. They limit themselves a lot in this film by keeping it almost like a drawing room story. You're in just a few different rooms.

A lot of it is conversation just between three people. A lot of it is glances. A lot of it is trying to remember where things were situated in the room at certain times. There's a lot of head games that are going on. And if you like that kind of movie. this is the movie for you, especially because they don't keep it where it's drawn out for a while. It's not very long into the movie till everybody pretty much says, hey, I think we all know.

where we are in this situation. And yet, it's not super subversive. It's not really staying one-sided. In fact, how much does this movie try and keep balance between what's happening with the religious folk and the guy who's not and maybe The Maniac, the Church of Latter-day Saints supports this movie. They said that's a pretty good indication of what it's like to do this and a pretty good representation of our religion. And I think that's because of how the women debate him.

In the beginning, it feels like it's going to be a mudsling. But they start to debate very cleverly. So the LDS came out and supported this movie. The only thing that they did say is, hey, we're a lot more cautious with safety than this movie allowed. But we understand it's a movie. So there you go. That's a movie that I would definitely give a thumbs up to. And we're going to just keep moving on.

So I've already said that I really like surprise in movies, and I love movies that are a little bit of head trips. They're kind of batshit crazy, as I've said before. They seem as if they're going in one direction, and then they just kind of flip the screen. on you I love when that's done well it's not always done well but there's a few movies this year that I saw that I really felt did a great job some of the best surprises of the year

So the next movie I'm going to talk about is one that wasn't really on my radar at all. It was something that I was told to see by a friend. I'm really glad that I listened to them and I ended up watching it because sometimes in a horror... film, you come away exhilarated. And that's kind of how I felt here. Like I had just seen something original or amazing, crafty and naughty.

and that is Strange Darling, written and directed by J.T. Molnar, and I sure hope we hear a little bit more about this guy in the future. So... Let's just try and stick to the IMDb summary, because one of the big things about this movie is its element of surprise. So... What does IMDB say? Nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer's vicious murder spree.

Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's very basic. And that really should be the kind of thing that you're thinking when you walk in. Knowing much more than that will probably hinder it. What I will say is the structure, you know, you may not be a fan of a certain type of structure and this movie has a very arch. structure to it. So when I first started watching the movie I'm seeing this very cool opening sequence that really grabs your attention.

And it's something that you'll see in the trailers and stuff. So I don't think I'm really giving much away. But it's a chase sequence. And it's done so richly. And without any dialogue, we're basically getting the story from what we're seeing at the moment.

That's an important distinction. That's going to matter in this movie again and again and again. I'm watching this movie, I see this beginning, and I'm like, oh, this is pretty cool. I'm loving the vibe and the energy that this thing's giving me. The style seems to be right.

up my alley and then all of a sudden it goes black and it says a tale told in six parts and I'm like oh fuck and then it says part three it starts with part three after we start the movie in this one way and I just go damn you Quentin Tarantino ever since Pulp Fiction we've got people who are like non-linear storytelling and I thought I was going to hate it but really that structure is kind of like irreversible in

how you have the movie start with the end and end with the beginning so this is a movie where perception is everything what we know is everything because you're going on whatever is in front of you and then it changes you go to another part where we're seeing maybe a little bit earlier, or maybe we're seeing a little bit later. And we're being influenced by how this movie is broken up. The actors in here are great. Willa Fitzgerald is really something else. She plays

someone just known as The Lady. And Kyle Gollner plays a character named The Demon. And you think that's giving everything away, but it really isn't. It's a really interesting movie, super violent in some ways. It is kind of kinky. And it's one of the things that I really liked about it is that there's this kind of embracing of sex and sexuality in this. And it's not your...

kind of 80s idea of sex equals death all the time. There's kind of this acceptance of sexuality that's in this movie that's a lot of fun. And what happens is you're watching one part of the movie and you think you know where it's going. And then there's a reveal in the next part that's shown to you that gives you relief or makes you laugh or terrifies you.

I will say that this is one of my favorites of the year. It won me over. It surprised me. I felt that it was deft in what it was doing. I was kind of shocked at where it ended up going. And I thought the performances were really great. I'm not sure who it is, but someone in here is about to become a superstar. I hope you take a chance on it. To me, it was one of the highlights of 2024.

Now, another one that is kind of similar in that way, because it is a head trip, it's a little kinky, and it's very fucking strange, is Cuckoo. Now, I know this movie drove some people absolutely crazy, but I love this movie. So if I'm here to talk about Cuckoo, which I am, I would describe it as a weird, bizarro comedy.

Brian De Palma directed it, and he was trying to do a complete giallo film, but he was also filtering that through this cult film from 1978 called The Shout with Alan Bates. And that movie had a guy who... a loner, a traveler who gets into a family, insinuates himself taking the place of the father. And he has this Aboriginal magic to him. And it comes out in this vocal way, a shout. So those things. come together in this crazy movie called Cuckoo. And here's the storyline.

Reluctantly, 17-year-old Gretchen leaves her American home to live with her father, who has just moved into a resort in the German Alps with his new family. Arriving at their future residence, they are greeted by Mr. Koenig, her father's boss, who takes an inexplicable... . . . . . .

Gretchen is plagued by strange noises and bloody visions until she discovers a shocking secret that also concerns her own family. That's a pretty accurate thing that doesn't really tell you a whole bunch about this movie.

I found this just wonderfully strange. This is a movie where they make their little world, they have their own myth, and they just tell you to run along with it. And really, that's not very much... removed from a lot of the giallo films that are out there so i really thought it was pretty freaking cool they have this

creature kind of thing, that very much feels like a De Palma creation. It could be Phantom of the Paradise mixed with Dress to Kill and a few other tropes of his all coming together into one character. So if you've seen the trailer, you've seen... part of one of the more amazing scenes. It's kind of the set piece. And just when you think it's going to end, no, it becomes a...

bigger extension into the film. But it's Hunter Schaefer who is the lead actress in this movie, and Hunter really keeps this movie together. And I'll go into that a little bit more as I describe it a little bit more. But there is a scene with her riding her bike at night. and something is chasing her. And how you get to find out that she's actually being stalked and how much it escalates is really a treat in this movie. And it sets a tone that I think continues through the rest of the film.

pretty violent. There is some crazy stuff that happens and some of the violence is really very, I know it's crazy to say physical, but you know, some movies you can watch a thousand people get stabbed and it doesn't really seem to affect you that much because it's not truly committed.

to make you feel the heft of the violence. But this is one of those movies where when Hunter Schaefer hits her head on a piece of glass, you feel it. And it's funny, the director kind of does a Polanski here where he takes Hunter Schaefer. who's a lovely looking woman and essentially breaks her nose, screws up the tendons in her arms and her legs. So she's in cast through most of the movie. She has black eyes. It's a great bit of acting.

that Hunter Schaefer does and why I think that her performance is so important to this movie is that there is a lot of absurdity to the film. And she... just handles all of that with a certain dry wit. And her delivery at certain points is the only thing that keeps the scene from being just absurd. And you laugh because she's in on just how absurd everything is. People are acting relatively normal, even though thoroughly abnormal things are happening in this resort.

And she's the only one who gets to talk about it, but she does it in a very deadpan way. She's a 17-year-old kid beholden to her parents. The director of Cuckoo is Tillman Singer. And Tillman, his first film was Luz, L-U-Z. which is even more idiosyncratic and strange. And I really like Tillman's style. It's got this really interesting deadpan humor, absurdism, true horror. and explicit violence that works together to be a little bit surreal and a lot bit strange. I really liked it.

I thought there was a lot going on in this movie that was a lot of fun. It's visually stunning. It has moments of, like I said, breathtaking violence. And there's just this really interesting supernatural element that... Kind of like the movie The Shout, which is another really idiosyncratic movie, Cuckoo has a mind-bending premise inside of it.

2024 had a few blockbuster horror films as well, some that were continuations of franchises. And for the most part, I'm usually not a fan of that. You've heard me talk about sequels before. Sequelitis is... a disease that seems to just want to kill horror movies all the time. And I'm not a fan of prequels, as I mentioned before. So...

What chance was there that I was going to like A Quiet Place day one? Especially since I wasn't a big fan of A Quiet Place, the original. I didn't even see the second one because I was that much of not impressed. by the first one. I liked some of the premise that was in there. I love some of the suspense. The creatures look great, but the idea just felt pretty absurd to me. And I really didn't like the whole family dynamic thing where dad is like...

I'm so tired of messianic sacrifices. So tired of the Jesus Christ pose showing up towards the end of the movie. The long-suffering dad does a cool hand Luke and dies for everybody else's sins so they can be freed. God, I hated that about that movie. That movie is just so purple with that stuff.

And, you know, so many of the things just didn't seem to make much sense. I laughed when I saw the trailer to A Quiet Place because they're playing fuzzy dice. All these things make no sense. Like, why would you be in the woods? where anything can make a sound. Oh, you're going to put all this sand down? Where did you get all this fucking sand?

There was just, you know, when the movie's pacing or something isn't working when you start nitpicking like that, right? So I wasn't going to see day one. I had no reason to see A Quiet Place day one. And then I had people tell me, you really should. give this a chance because this isn't like the others. This is trying something a little bit different with the same story. And then somebody said the magic words. They said, this is kind of a 9-11 movie.

And for a while, I didn't want to hear anything about 9-11 movies. That was not something that I was interested in. Although I will say Cloverfield definitely did a pretty damn good job. And I would put this in that Cloverfield feel. The thing that makes this movie so good is that the more horrible things get, the more people's humanity starts to show up in the strangest places. And it feels very realistic. A lot of that has to do with the acting that's in this movie.

A lot of it has to do with some really tight direction. So I'll give you the rundown. I'm sure everybody and their mother has seen this movie. But just in case, I will give the storyline. After the events and revelations of A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part 2.

It's time to go back to day one, following Sam as she's on a group trip to New York City. Everything's going fine until the invasion that sends the world into silence begins. Can the city stay quiet and can Sam and Eric, a new unlikely friend, make it? somewhere safe okay so things that they don't tell you in that synopsis that i think are kind of important sam is a patient in a hospice dying of terminal cancer

And she is not exactly a joiner. She's not having a great time in the last aspects of her life. And she's kind of fooled into going to New York City that they're going to go get pizza and all this stuff. So she's feeling this thing of this is my last. This is my last time to be in the Big Apple. So she goes on this bus ride with other terminal patients, and they go to see what they think is going to be a movie, and I think it's just a puppet show, a marionette show. And so they're in there.

watching this low budget thing when the disaster strikes. And it starts small, right? They just see stuff in the sky. People outside are seeing stuff in the sky. And then everything starts to happen all at once. The imagery that's being used. The idea of dust everywhere. Huge dust clouds. People walking through it. People coated in dust. People blinded by it. The shell shock.

All of this stuff felt very much like what happened during 9-11. And that was a rough day for many people. Certainly, I remember it very, very vividly. this movie gives a very good expression of why I watch horror films. And that is sometimes there are things that kind of need to work out anxiety-wise and stuff like that you need to talk about.

You don't want to go at it directly. Like, I don't watch documentaries about 9-11. That's just not my thing. I don't need to see video of the World Trade Center going down. Not my deal. But I will watch a bunch of aliens doing the exact same thing to New York and see how people are responding to it. And like I said earlier, the thing that makes this movie so interesting to me, not only the visual imagery, but the amount of humanity that comes out of...

These people, the amount of pain that they're in, you know, people, some of the characters in this movie are dying of terminal cancer and they won't give up. and there's something really well-earned, I guess is the way to say it. The thing I didn't like about A Quiet Place, the original, is I didn't think most of the emotions were earned. It was kind of milked out of you in this manipulative way.

And this one, the way that people act, the amount of information that you get, they're not beating you over the head with anything. It's just response, response, response, whatever's happening in front of these people. All of that works that when there are these moments of humanity, A Quiet Place Day One really earns its stripes. I was pleasantly surprised.

So I've been a fan of Robert Eggers' work since I saw The Witch when it first came out. And that movie really hit me the right way at that time. I'm a huge folk horror fan. I felt that he really hit on making it. it feel like we are back in that time period. I saw it in the theater. I didn't know much about it before I went in and it really blew me away. It was a universe I didn't expect to walk into and he hit a tone of dread that really

resonated with me. I know it didn't with everybody, but it certainly did with me to the point where Eggers became one of those, the rare filmmakers that I follow where whatever they do, I'm going to see it. They jazzed me so much that I'm going to see everything that they do. And Eggers is part of that now.

This new movie, of course, is Nosferatu. And I'm sure by now, if you're a fan of horror films, you've probably at least heard about the movie and you've heard the really polar opposites that have been said about it. There are those that call it a masterpiece and the greatest horror film of the year. And then there are others who are like, this is a really embarrassing misfire, boring. You hear all of that stuff. And whenever a movie divides like this, I think that there's...

something really deep to look at. I'm really glad that I had a few technical glitches that made me stop from recording for a couple days. Because of that, I had a little bit of distance from Nosferatu when I saw it. So when I first saw it, I will say that I was underwhelmed by it. I was not bored. I was not feeling like it was a misfire, but I felt like it was. kind of emotionally distant for me. And it's something that I've seen in films that are labors of love for directors.

give you a little bit of context on what I'm talking about. Eggers saw Nosferatu, the silent film, as a kid, and it so impacted him that he became obsessed with it, and he ended up doing a school play of Nosferatu. And it has always been in his mind that he wanted to tell this story. It was so much of a passion for him. And he wanted to make Nosferatu right after the witch. Did not happen. Now his time has come.

But sometimes when you're doing that kind of thing, where you have something that you're obsessed with, that is your pet love for a long period of time, especially if you fall in love with it when you're a young person. It's almost like a rest of development on the creative process of the story. You become so close to it that minutia starts to take over. When I first saw Nosferatu...

I felt the same way about it, like I did for Scorsese's Gangs of New York. It's a movie that Scorsese had in his mind since he was a teenager, and it feels that way. When you watch that movie, there's this feeling of just how opulent everything is. universe is there, but the story has not matured.

It's the same story that he was thinking of when he was 16. And it's a story we've seen a whole bunch of times. But to me, it was just not emotionally engaging in any way. And I felt like all this worthless beauty is pretty much what I felt. And I will say that Coppola is megalopolis. It feels like Coppola had this idea for decades.

And it's a story about social change and social needs and unity and all this stuff. But 20 years of all sorts of crazy upheavals have happened. And what he does is he throws every kind of change that he can think of. But the story, you're trying to figure out what the hell it is. And you can't say that either Scorsese or Coppola stopped making an entertaining film. They're entertaining messes.

It's not emotionally engaging. I felt very much the same when I was first watching Nosferatu. A lot of people said that it was boring. I didn't find it boring. I thought it moved along. But what tends to happen if I'm not engaged with the movie?

little things start to pop into my head like how how is one crazy person from an insane asylum able to take this huge heavy casket and put it on a boat on his own and escape and take it back to the castle you know little things like When that starts coming in, I realize that I'm not thoroughly engaged in the movie.

Here's the thing. It feels more like a Merchant Ivory film than it feels like a Hammer movie. And Merchant Ivory films were really beautiful, opulent films in the 80s. They were great for people who were Anglophiles. But, you know... I'm not a cosplayer, so I'm not that interested in that as much as I am the human emotions. Eggers spent so much time with this story that he made sure that the world that he created was real.

Somewhere along the line, I wasn't getting engaged with the characters. There wasn't blood, that feeling of blood coursing through a heart that you get with Hammer films, even if there can be a silliness and a hokiness to them. So that's kind of how I felt when I... first left Nosferatu. I couldn't say it was a bad movie, but it wasn't going to make my best of list because I could not get completely engaged in it.

And then a few days passed, and I started thinking about another movie that I saw that initially... I didn't like. And it split critics and fans when it first came out. And that was in 1982, Blade Runner. We saw Harrison Ford in the poster. We see him carrying this really interesting looking gun. We see ships, spaceships. We see kind of this neo-noir kind of look on the poster. And we're thinking this is going to be like most of the...

science fiction films that were happening at that time, most of them trying to be an adventure, like Star Wars had said. But instead, we got this meditation, this dark film, science fiction no longer being about the discovery, but more Here we are stuck in a world that is disintegrating because of our technology. We're no longer feeling ourselves as humans. And when that first came out, it looked beautiful. There were moments that were really cool in it. But in the end...

By the time Roy Batty is dying and saying his piece, I'm feeling rained on. And so when I first saw it, I said, this is a good movie, but it didn't blow me away. I liked how it looked. Man, I wish I liked it more. But of course, as time went by, I did like it more.

And I think Nosferatu is going to be like that for a lot of people. At first, it's just not what we were expecting. It's not what you were looking for. I think that it's going to stand the test of time. I don't think it's a movie that's going to disappear. quickly. There are things about Nosferatu that are inherently different and inherently grittier and eerier than Dracula. When we think of Dracula, we think much more gothic. We think much more of this twisted romance.

When it first came out, they said the weirdest romance you'll ever see on the posters. This one goes more towards the darkness of Nosferatu, the German Expressionism film. Things that I really like. I love how Orlok looks.

Now, I know the mustache is very controversial for people. It doesn't really bother me, but I've got to say I was kind of told about it beforehand. And that contemporary stuff, if I know about something that's glaring beforehand, it's either really going to... bother me or I'm already aware that it's going to happen so the surprise isn't as big it didn't seem as big of a deal to me as it did to other people I saw it as kind of a nod to the old paintings of Vlad the Impaler whether it's supposed

be Vlad the Impaler or not, it gave a certain hint that made me feel that, ah, it's okay. What I loved about this, though, is that it really goes to the idea of the supernatural, because this is an undead nobleman. This is not a sexy Dracula. This is not a Frank Langella. This is not a Bela Lugosi. There's no kind of semi-romantic notion for the ladies. This is definitely a spell because this.

is a guy that has like maggots on him he's rotting he is an undead spirit and he's conjured to come to this woman she's basically bringing death so the romance is more with death not romance with i'd love to date a vampire and i thought that that was really very cool because you get really creeped out when they're next to each other when there's an embrace you're like going man she does not realize what she is with Or maybe she does. Our main character in this—

It's not really Nosferatu. It's really Ellen, who is the Nosferatu version of the lady in distress. But she's really, she's someone who suffers. You get from the very beginning, the opening sequence, that she is calling out. into the darkness to either be freed or be freed by death.

And then this thing reaches out to her. I will say that I still feel that it's a little bit too mannered in some spots. I guess that's what I talk about when I feel that it's at arm's length. A lot of the ideas that are in Nosferatu are... intellectually sound but I'm not getting the heart the blood is not pumping through a heart the look of it

Amazing. I love the monochromatic color that they're doing. So you are actually thinking that you're watching colored gels that they used to put in. They used to color the frames themselves in old silent films. You kind of feel that in the way that it's. There's stuff that's shot in candlelight, like what Kubrick was trying to do back in the 70s. It's amazing how good it looks. But because of that...

And the fact that we don't have this emotional impact, it's always got this little distance between the people and the story and me that I felt like it was a good movie, but it wasn't one of my favorites of the year. I do feel, though, just like Blade Runner, that it's going to change with time because I can't stop thinking about it. It's like Nosferatu in and of itself. Anyway, Nosferatu is worth seeing so that you can enter the debate as well.

I'm going to go on to the next movie that was really big. It was a hit. It played in a lot of places. It's a sequel that transcended the low-budget roots that it came from and became something that was a cause celeb enough that people like Paul Schrader went...

to see it and commented on it on his Facebook page and things like that. So it was more than just your average horror fans that went to see this movie. And I've got to tell you, I was disappointed by it. And that is Maxine, Ty West's Maxine. a really checkered past with this franchise i loved x and that's the one that a lot of people don't like it was a great movie because it knew what it was and it was itself

Yes, it had a certain feel of Texas chainsaw to it. Yes, it was trying to do a little bit of a porn thing there. But it was uniquely itself, and it had an idiosyncratic style and a sense of pacing. Kai West really understood how to drain the audience with suspense. He had set pieces that were really eerie.

And it felt like that movie was present the entire time with you. It was convincing you that it was what it was. And I say that that way because I had a real problem with Pearl and I was disappointed in Maxine. Because both of those movies wink at the audience the entire time. But Maxine is essentially, well, what I'll do is I'll read the text. In 1980s Hollywood adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big...

break, but as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past. All that stuff sounds great, and the energy of the movie... is very much like the 80s. It really hits. Movies that it reminded me of was like Vice Squad, which is a great movie with Wings Houser, one of his great roles. It reminded me of Angel, another exhibition.

exploitation classic. These are dark and gritty movies and they've got a certain amount of 80s bubble gum to them and a nihilism that's there. But this one feels like it never really knows exactly. what it wants to be. And as much as I really like the character, that Mia Goth played in X, that goes on to be Pearl, that goes on to be Maxine. It felt like everybody was winking at the camera except for Mia Goth.

And it really started to get to me. It kind of reminded me of Richard Rush's The Stuntman, where you have someone who is bouncing between reality and fantasy on a movie set, and the director is somewhat devilish. you have a woman who's the director in Maxine who feels a little bit like Peter O'Toole's character in that movie. But I just, there's just ideas thrown all over the place.

that don't really connect. It all feels very superficial. And it is the 80s, so there's a certain superficiality that's going on, but there's... kind of a giallo film that's going on inside of here there's a parody of what it's like to be in hollywood and how many of those movies have we seen uh there's a little bit of sunset boulevard and just how maxine is

And it just gets preposterous towards the end. And the big surprise that happens is like this big change that happens towards the end. I didn't buy it at all. And I was really disappointed because I wanted to like it. I liked Ty West as a director. I liked what it seemed like he was going for. I liked that there were these interesting homages that were in the film. And yet...

I could not help but feel that the idea of the story was secondary to the style of what was going on. And that really just detached me from the movie. Every so often, there would be a scene that I really liked. I really liked some of the work that Kevin Bacon was doing. But once again, rather broad. There's stuff that just doesn't connect.

You know, there's these sequences with detectives and the storyline that they're following doesn't seem to be the storyline that Maxine is on. And there's just this stuff that's happening and just fills up. An hour and 40 minutes is what it does. You know, what is Maxine's line that she says? I refuse to live a life that I don't deserve. I don't know. X is the only one of these three movies that actually stands for those principles.

So the hits just keep coming. Let's see how much I can piss people off again as this continues. Because I'm going to go to another movie that's very high profile. And I liked it more than I thought I was going to like it. And it would be insane. saying to not bring it up because it is so... So much of an impact, a big part of horror in 2024, a big part in what was happening in Hollywood. It broke records. It busted through barriers.

And that is Terrifier 3, Damien Leone's Terrifier 3. It'd be crazy to not speak of it because it made a billion jillion dollars, right? It was a huge hit. And it was number one in the box office being an unrated film. The first time an unrated film has ever been number one at the box office. And a horror movie. And an unrepentant horror movie. A movie that is there to judge.

really rankle people. And I was there for it, for a certain amount of it. Did I think it was great? No. But let me talk a little bit about what I think is really interesting about Damien Leone and this franchise. The first one, as people know if they listen to this show, I loved the first one. And I loved it because, for a lot of the reasons, people hated it.

I loved it because it felt like an old school slasher film where there weren't rules. And there wasn't Final Girl. And anything could happen on the screen. And the screen, what was happening on there was brutal. And I felt that there was a, now this is being said with me not knowing that there was a short film. That was made before this with Art the Clown and All Hallows Eve, I believe. I didn't know about those two, really. I came to Terrifier cold. Didn't know anything about it.

Turned it on. And I was like, holy shit, this has a feel. First off, it felt like Halloween. It felt like New York City. And it was... Just, you know, people say, oh, another killer clown. This is a clown that what I like about Arthur Clown isn't the little silliness that he does, his little business. What I liked about Arthur Clown is like when he sits.

In a diner. And he just stares at you. And he's just wearing that monochromatic stuff. And he's got a garbage bag. And he just has this dead stare. that's when he's scary. That makes the little smile and the little wave creepy. How far that movie went really got to me. And it was the idea that, you know, he uses a gun, all that stuff that people hated. I was like, this feels great. It feels like it's...

kicking at the shins of people who love slasher films, can't see how de rigor they are, how repetitious they are. And I really like the original Terrifier. I hated... Terrifier 2. I was bored silly. It suffered from every bit of sequel-itis that I can think of. The little girl art, all of that stuff just drove me crazy. It was pretentious. It was extremely long.

I just did not get it. It was stacked with a lot of violence, but none of it felt as disturbing as the first film. Now, we get to Terrifier 3, and that... is not the case. Now, there are things in here that I can see why people get mad. I mean, I saw it in the trailer. There's a lot of homages to Bob Clark's Black Christmas. I don't think that they're bad homages. And it's a Christmas horror.

movie, and it's a lot like Black Christmas in one way, that there's a killer taking out people at Christmas. Other than that, it doesn't really have much to do with it. Now, the storyline and the myth of This guy, Art the Clown, coming back and being in a body and the spirit and all this stuff. I mean, that's okay. You know, it's not a huge deal. And quite honestly, is it a good movie?

It's okay. I dislike, like I said, sequel-itis, and I dislike how it ends, and I dislike certain things that they do in there that you're supposed to know what's going on because you've seen the other movie. I like movies to be a little bit more standalone than this one. does. But what I will say is that I have to admire Damien Leone for being that wedge unapologetically, being incredibly violent and upsetting the older generation with this.

unrelenting violent thing that thumbs its nose at the protestations of the older generation. I think these movies are made to be like this punk rock. anarchic thumb to the nose for what came before it. The violence is way over the top, and the violence connects.

That's the thing that I will say about Leone. He is committed to doing things that are really disturbing in a way that has emotional heft. What I didn't expect. I thought I was going to be bored through this movie. And there are parts that I am, but... He really goes to places that other films don't go.

The chainsawing of a man through his privates hit with the hallelujah chorus happening at the same time. There's a lot of insolence that I can consider kind of recklessness that I really think is interesting about Damien. Leone. And when he does hit with violence, the sadism that's in it, the cruelty that's in it, you feel an empathy that you don't expect.

The sequence inside of the shower, the bold attack on this woman with a chainsaw, really had me like choking. I was like, holy shit, this actually affected me. This freaked me out. He took it to such a degree. that I actually felt sorrow of someone dying. Maybe there are people who are watching the movie and like going, yeah, get some.

But that kind of dies because he pushes forward. And I think he's got something going that a lot of directors don't have, which is he pushes that envelope until you start feeling something. In some ways, he reminds me a little. bit of some of the stylistic ideas that Peckinpah had, where it's just keep editing, keep repeating, keep bringing this up until you mush it in people's faces that this is disturbing.

And I really have to say that I'm not going to put Damian Leone at Sam Peckinpah level, but I will say that he is a lot more than what I'm hearing, especially the older generation. The old slasher fans don't want to give him a lot of... respect. And I've got to say, hey, he's going with Terrifier. He's going to probably die doing Terrifier movies. He's not afraid to beat the dead horse. But I will say he's got a certain talent for what he's doing.

And it's a brutal talent, but it is a talent. And I think that he is talking for, it did not make the money that it made without connecting to a whole group of people. And I think it's generational. I think that there's something for, with Art the Clown, we can sit there and say, oh, we've had clowns and all that. Boy, you can't sound older than when you say something like that. This is theirs.

It's not ours. Art the Clown is, I think, as I said before about having Webster's dictionary change, you know, Art the Clown, he don't bother me. I'm just not the snawly goster that they made that hoedad for. Now, all the movies that I've talked about, they're worth seeing.

They are strange nuggets. Some of them have these great moments in them. Some of them are just really, really good that I highly recommend. I'm going to go down the list of a few movies that I think are just absolutely great. And they're smaller films. You may not have heard of some. of them and some of them you may have. And some of them might drive you just a little bit crazy. Okay, so the next movie I want to talk about is a...

Irish film. It's a low budget Irish film and it creeped the hell out of me. And it is not as if it's a brand new original idea, but it's a variation on an old theme and it is just in the present. presentation that makes it so scary. And the name of the movie is Oddity, and it's directed by Damian McCarthy. And you've heard me talk about Damian McCarthy before, because he's the director of Caveat, another movie that made the...

best of list a few years back and this is just a little monster movie ghost movie haunted house movie all kind of wrapped together and it has some of the best set design that you can think of the thing that really does damien well or the thing that damien does really well is he certainly knows

how to make something look really creepy. In caveat, there was a rabbit that had this really weird face that was kind of like the monkeys that have the symbols in their hands. And in this one, it's a large... life-sized wooden mannequin that does not look human, but looks like some kind of golem, quite honestly.

It is just god-awful ugly and creepy, and it's the size of a person, so you get an uncanny valley feeling every time that you see it. So what's the plot? So the story follows a blind psychic medium, and she's a shopkeeper. keeper who owns all this shop that has all these crazy curios in it. And her sister died a year earlier. She was murdered in her house. She was left alone when her psychiatrist husband

was at his office. And she goes back to that house to try and figure out more about what happened because the murder is unsolved. The husband is now remarried to another woman. She is aware of what happened. And when this woman who's the twin of the person who was killed shows up, it makes it for a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation. She decides she's going to stay and that she has something that's going to be mailed to them and it should be at the house.

So she's a spirit medium. And one of the things that makes this movie kind of interesting is that it really ties in on this idea that there is magic and weird spirit and supernatural stuff that's happening all around us. we're unaware but mediums people who are connected to that can see it and understand and they know that certain objects just absorb energy and spirits. So her curio shop is full of things that are good luck charms, bad luck charms.

cursed items items with spells on them and so when she decides that she's going to mail something to the house where these people are living, before she gets there, it is this life-sized fucking wooden mannequin. Why would anybody keep that? And that's one of the things that I love about Damien's work. Damian McCarthy's work is he has this thing that he does. He's going to take you down a very surreal and strange path, but there is a price to admission to his movies.

And what I mean by that is there's something strange in the movie that is just improbable that you have to suspend disbelief and say, I'm going to allow this to be true. And you cross over that line to say, okay. I can accept this, then the rest of the movie, you are in his spell. So in this movie, it's you're going to have someone send you a large wooden life-size mannequin that looks like...

a fucking demon. And you're just going to let that be in the house. You're just going to accept that and go, okay, well, that's what you have to kind of swallow in this movie. And then the rest of it is just going to take you. on a really cool, wild trip. This is a movie that drips with suspense.

You are waiting for all sorts of strange stuff to happen. There are setups upon setups that are made for that movie. And little by little, it's cranking up all of the tension on these. And when all these traps start to snap, you will jump. I really like this movie a lot. It's one of my favorites of the year. If you get a chance and you can't see all of these, put Oddity at the top of that list.

The next movie I'm going to talk about as well is another one that should be at the top of the list. It's a movie that, for the life of me, I would have never picked to watch because it has one of the worst names ever.

But because of my friends over at Discover the Horror, especially Aaron Abuchan, he had mentioned this movie and said that it was absolutely fantastic. I'd never heard of it. I looked at the poster. It looked ludicrous. And the name of it is... terrible and yet it's one of the best movies of this past year hands down truly disturbing it's called daddy's head yep you got that right daddy's head

Never would I think that would be a good name for a movie, and a movie that had that name could not possibly be good. I was wrong. This is a really amazing film. So Daddy's Head... is one of those horror movies that you feel first, then you think about what it's all about later. It's a really disturbing idea. And I'll give you the quick synopsis. A boy and his stepmother fear for their safety...

after an eerie creature resembling the boy's recently deceased father visits them. The underlying emotion that is in this movie is grief and loss, and the pain of that. and how you cannot stop being haunted by the person that you've lost. So the ugly, selfish nature of grief... It was certainly abundant in the Babadook, and it is here in Daddy's Head as well.

And it starts a very disturbing visual image of a boy being escorted into an emergency room bed to say goodbye to his father who is dying and is... Father, we don't know what the accident exactly is. We don't know what his injuries are, but we can tell his head is crushed. It's underneath all of these bandages and stuff. And the mother, upon seeing the son go in there, walks out of the hospital room. Now, she's not really his mom. She's a stepmother.

and one of the things that really resonated for me with this movie is that the father was the glue between those two. She fell in love with the man, and she said, okay, I'll take the kid as a consolation. And now the man is dead. And all she has is the kid. And she's not good with kids. And she doesn't really like kids. She's just been tolerating this person. And now they're both...

connected in a painful way through grief and loss. They're back in the house and there's something in the house and it comes to visit when the kid is in bed and we don't see it but we hear it. It's not making human sounds, but it's as if it is slowly starting to learn speech. Like it's gaining momentum as... The sun pays attention to it. It starts to get more formed, almost as if we're hearing vocal cords starting to grow until the voice comes out.

That's the kind of thing that's through this movie. It's more of like a premise than it is a plot. It is this observation of the devouring nature of grief. And there is some really, really creepy stuff. There's some visually amazing stuff. We do get the pain of the son and the stepmother. And then there's this thing that's in the house. And it is really disturbing how it shows itself and how it mimics. We don't know where it's coming from. We don't know what it is. But holy shit.

There is this whole feeling of a enigmatic creature. And it's super creepy. I've got to tell you. This was a amazingly effective horror film that I had never heard of and I would have never seen if it was not recommended to me by Aaron Abuchan. And it is one of my favorites of the year. I highly recommend it. So anyone who listens to the show knows that I am a huge fan of full car and.

There was a great folk horror film that came out this past year. Not too many people know about it. It was a rather quiet, small film. But I will say that it is... one heck of a ghost story. And it is a film that will disturb you if you watch it. It starts with a very disturbing scene and it... ends with a very disturbing scene. And in between, there's a lot of unrest just up my alley, right? It is called Starvaker.

And it stars Matt Smith, who was Doctor Who at one point, but he also was in His House, another great horror film from a few years back. And it also stars Morford Clark, who was Saint Maude in the movie Saint Maude. Both of them are really good actors. and they both bring a gravitas to this story. And what's the story, you may ask? Well, let's take a look at the plot.

Richard, an archaeologist, and his wife Jules live with their son Owen, who claims he has been hearing some whistling sounds. So Richard starts to investigate mythic folklore about an ancient oak tree on his land. And during his investigations, a dark...

and sinister force pursues his home. Now, with that, that's a very, very general look at this movie. There's a lot more to it, and I will just give a little bit because... that really doesn't do much justice to why this is such an impactful film. talk about the opening sequence. This is a very unsettling sequence, especially if you're a parent. This is a movie that is right up there with Don't Look Now and The Haunting of Julia for really disturbing...

horrifying death sequences. And this one starts the movie and it really hits deep. And it sets up how this entire movie, everyone in it is kind of a ghost because of grief. So after this tragic death, Richard and Juliet... start to experience strange happenings while they're trying to deal with overwhelming grief. So Richard...

is on a sabbatical from the university where he teaches, and all of his peers are very forgiving and understanding that he is really off. We get to see someone who's trying to hold it together. and maybe not doing as well as he thinks he is. So Richard is on his land and he finds his father's diaries and he's talking about this legendary oak tree that was felled. And he wants to find the roots. The roots have this mystical phenomenon that's connected to them.

So he's trying to find it, and he's digging, and he discovers while he is going into the ground around where he thinks the roots are going to be, he finds a skeleton, a bare-bones skeleton of a rabbit. And he boxes that rabbit up, and he takes it home. takes the bones home only to find out when he opens up the box that suddenly there's little pieces of meat on there. It seems as if it's slowly regenerating.

Now, that's enough. We can go that far. All of this is going to feed into the full car of this film. And this film is a slow burn. It is a movie that is more interested in haunting than it is to give great shocks. And yet, with that said, the opening sequence and the final sequence, the final scene of the film, are super shocking.

watch this movie, which I certainly hope you will, you're going to find out that that end is going to haunt you for a while. It's one of the better gripping gut punch ends that I've seen in a while. So if you're looking for some good full car with a very... haunting concept, take a look at Starve Acre. So since our last film, Star of Acre, had us digging into the ground, let's keep digging into the ground again.

And our next film is one of my favorites of the year. It consistently surprised me, and it also did this surprise with a level of sophistication that I was really impressed by. From South Korea, Exuma. And so talking about giving nothing away, this is what the IMDB plot synopsis says.

The process of excavating an ominous grave unleashes dreadful consequence buried underneath. And that's it. I'll give you just a little bit more of a hint with this movie or what I actually liked about it. It is a story that... has four main characters. Two of them are shamans. So this is a story that is going to have a lot of mysticism in it. So you have a shaman and her protege. They're enlisted by wealthy...

clients to find out what is going on with family members who have illnesses, strange, bizarre illnesses. And there's an infant. in the house of this wealthy family that is having all sorts of strange issues of not being able to wake up. It's in this weird dream sleep.

and so they come to do this mysterious illness try and figure out what's happening with this newborn child and once they do some rituals they realize that there's something more going on here something deeper something deep inside of the family the family doesn't really want to tell them about. So because it's a bigger job and of course there's more money involved in it, they decide to bring in some people that they know will be able to help them solve whatever this mystery is that's going on.

up bringing in a feng shui master and a mortician who's also his friend they're going to be bringing up bones all of these rituals have to do with something going on an unresolved issue with the dead and the feng shui is there to essentially make sure that whoever is buried they're buried in one of the

best plots that allow them to get to the afterlife easier. Of course, it is interesting that the Feng Shui master tends to do this for really rich people. And he's been doing it for decades. And they're like, how can you still find places that are this perfect Feng Shui and he's like it's really about 60% perfect at this point. We are running out of room for this kind of thing. But these people get together to try and uncover what's going on.

The family itself is mum. They don't want to tell anybody anything. And they have this grave for this extremely rich ancestor in... the most un-thingshui place possible. Up on top of a mountain, desolate, covered with vines and all sorts of stuff. There's piles of sticks all around it, and it's just an unmarked grave. So...

We have a great mystery here. And the rest of the story is what happens as they start uncovering it. And this is a movie where people dig in, they grab the bones, they bring them up, they do some rituals around it. And usually at that point, there's enough information. information, that they're able to resolve whatever's happening with the family. That's not this movie, of course.

This movie should also be called The Deeper You Dig, which is another really good movie. But the deeper that they dig, the more mysteries start coming up out of this hole. It's really, really cool. And it goes places I didn't expect. What I really, really like about this movie is the way that they deal with the rituals and they deal with the people who are touched with.

the ability to work with the supernatural or people who are touched to be able to work with nature in such a way that they are in tune beyond what normal people are able to do. They're almost able to talk to the land. What I like about it is Kind of like A Dark Song, another movie that I championed, I think back in 2018. A Dark Song is a movie where they take rituals so seriously that you get the idea of how hard it would be, how arduous it would be.

be if we actually could talk to the dead? And would they tell the truth? Would they go back if we asked them to go back? This movie kind of delves in that, but the thing that was really cool about Dark Song and Exuma... is that they treat the people who are doing these things, the Feng Shui master, the shamans, as just workers. This is just their job, man. They have this gift and they're not paid great. They live off of every job.

contractors, they're subcontractors. They don't really trust each other about the money. They've all been ripped off. They keep their conversations away from the families as much as possible. They keep their information close to their vests. And you just get this idea, almost like Simon King of the Witches, that there's no glamour whatsoever in doing this. And the idea that it's a gift that makes them somehow happy is just not true. So I really...

like how they show it as a workaday thing, and they go deep into ritual. From what I've read, this movie, the actors and the director really went into research and started learning how to perform actual rituals. So the things that you're watching...

watching feel authentic because they were done with authenticity in mind. There was a lot of research that was done. That kind of thing, that believability that comes when you're watching that kind of stuff really does help the movie stick out, at least for me. And then what's even better is I love how as much as these people know about their given spiritual paths and their skills that they have, they haven't seen everything. And there's a great...

couple moments in this film where they seem to know what's going on. Everything is going the way that they expect. It's as they predicted. Things are moving along as they're supposed to. And then all of a sudden, it just goes off the rails. The afterlife or the spiritual... world or the supernatural does something that they did not expect. And at that moment, you can see the insurity in their eyes and the fear.

And that happens a couple times. As the movie goes on, it increases more. And I love the idea that... There's never anyone who can answer everything that's going on in the unknown. You cannot know the unknown. And this movie kind of hits on that. I really enjoyed Exuma. And if you love that kind of movie, if you love mysticism and even monsters, this movie has a little bit of everything. I don't know how much it was seen here. It was a blockbuster in Korea.

But I really enjoyed Exuma, and I hope you do too. I mentioned in the intro that... This year, there were a lot of movies that did some experimentation. They went in different ways to be able to tell their stories. And so I want to talk about a few of those, ones that I thought were really exceptional. And the first one I want to talk about is a movie. called Stop Motion.

So let's go and look at the IMDb synopsis, shall we? A stop-motion animator struggles to control her demons after the loss of her overbearing mother. And no, that's... Pretty simple, but it's pretty effective. I will say a few things about it. The mother that they're talking about is a world-renowned, legendary stop-motion animator, and she has...

gotten debilitating arthritis and cannot use her hands. So her daughter ends up being her hands for her. The daughter does not have the skill of the mother, but she does have the technical ability to manipulate things. The daughter is played by Asling Franciosi, who is from the movie The Nightingale, and she does a great job here of being someone who has dedicated her life to her. mother, her parent. And as she's lost, she's also losing her identity as well as her parent.

And the movie shows through stop motion some of the methods of madness that are going through her mind. Now, when the mother is struck with a debilitating stroke that ends up killing her... They were in the middle of working on Mother's last movie. And it's a very quaint fairy tale kind of thing with Cyclops.

that really doesn't resonate with anybody anymore, but it is this legendary person doing it. So the daughter decides she's going to continue on after the mother has died and finish this. But... Her mind and her psyche have different ideas of what should be done next. So there are a few characters that come into play. I'll leave those as blanks. But she gets an inspiration to go in a different direction than what her mother was doing. And she comes up with this idea through a muse.

about a girl frightened in the woods, hiding in a cabin, and she's being visited by something that's known as the Ash Man. And the Ash Man will come to see her three times. And the rest of the movie is what happens as our character continues doing this stop motion with these new characters and what is happening to her life. There's a lot of stop motion animation in here. There's a lot of blurring between the reality of live action and stop motion. And there's just something really...

cool and unsettling about the uncanny valley that there is with stop motion animation. And somehow it really works well with the idea of someone. starting to lose their composure, starting to lose what they believe is their own identity, this decline. And I can see similarities to this and Roman Polanski's repulsion. There's some really cool stuff in here.

I really like stop motion. It is a body horror film. Once everything is all said and done, you can call it body horror. You can call it psychological. You can call it a movie that deals with ghosts through uncanny valley. There's a lot of really cool stuff going on in stop motion. I hope you check it out. So the next experimental film that I want to talk about is named Mad S. It's directed by David Moreau, and he is probably known by horror fans for his movie Them that he wrote and co-directed.

the one that was the french film with the killer kids going after the couple anyway mad s is made by the same crazy person who did that that was a movie that was like a perpetual motion machine that never was slowing down it was consistently moving the entire time. And what I'll do is I'll give you a real quick synopsis, the great IMDB synopsis of Matt S, a teenager who stops off to see his dealer to test a new drug before he heads off for a night of partying.

On the way home, he picks up an injured woman and a knight. takes a surreal turn and quite honestly that's about all i want you to know about the movie so that you are hit with every surprise that's happening so why is this experimental why did i put this on here well because

This is a movie that is filmed in one long tracking shot with no breaks. Now, this is not the first movie to try that or give the illusion that it's doing that. I mean, you can go back to Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, which used seamless edits to take... multiple cuts and make them unseeable, you know, and make it seem as if the movie is one long take. But it was a simulation. And you had that a couple more times. I think Time Code Russian Ark is another movie. That's the one that I remember.

where you would hear about this legendary movie that was like 89 minutes long and it was all one take and there was all this stuff that was going on. And I always thought about being an actor and you're at minute 77 and somebody makes a mistake and you're like, God damn it.

The director's like, okay, back to one, you know, all the way to the beginning of all this stuff. You have to restage it all. Really a pain in the ass, I would think. And then there's The Silent House, which is one that I really like.

Now, Mad S ups the ante in all this. I think first off, this is the one, maybe the Silent House did it as well, but because it's digital video, they're no longer encumbered by the cartridge of film, so they can... go forever if they so want and this is a movie that just ups the ante and I think telling you that it has one long tracking shot just adds to the suspense of the movie there's already a built-in suspense on what is happening

but also the action of what is going on on the screen when you realize that, oh my God, they're not staying in one place. It's not in a house. It's not in an apartment like Rope. It's not in a castle like Russian Ark. This is like a road picture. The guy's driving around. There's multiple vehicles. There are people coming in and out of the frame. There are multiple locations. There's action. There's violence. There's stunts. There's gore effects.

of this stuff is happening and it just layers one on top of another it gave me kind of a feeling that uh one cut of the dead gave me which is like at any moment you feel the fun and exhilaration of what they're doing but you also feel like it can just kind of spiral out of control. And that is what the subject of the movie being on drugs and having it be experimental, an experimental drug and things spiraling out of control, all of that.

works so well with this immediacy of having a movie in one complete shot. You can almost feel the tension growing as the movie goes on. Some people will say, well, that's just a fucking stunt. And I'm like... Prove to me that any movie that you watch isn't a stunt of some sort. Tell me that any marketing isn't a stunt. Anyway, if you feel like doing something a little experimental and fun, take a look at Mad S.

The next experimental movie that I want to talk about is one that will probably cause some hackles to raise. It has been controversial. And the big controversy is this statement that I hear over and over again, like a clarion call. That's not really horror. That's not a horror movie. And if you've listened to me for any given time, you know that I say that horror is very subjective. And how I check whether it's a horror movie or not is I ask, does it give you a sense of dread, unease?

fear, repulsion, and why does it give you that? What feeling does the director, the filmmaker, want you to go home with? And that's usually the most thumbnail thing that I can come up with on whether or not something is horror. If it's scary to you, if it affects you in that way, if it gives you dread, it gives you unease, then it can definitely be a horror film for you. But people have had a real hard time with saying, I saw the TV glow. is a horror film and I absolutely do believe that it is.

And I think it's one of the more original films that I've seen. There's nothing quite like it. It is strange. I don't necessarily know if I get everything that's happening inside of it, but I appreciate what I'm seeing a lot. And I know that it affects me. And it may seem as if some ideas in there are not universal, but I think the idea of loneliness and not feeling like you fit in your own skin, that the world is changing around you and you just...

Just want it to stay the way it was, but you know it can't. I think that's pretty fucking universal. And I think that's what Jane Schoenbrunn is going for in this. This movie is their second film. Their first one, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was another. head trip movie. And I like both of them. And so before I go any further, let me give you the storyline.

Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show, one which conveys a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own in the pale glow of the television. Owen's view of reality begins to crack.

The name of the show that Owen and Maddie bond over is called The Pink Opaque, and it follows teenagers, Isabel and Tara, as they use their psychic connection to fight a supervillain named Mr. Melancholy, who has the power to warp time and reality. And the movie is about their relationship and Owen's relationship to his own world and how sometimes we can feel that we no longer know who we are as the world changes and we change. now sean brunn

is transgender. And when they were writing this movie, they were about three months into a total chaotic change in their life, the shift of coming out as transgender. And so everything... that they knew kind of blew up. So it is an allegory about being transgender, but it's not an isolationist kind of thing. Sean Byrne describes this movie as being about the egg crack.

It's a term for the moment a trans person's life changes, when they realize that their identity that they have does not correspond to their assigned gender. And they start to realize that there's a tension between the space that they exist in. which feels like home and is supposed to be safe. And this simultaneous terror, that space that's supposed to be safe may not be so, may not be able to hold you in your true form. And I think that that is where the...

breakdown of reality that happens in this movie becomes scary. This is an existential kind of horror that's in this. And it is a story about being lonely. How lonely is it if you don't even know who you are? And this is a movie that goes with some magical stuff, some scary stuff. This movie has this sense of claustrophobia and disconnection from reality. One of the things that I think is universal is... how when you're a kid, you feel like you're on a different planet than your parents.

The world that they're living in just seems very much like yours. It's like a parallel life, but it doesn't seem to make sense. Anyway, I found this to be a really gripping story. a melancholy story. And in the end, in the final few scenes, it becomes really terrifying. It's rather Lynchian in that way. And it's an overused word, but I think Sean Brown was actually going for that Lynchian feel in that end. I will say if you're up for something a little avant-garde.

You may enjoy I Saw the TV Glow. And speaking of movies that might piss off some of my listeners, we're going to go to the next film. I've talked about this one before in an episode called A Brief History of Failure. And this movie is The Coffee Table. Oh, my goodness. Yes. Oh, my goodness. What a what an amazing film. Can I say that I enjoyed it? I think I enjoy.

the idea of it, more than I enjoy actually watching it. But even so, I was giddy with the way that this movie goes. It is the darkest pitch black comedy possible. And it starts with comedy. There's a comedy routine about a husband and wife with a newborn baby going somewhere to buy something for their house. They haven't been out of the house for a long time. And the husband...

just decides that he wants this coffee table. And there's this argument between them and the salesman talking about how it's unbreakable glass, all this stuff. It's a comedy routine that goes five minutes, and it's funny, and it tells you everything.

everything that you need to know about the characters, our main characters. And it is a setup for what I will say, if you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen the movie, oh, you know, if you want to... watch it you should probably hit pause go watch it come back and curse me it's this distillation of an idea to its most simplest form. And in that it finds like a really nasty truth. So what I consider the coffee table is it's an hour and a half dead baby joke.

So when I was growing up, there were dead baby jokes all over the place. You know, this cruel humor, sick humor, dark humor. The thing about a dead baby joke is that it is cruel, but it's over. in 30 seconds and everybody laughs and they laugh about how outrageous the story is that you just told and that's it but this is a movie that is an hour and a half of the dead baby joke it won't let you go and there is a joke

in the center of all of this. And if you were to talk about each of these things without the way that it is visually shown to you, it would sound like a comedy routine and it would sound like a dead baby joke. But... It's the way it's told. And to me, it's kind of like... To me, it's somewhat ingenious. It is a movie that is for a very specific audience. Not everybody, most people are not going to enjoy the coffee table.

And there's just something about doing something that ballsy that really appeals to me. With that said, I've only watched it twice. I will say that I probably watched it one more time than a lot of people did. But I do find something really interesting, cool, disturbing, brilliant, and punk rock about the coffee table. Okay, so that brings me to the movie that I think is probably going to be out of my list, the most controversial pick that I've got.

And it's going to rankle some people. And you know what? I don't care. I really like the movie. It's in a violent nature. And this really divides audiences. Things that I absolutely loved about it, I'll get to. But this is...

Probably just by name you have an opinion on this film. Whether you've seen it or not, you've probably heard enough. They're either negative or positive. People who hate it will say the people who love it are being... purposely contrarian just to like it just to rankle them i don't

feel that way at all. I actually was stunned when I saw the movie and heard how many people really disliked it, especially people who love slashers. Now, with that said, people who listen to the show know that I'm not a big fan of slashers. I was a fan of the slasher films, the earliest ones because they did not have a template, a real pattern to them. And the rest of the slashers really started to feel very derivative. They were repeating themselves often.

And I got bored with them very quickly. So before I go any further and I get too heady, the storyline. When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurned on by a horrific 70-year-old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hell-bent on retrieving it.

And that's the story. And people go, that's why I hate it. That's all it is. Well, see, I see this as a deconstruction of slashers. I think it goes right down to the thing that everybody really likes slashers for. They don't really care about the characters. They don't really care about the storyline. They're there for the kills. And this movie takes away any of the false pretense and just goes right for that. Remember, the name of the movie is In a Violent Nature. And this is a movie that...

takes away soundtrack. I mean, you have no music in this. The only sounds are like really strange, digitized, distorted sounds of nature plus normal sounds of nature. takes. We're in the woods. I mean, some people say incredibly long takes. There's something really unsettling about that to me. You just see this force of nature walking through the woods, no matter what it's coming for you. the people who are being stalked act much more realistically than they normally do in slashers.

There's a sequence pretty early on where the monster goes to a farm. And there's like a whole different movie that's happening there. They're inside of a state park. It's in Canada. And the park ranger is... at this guy's house and he's complaining about something that's going on. The guy's like having this big argument out front and this monster walks in the back door, just walks in.

To me, that's absolutely terrifying. There's no cutaways. There's no strange Dutch angles. There's no foreboding music. There's nothing. Just this very matter-of-fact thing that he goes into the house. I got when the creature goes into this house reminded me of a movie by Michael Winner called The Sentinel.

And there's this scare, one of the best scares that I'd seen in movies. This woman who's in a bedroom. It's dark. She hears a noise. She walks in. There's nobody there. But all of a sudden, from behind the door, this... creature just kind of walks across as a ghost, right? Or it's a undead body.

But it's just this old man painted all white who walks across nonchalantly, doesn't notice her, recognize her. She gasps. We gasp because there's something so bizarre. It's so without any of the normal conditions. inventions that you have in a horror movie and it really unsettles you and to me this thing of him going into the house the guy doesn't know the guy tries to go back into the house he sees this guy and instead of trying to fight him or shoot him or anything he screams

realizing that this fucking thing is a nightmare coming at him. And he's running. And there's something to this scene as well. And this is a relentless creature just moving forward. It does go with the language of video games. We have generations now that have played horror video games just as much as they've seen movies, and that is now a film language, the way that those horror games move.

So it's like a video game where you're the monster, you're the killer, but we're helplessly behind this killer the entire time. We're not the killer. And the kills are really grotesque and violent. I think people remember the big kill. And it's deserving of its reputation. It's a really grotesque kill.

All the way through the movie, there's this malevolence and this violence that's there. And there's no buildup to it. We just have this violence. And there's something to that just feels like we're almost watching a nature documentary. the scariest nature documentary ever. And I think there's some real brilliance to this where... They are not telegraphing anything to you. They're just giving you this thing right in front of you, this story. So no nods.

It's just you are watching the brutality that's there. And the end, I thought, was absolutely great. A lot of people were mad about the end. But to me, it was like the perfect end of this thing. It was very reminiscent of. No Country for Old Men, the story that's being told in No Country for Old Men, and even the idea of Anton Sugar, this idea of mad fate, this thing that can't be killed. There is this feeling of futility that there's nothing you can...

do. We are at the mercy of a vengeful nature, this mad fate with blood in its eyes, as Wes Craven once said. So I really like this movie. I've watched it a couple times. It is hypnotic to me. Also, maybe it's something that has to do with the fact that I spend a lot of time out in the woods and there's something about being in the woods.

When you're far enough out there and maybe just get a little bit turned around, there's nothing scarier than the dead silence. When you're hearing birds and stuff like that, that's great. But when it goes dead silent, there's something really, really scary about that. So I know. You may not like in a violent nature, but...

This is my show. And I will say that I really liked it. And if you see me at a convention, you want to argue with me about it, I'll be more than happy to argue with you. But In a Violent Nature makes this show. So here we are. We're coming into the home stretch on this look at the year of horror in 2024. All the movies that are there. If you're counting, we're pretty high up in the count rate right now. We just have a few more that I want.

to do. And one of the things that I think is always fun for me, movies that I love to see. are movies where they play with our concepts of reality and our concepts of time. And there are two movies this year that I really liked that have to do with time. And the two movies that I want to talk about are Caddo Lake and Things Will Be Different.

So the first one I want to talk about is Caddo Lake, which was one that I had not heard about and a friend referred it to me. And I was really pleased with this movie. So here is the synopsis. When an eight-year-old girl... disappears on Caddo Lake, a series of past deaths and disappearances begin to link together, altering a broken family's history. And this is one where characters and the storyline really matters, where you need to follow along with what's happening.

Why I like this movie so much is the characterizations that are in it, the characters themselves, the world that they're trying to show us. It's a part of Louisiana I didn't know anything about. They make it feel very authentic. Everything feels very much lived in.

People who live on the lake, people who work on the lake, people who are trying to fix things that are inside of the lake, and a dam that is slowly starting to fall apart. All of these things, the people who are involved and the environment. that is around this lake, all are part of the story and part of the clues as to what is actually happening.

So the story centers on Ellie. She's a teenager who fights with her mother. She leaves home all the time. But there's also a man named Paris. He's in his 20s. Now, he was in a car with his mother when she drove off the bridge. some kind of seizure. He survived the wreck and she drowned and he's haunted by this. He cannot let it go. The little sister of Ellie is the girl who disappears.

Now, when she disappears, people start going on the lake to try and find her, Ellie being one of them. She's one of the people who works on the lake. body of water Caddo Lake straddles the Louisiana-Texas border. So I think that's very important to the story, that this lake is...

in between places, right? It's neither Texas nor Louisiana, or it's both of those things. Where is the dividing line? You know, when you're going over a bridge, like I live out in the Bay Area, and there's a part of the Bay Bridge. when you're going over it, where it goes from Alameda County to San Francisco County. When is the water changing its allegiances between Alameda and San Francisco? Well...

That's kind of the idea that's here in Caddo Lake, this mysterious place where if you're on the lake long enough and you go to places in there deep enough, you can find a spot. where it's no longer the world that you know. And the end result is a film that is really touching, talking about family ties and the lack of resolution when someone just leaves you. So if you love time travel kind of stories, the idea of time being this wibbly wobbly kind of thing, I will highly recommend Caddo Lake.

And the next movie, the next time travel movie that I'm going to talk about, has a very cool pedigree to it. producers of this movie are Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, as well as others. Michael Felker is the director, but Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, they've been talked about on this show often. They love head trip kind of films. So Things Will Be Different has their stamp on it, but it is its own little beast. And here is the synopsis.

In order to escape police after a robbery, two estranged siblings lay low in a farmhouse that hides them away in a different time. There they reckon with a mysterious force that pushes their familial bonds to unnatural breaking points. And this is one that you really have to pay attention to. I love this movie from the very beginning. The movie starts inside of a diner.

should be paying attention you should be watching everything that's on the walls see what people are wearing see the length of people's beards of their facial hair all of this stuff is little clues that are going to take you through the rest of the movie The closest thing I can think of to this movie is Time Crimes, if you've ever seen the movie Time Crimes, another one that I highly recommend. I love movies that twist my mind, and they respect the audience to be able to follow along.

with what's happening there's enough really cool puzzle box kind of ideas that are happening that it's enough to keep you truly engaged one of the things that's really great about this movie is that watching it a second time you start Start catching all of the little hints that are in there. This is a movie that when I watched it, as soon as it was over, I was like...

Okay, I got to watch this again. If you like time travel movies, if you like Benson and Moorhead's work, you're probably going to like this one as well. Things will be different. Take a look. The next movie I'm about to talk about, well, I have to admit, it's a little bit of a cheat. It's a South Korean film, and it did open in South Korea in 2023, September of 2023. But it didn't come to American audiences until 2024. And when I watched it...

And I saw it, I was like going, this is really good. And I'd like to be able to talk about it. So I'm going to take that defense to put this film on my list. And the film is Sleep. Let me give you a little bit of a synopsis. A young expectant wife must figure out how to stop her husband's nightmarish sleepwalking habits before he harms himself or his family.

This is a slow build kind of movie. The wife is pregnant. The husband is overworking. He's an actor. He's trying to get as much work as he can. And of course, they're newlyweds. They're young in their life. There's a bunch of stress. They're in an apartment. All of this stuff. And he starts having sleep problems. And his sleep problems under all of this stress is he starts to talk in his sleep. He starts sleepwalking. And something that seems...

pretty harmless in the very beginning starts to get really creepy pretty quick. Now, if you're someone who lives with somebody who sleepwalks or talks in their sleep, it's kind of unnerving. You're not quite sure if they're awake or not. any given moment. There's not a major difference until they start talking or until they start looking at you and they're looking through you. But at first they're going through the motions and it seems like they're awake.

And there's something really disconcerting. Like, who is the person that you're with? How much do you really know about them? What is happening when we sleep? There is a character in this movie, a shaman, who says... We are at our most vulnerable when we are asleep. We are where the veil is the thinnest when things can enter us, when things that wish to do us harm can actually make it in. So we have kind of an exorcist-y kind.

of thing going on here where it starts out as everyone believes that it's just a sleep issue. But then as they continue to try to get him healed through sleep therapy and doctor visits and drugs, and it just doesn't seem to be working. people start thinking that there might be something a little bit more, something a little bit more supernatural. So you have this thing that you see a lot in The Exorcist and movies like it, where the superstitious or the spiritual is meeting.

and beating against the science, and science can't answer all the way. Or it might be able to, but we're not sure, because this movie plays a couple more tricks on us. One of the things is our narrative. The world that we're seeing this through is through the wife who is herself starting to become sleep deprived. She's dealing with him, but she's also... Having a baby. When she does have a baby, the worries go up because now it's not just her and her husband and a dog.

Yeah. You hear me say it, dog, and you already know. It's not going to be good news. It's a horror movie, right? But... She's now starting to worry about, is he going to cause her damage? Is he going to cause the child damage? Because he's doing things to himself while he's sleeping. He's scratching himself and tearing off pieces of skin.

up and just kind of walking to the window and looking as if he's going to jump out and just kind of leans out into the street and she has to pull him back in. Stuff like that is happening which is pretty terrifying and just gets crazier and worse. And as her sleep deprivation gets worse, we don't know what's actually happening. We don't know what's true. And as it continues on and things get a little bit weirder and a little bit weirder.

We start getting into territory that is really freaky. And the end of the movie, the last 10 minutes of the movie, is really something to see. You don't expect it to really go where it goes. And I was really impressed. I like this movie a lot. If you get a chance and you're inclined and you want to see something that's going to creep you out, maybe not watch it right before you go to bed, but take a look at Sleep.

I've been a fan of Oz Perkins films since his first film, Black Coat's Daughter. Now, that movie was so good that... He's one of those guys, I'm yours for life. I'm going to watch everything. So I was really excited to see that Oz had a new film this year, Long Legs. Now, there was so much hype for this movie that there really was no way.

way that it was going to fulfill all of the expectations that were coming down the pipe. And I'm someone who knows not to listen to hype to form my own opinions, but there was so much and a lot. lot of it was actually created by the production company itself, that I did succumb to expecting a little bit more than what I got with the movie. It's a very idiosyncratic film, so long legs.

Let's give you the synopsis. In pursuit of a serial killer, an FBI agent uncovers a series of occult clues that she must solve to end his terrifying killing spree. I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school to say that Nicolas Cage is in this movie. And you're getting another... Just crazy performance by Nicolas Cage. There is humor in this movie because of how Nicolas Cage decides to play this character. Now, the story is set in the 90s. We have an FBI agent who might...

possibly be clairvoyant. Now she's assigned to a case that's a series of murder suicides that are happening in Oregon. Each case involves the father killing his family and then himself. even behind a letter with satanic coding all over it, signed long legs. And the handwriting belongs to none of the family members. And there are other similarities in all of the families. But for the sake of the mystery of the film, I'm not going to...

go into any of those. Let's just say as our FBI agent goes deeper in, things get weirder and weirder. In fact, we're not quite sure. There may be some supernatural that's happening. There may be something satanic There may just be a serial killer. There may be clairvoyance. There's all sorts of little things, strange things that are popping up in this film. As I said before, it's pretty idiosyncratic. It has some really shocking sequences in it. It has some really cool ideas in it.

But what I will say is Oz Perkins really has a great style to him. And I really like... what he's trying to do in his movies, and I'll support him till the bitter end, and Long Legs is well worth taking a look at. All right, before we get to the last film, I want to get to the penultimate film, which is on this list because it's just a movie that really pleased me. It entertained me. It freaked me out. It seemed like a very...

very interesting mixture of different types of horror films and different types of action films. We have a little bit of post-apocalyptic. We have a little bit of demonic stuff. We have religious horror. We have action film. We have gallons of blood in this movie. And we also have a gimmick. And the gimmick is nobody speaks. And there's a reason why nobody speaks. And the name of this movie, before I go any further, is Azrael.

Many years following the apocalypse, a devout female-led cult of mute zealots hunts down Azrael, a young woman who has escaped her imprisonment. Recaptured by its ruthless leaders, Azrael is to be sacrificed to pacify an ancient... and evil that resides deep within the surrounding wilderness. Yet she will stop at nothing to ensure her own survival. Azrael makes a savage bid for freedom as her escape accelerates towards a vicious showdown between the very forces of good and evil.

So this is after the rapture, after the apocalypse, and because of the sin of communication, everybody cuts their fucking vocal cords out, essentially. Everybody has a cross. on their throat where the vocal cords were removed. So... They're still communicating, right? The irony is just like any cult, you know, there's a certain level of hypocrisy in what's going on. So they're still grunting and, you know, doing all this stuff. They just don't use the human voice. So what we get in this movie...

is not much dialogue at all. I mean, there's not really dialogue. There's a song that gets played. So everything is action. Everything is how people respond. Everybody is using their bodies to be able to communicate. So this is a moving picture. It is action-packed from the very beginning. And what I liked about it, like I said, it was just a combination of a... bunch of different ideas. You've seen most of what's in Azrael in different places, but it's how it's told. And

how it's mixed together, and the main character, who is really, really good. The actress is Samara Weaving, and she's great in this role. I don't know how much in the way of her own stunts she did. But she had to do a ton of running in this thing. So this is a kinetic film. It never stops moving. The ideas never stop coming. It's got, you know, the apocalyptic thing of the evil that's out in the forest. It's kind of like...

Burnt zombies is what they look like. They come in, they devour people, and there's this whole weird worshipful sacrifice that goes on. But through all of this is a relentless action film that has all of these horror trappings to it. And it gets gory as hell. Azrael herself could take on John Rambo, it seems. I have to say, I really enjoyed this movie. You can recommend this to people and they're going to come back and go, damn, that was really cool. So that's Azrael.

So we've done it. We're at the final movie of this list. Believe it or not, we have gone through 25 movies to discuss that I felt really showed the depth, breadth, and scope and craziness of 2024. And we're going to end with what I think is probably one of the craziest movies of 2024, which despite all of its madness and grotesquerie and crazy satire and weird farce. and strange fucking acting. Despite all of that, it became a mainstream hit.

And it wasn't supposed to be one. It was kind of an art house film, and it still made money. And the movie became the talk of the town for a while. Everybody seemed to be buzzing about it. This movie brought in non-horror fans to the horror world. realm and normally when that happens that's usually with a thriller type movie or something a silence of the lambs there's something that keeps it from being total horror well not this one this one is uh like a real

bona fide horror movie that I don't think too many people would be able to dismiss as a horror movie. They may not like it, and I will say this is another of those divisive films, but no one's going to be able to say it's not stunning. Crazy, wild, sick, sexy, funny, enraging. All of those words work with this movie, and that is... The Substance. The Substance is written and directed by Corley Farge, whose first movie really impressed me as well, 2017's Revenge. And that's another movie that...

All those superlatives that I used about the substance could probably be said about too. It caused a bit of a stir. Some people really loved it. Other people were just not happy with it. They were like, oh, this is... way overblown. There's nothing realistic about this at all. And essentially that movie is a rape revenge film that turns into Rambo. The woman is Rambo though. And something about that, even though we've seen, I don't know how many actions start.

get shot and poisoned and buried alive and pull themselves out of the grave whatever it is somehow we're able to bite that bullet on that one and be okay with it and suspend our disbelief but when a woman's doing it it's just impossible and it's preposterous and it pulls people out of the movie.

It's really interesting to me when that kind of thing happens because I like to say that if I watch a movie that's directed by Jordan Peele or directed by a woman, I'm looking at a movie that just has a different... filter on it. It just has a different focus pull. Whatever it is, it's still the same story, but it's told from a different perspective. And that different perspective excites me. I want to find out how other people look at the world that I'm in.

And it's interesting how when that look is somehow different than what we're normally expecting, that we're usually given, hand-fed, the thing that makes us so happy, when it's opposing that. We argue that point, that that point can't be right, even though it's their point of view, right? So I feel that the substance had a little bit of that backlash. And I think that there's still a bit of that backlash that's out there.

firmly in the camp of loving the substance. So before I go any further in this, let's talk about what the movie is in very general terms, which means we're going to go to our old friend IMDB. The substance follows a fading celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, who, after being fired by her producer, Dennis Quaid, due to her age, uses a black market drug that creates a much younger version of herself, Margaret Qualley,

with unexpected side effects. Unexpected indeed. So I'm not going to give up too much of the movie. You may already have a little bit of an idea of what it's going to be just from that description. This is a body horror movie. This is a satire. This is a farce. It's not just satire. There is farcical elements in this. This is a look at the beauty myth of women, how women are put under societal pressures about their body.

and aging it's also about our self hatred not just women but men as well but the idea as we age as we change and we start to fall into areas of self hatred at times And I think for actors, this movie is in some form of showbiz, the wonderful world of aerobics television, which means lots of bodies, bodies, bodies. The focus is going to be bodies, right? But in that world...

The idea of how you look and how you change as time goes by and how you're perceived as time goes by. The chasing of being adored takes the place of how you truly feel about being in your own skin.

There's a lot of real cool mystery in it as well. The way that our main character, Elizabeth Sparkle, ends up finding out about the substance is she's in a car accident, a minor accident. She has to go to the hospital and she meets... a hospital intern there who's checking up on her and he hands her a thumb drive and she takes it home and he essentially tells her this might be something what you're looking for and on there is a cryptic message about something called the

And you have that as an opening idea and the telling of the story is so much of the fun. There is everything that an 80s fan would like as well. This is a movie that... I think they had 21,000 liters of fake blood that they used in it. This is not for the squeamish. This movie goes all out. This is a full Monty kind of body horror film. I loved how far it went with some of the effects.

there's a lot of prosthetic work that's in it there's a lot of nudity but this is nudity where it's actually making fun of the male gaze it's rubbing your nose in it when we're watching this aerobic show I mean there are just ass cheeks in your face the whole time

There are a lot of scenes where the main characters are naked. And of course, that's going to have people say, oh, look how brave they were. Yeah, I guess you can say that. I hate that that's when people start saying that women are brave. It's brave when Demi Moore is slapping her own face trying to put makeup on. The look that she gives herself feels so real and it's heartbreaking. That's the stuff that I think is courageous. I think that this movie is a lot of fun and it's something...

about that focal point again. What I've been hearing a lot is people are like, well, it's really broad, you know? I mean, it's not subtle. And I'm like... Fucker, what body horror film have you seen that was subtle? What about body horror and subtlety? Where's the connection on that? What was the Cronenberg film that you thought was elegance and simplicity and subtlety? Let me hear all about it. There's something about how the story is told that bothers certain people.

And I think part of it has to do with something that I notice in movies that are written and directed by women. There's this ironic, sardonic humor. It's a defense mechanism. I see that movies, not all of them, I don't want to generalize completely, but I will say that I think the thing that most people get upset about with these movies that are written and directed by women, especially in the horror world.

is that they come with this kind of sarcastic and or ironic humor. And I see that as it's how women have defended themselves in a world that they really can't change. Humor. And that mixes in with the horror. So a lot of times there is this tonal balance that's constantly being juggled. I think this movie juggles that rather well. Farage really does a masterful job.

I will say that where it ends, where it goes, the final act of this movie went somewhere I didn't expect it to go. And it went all the way. When I talk about Full Monty, the end of this movie is like... I applauded. I laughed and I was like, wow.

In the end of that, let's just put it this way. I will say that one of the goriest movies I ever saw, and I actually don't call it the goriest movie. I call it the wettest movie. It's like the wettest movie ever was dead alive up until maybe the end sequence. of the substance that may have actually beat it out.

So I really like this movie. I think that there's a lot being said in there. What I think is also interesting is that it plays for jokes, it plays for horror, and yet it still finds time for real pathos. You feel for these characters. As the story goes on, you realize how close we all feel to our own mortality, that there's so much sadness in not being happy and comfortable in your own skin.

is easily one of the best movies of 2024 horror movies. And I really hope that people take a chance on it if they haven't seen it yet. I think you're really in for a treat. Thank you. And there it is. There is my list. 25 movies from 2024 that I felt really showed a vision of what the year in horror really was. And of course, as I had said in the beginning, I didn't want to just...

talk about the best of. I wanted to talk about some of the movies that I didn't quite understand, but I saw Merit in. I wanted to discuss that a little bit because I do think that we're at this turning point. We're in the middle of a turning point. I think it's kind of like where we...

are in the culture right now. It's kind of like turning a battleship. It takes at least a mile or two to turn a ship around. It doesn't turn like a car. It takes a lot of effort, a slow burn to be able to take momentum. and start shifting it to take something so big and move it in the opposite direction. And I do think that we've been in this change. And in that, it means sometimes the movies that people are celebrating are not movies that I quite understand. I'm looking at it.

from different eyes. I want to try and take a look at where I am in this culture. And as I said before, this is like Webster's dictionary. It's still English, folks. It's just some of the words have disappeared and the culture has changed. change in a way that it is evolved that new words come it's not necessarily the death of anything but it is a change and to me change is key you either change or you die and I intend to be around for a little bit

I hope that you intend to be around for a little bit and we get to sit around and talk about horror movies a little bit more. We'll see how the business changes. Let's see if we ever leave our houses or if streaming takes over. Let's see what happens in the cinema.

What I will say is if you get a chance, go to a cinema. Many of the ones that I really connected with, I saw in movie theaters. There is something... about the action of getting up and going to see the movie and if you get a chance try and enjoy that magic but here's to 2025 I hope that we all hang in there as best as we can I think it's going to be Crazy. And thanks for listening to the show. Hellbent for Horror was written and broadcast by me, S.A. Bradley, and produced by me and Lisa Gorski.

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