Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  A group of co-workers were trapped in their high-rise corporate office building and forced to kill each other by a mysterious voice in Greg McLean’s The Belko Experiment, scripted by James (Guardians of the Galaxy) Gunn.

  Doug Jones portrayed the eponymous urban legend come to life in the delayed low-budget slasher The Bye Bye Man, which also featured Michael Trucco, Carrie-Ann Moss and a slumming Faye Dunaway.

  Two years after it was made, writer-director Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy finally got a limited release, as Ethan Embry’s struggling painter moved his family into a rural Texas dream house beset by Satanic forces.

  British actor Jason Flemying made his directing debut with the low budget vampire comedy Eat Locals, which featured an impressive cast that included Charlie Cox, Mackenzie Crook, Freema Agyeman, Eve Myles, Dexter Fletcher and Annette Crosbie.

  A homicidal New York vampire fan (Eric Ruffin) developed a relationship with an equally troubled young girl (Chloe Levine) in Michael O’Shea’s indie debut, The Transfiguration. Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman and film director Larry Fessenden both turned up in cameos.

  Set in 1980s Perth, Australia, Ben Young’s disturbing debut, Hounds of Love, featured Ashleigh Cummings as a teenage schoolgirl abducted and tortured by a psychopathic couple (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry). It was apparently based on a real incident.

  Virginia Madsen was wasted in Chris Peckover’s Australian home invasion movie Better Watch Out, as Olivia DeJonge’s teenage babysitter had to protect her twelve-year-old charge (Levi Miller) from a pair of intruders.

  John R. Leonetti’s 1960s-set home invasion thriller, Wolves at the Door, was inspired by the infamous Manson family murders, while Katherine Heigl stalked her ex-husband’s new fiancée (Rosario Dawson) in Unforgettable.

  Three kidnapped girls had to escape before James McAvoy’s twenty-fourth different personality emerged in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, which was set in the same universe as the director’s Unbreakable (2000) and had an impressive $40 million opening weekend.

  Samantha Robinson’s young spellcaster used magic to make men fall in love with her in Anna Biller’s clever 1970s feminist pastiche The Love Witch, and Dane DeHaan’s ambitious young executive was sent to collect his boss from a creepy Alpine retreat run by Jason Isaacs’ mysterious director in Gore Verbinki’s stylish horror mystery A Cure for Wellness.

  Featuring such veteran Canadian actors as Kenneth Welsh and Art Hindle, The Void was set in a rundown hospital under seige from multiple demonic forces, and a veteran war photographer discovered that his photographs predicted imminent death in Aaron B. Koontz’s Camera Obscura.

  Mandy Moore and Claire Holt’s vacationing sisters soon found themselves becoming great white shark-bait when their viewing cage sank to the bottom of the Mexican ocean in Johannes Roberts’ claustrophobic 47 Meters Down. The movie was originally intended as a straight-to-video release under the title In the Deep.

  A teenage vegetarian vetinary student (Garance Marillier) developed a taste for human flesh in Julia Ducournau’s French-Belgian-made debut Raw, while Kristen Stewart was stuck in Paris trying to make contact with her recently dead twin brother in Oliver Assayas’ euro-thriller Personal Shopper.

  Emilia Clarke played a nurse in 1950s Tuscany, hired to help a mute boy who heard the voice of his deceased mother in the walls of the family home in Eric Dennis Howell’s atmospheric chiller Voice from the Stone, based on the novel La voce della pietra by Silvio Raffo.

  In The Limehouse Golem, based on the novel Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd, Bill Nighy (in a role originally intended for the late Alan Rickman) starred as an urbane police detective investigating a series of gory murders in 1880 London, reputed to have been committed by the titular creature.

  Michael Fassbender starred as a detective hunting a serial killer through a bleak winter landscape in Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman. Despite an eclectic supporting cast that included Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons, Val Kilmer, Toby Jones and Chloë Sevigny, it was a disappointing adaptation of Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s best-selling novel.

  The atmospheric Vietnamese movie The Housemaid (Cô Haû Gaí) was set in 1953, when an orphaned peasant girl (Kate Nhung) went to work at a haunted rubber plantation in French Indochina.

  Luc Besson’s overlong and totally bonkers Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was based on a French comic book series set in the 28th century. It may have looked visually sumptuous, but the two leads (Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne) shared zero screen chemistry, while singer Rihanna was wasted in a cameo.

  As a result of the film’s poor performance at the box-office, Edouard de Vesinne—who had only been appointed deputy CEO of Besson’s EuropaCorp a year and a half earlier—was ousted from the company.

  Dean Devlin’s ridiculously entertaining Geostorm starred Gerard Butler as an unlikely scientist trapped on an international space station and trying to prevent someone in Washington DC using a network of weather satellites to decimate areas of the Earth. It wasn’t much of a stretch to guess who the villain was in a cast that included Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Andy Garcia and Ed Harris. Danny Cannon was brought in to do extensive re-shoots for a reported budget of $15 million after the movie tested poorly. It apparently didn’t help.

  Matt Damon’s midlife loser agreed to join a community of shrunken people in Alexander Payne’s whimsical Downsizing, while Anne Hathaway’s hard-drinking party girl realised that she was somehow connected to a giant monster destroying Seoul in Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo’s offbeat kaijū, Colossal.

  A scientific crew (including Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds) aboard the International Space Station learned the hard way that you shouldn’t experiment with a rapidly-evolving Martian life form in Swedish director Daniel Espinosa’s enjoyable, if clichéd, SF thriller, Life.

  The first human born on Mars (Asa Butterfield) developed a long-distance relationship with a teenage Earth girl (Britt Robertson) in The Space Between Us, which had its release pushed back from 2016. Gary Oldman and Carla Gugino were amongst the adult actors.

  Wesley Snipes turned up as a crazy survivalist in The Recall (aka Final Recall), as five teenagers sharing a remote lakeside cabin found themselves in the middle of an alien invasion.

  Alien Invasion S.U.M.1. was a low-budget German SF movie starring Welsh actor Iwan Rheon as the titular soldier sent to rescue a group of survivors.

  Lois Smith’s 86-year-old widow spent most of her time talking to a younger holographic re-creation of her dead husband (John Hamm) in Michael Almereyda’s thoughtful Marjorie Prime, which also featured Geena Davis and Tim Robbins.

  British model-turned-actress Suki Waterhouse played a young amputee who found herself abandoned in a post-apocalyptic Texas wasteland and menaced by cannibals in the halluciogenic thriller The Bad Batch. Writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour somehow convinced Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carey and Giovanni Ribisi that it would be a good idea to appear in it.

  A washed-up 1980s TV detective (co-writer Julian Barratt) used his prop robotic eye to hunt down a serial killer on the Isle of Man in the low budget British comedy Mindhorn. Essie Davis, co-executive producer Steve Coogan, Russell Tovey, Simon Callow and an uncredited Kenneth Branagh were also featured, while Ridley Scott was another executive producer.

  James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, made back in 1991, when the franchise still felt fresh, was reissued in movie theatres with added 3-D.

  Based on the series of eight epic fantasy novels by Stephen King, Nikolaj Arcel’s long-awaited The Dark Tower turned out to be a complete mess, as Tom Taylor’s troubled teen travelled to an alternate world where he encountered Idris Elba’s bland gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey’s over-the-top Man in Black. Despite $6 million in re-shoots and the movie opening at #1 during a particularly soft weekend at the US box-office, it quickly ran out of steam.

  Matt Damon’s miscast mercenary found himself helping to defend the Great Wall of Ch
ina against a horde of invading mythological monsters in Yimou Zhang’s impressive-looking, but hopelessly muddled fantasy epic, The Great Wall. At the time, it was the most expensive Chinese movie ever made.

  Takashi Miike’s 100th movie, Blade of the Immortal, found a samurai cursed with immortality (Takuya Kimura) helping a young girl (Hana Sugisaki) avenge the death of her parents. It was based on a manga series by Hiroaki Sumara.

  Guy Ritchie’s re-imagining of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword featured Charlie Hunnan as a cocky (and cockney) once and future king and Jude Law as his black-clad uncle (things are kept simple). The supporting cast included Poppy Delevigne, former footballer David Beckham and Katie McGrath (from TV’s Merlin).

  A grieving father (Sam Worthington) received an invitation from God to visit the place where his youngest daughter may have been murdered in The Shack, based on the best-selling 2007 novel by William P. Young.

  Dan Stevens played a struggling Charles Dickens who had to come up with a yuletide hit in Bharat Nalluri’s Irish-Canadian The Man Who Invented Christmas, which also featured Miriam Margolyes, Ian McNeice, Jonathan Pryce, Bill Paterson, Donald Sumpter, Simon Callow, and Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge.

  Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women felt like a bit of a cash-in as it took a look at the unconventional love life of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston (played by Luke Evans).

  Three years after the release of the Guillermo del Toro-produced The Book of the Dead, Pixar’s hyper-coloured 3-D Coco covered similar animated ground as a young Mexican boy (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) travelled to the skeletal Land of the Dead on Día de los Muertos to find a legendary guitar.

  A teenage boy discovered he was was something different in the Mexican children’s CGI cartoon Monster Island, which was animated in India.

  The French/Belgium animated comedy Zombillénium was set inside the eponymous Halloween theme park and was based on the graphic series by Arthur de Pins, who co-directed with Alexis Ducord.

  Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson and Ralph Fiennes voiced the animated toy brick versions of, respectively, Batman, Robin, Batgirl and Alfred Pennyworth in The LEGO Batman Movie. Arranged against them were an impressive line-up of classic villains, including Joker (Zach Galifianakis), Harley Quinn (Jenny Slate), Scarecrow (Jason Manzoukas), The Riddler (Conan O’Brien), Bane (Doug Benson), Two-Face (Billy Dee Williams), Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), Clayface (Kate Micucci) and Poison Ivy (Riki Lindhome). Perhaps somewhat more unexpected were also versions of Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), Sauron (Jemaine Clement) and King Kong (Seth Green)!

  Based on the children’s books by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg, the Dutch-made The Little Vampire 3-D featured the voices of Jim Carter, the late Tim Piggot-Smith, Alice Krige, Kevin Otto and Mirian Margolyes.

  Alexandre O. Philippe’s feature documentary 78/52 was a look behind the curtain at the infamous shower murder scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The title referred to the number of set-ups and edits in the sequence, and amongst those interviewed were Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Guillermo del Toro, Bret Easton Ellis, Mick Garris, Neil Marshall, Eli Roth, Richard Stanley and Marli Renfro, who was Janet Leigh’s body double.

  In the feature-length documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, the artist and film-maker discussed his early life and his idiosyncratic approach to the creative process.

  A 16mm film enthusiast in Scotland discovered a lost British production of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart while clearing out his loft. The twenty-minute short was made by Adelphi Films in 1953 and starred Stanley Baker as the Poe-like Narrator. Originally purchased for £5.00 in 1984 from a junk shop in Brighton as part of a “bargain box” job lot, The British Film Institute subsequently digitally restored the 16mm reel and added it to the BFI archive.

  London’s BFI Southbank mounted a retrospective season of “Stephen King on Screen” in September that included showings of The Dark Half, Dolores Claiborne, The Night Flier and The Mist, amongst other titles.

  The politically correct 89th Academy Awards ceremony in January may have featured an embarrassing mix-up for the award for Best Picture, but at least Arrival won Best Sound Editing and Suicide Squad received Best Make-up and Hairstyling. The Best Costume Design Oscar went to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, while The Jungle Book collected the award for Best Visual Effects. Once again, TV viewing figures were down.

  Despite featuring the voice of Brad Dourif as the titular killer doll and Jennifer Tilly as his character’s former wife, Don Mancini’s Cult of Chucky, the seventh entry in the series since the 1988 original, went straight to DVD and Blu-ray.

  With Roger and Julie Corman credited as co-producers and featuring Malcolm McDowell, Yancy Butler, and Manu Bennett as racing driver “Frankenstein”, Death Race 2050 was a remake of the original 1975 movie that made its debut on home video.

  Basically a rip-off of Joe R. Lansdale’s 2012 story ‘The Hunt: Before, and After the Aftermath’, the low-buget The Rezort was set after the zombie apocalypse, when tourists could hunt the walking dead in a safari park. Dougray Scott starred.

  Released two weeks before the bigger budgeted Geostorm, The Asylum’s similar-sounding Geo-Disaster featured a family trapped in the midst of a super volcano, a major earthquake and massive twister all destroying Los Angeles at the same time.

  Andy Edwards’ crass British comedy Ibiza Undead (aka Zombie Spring Breakers) found a group of typical tourists confronting the walking dead while on holiday in Spain. TV and radio presenter Alex Zane had a cameo.

  Given a brief theatrical release before going to DVD, the animated Batman and Harley Quinn found the caped crusader (voiced by Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (voiced by Loren Lester) teaming up with the Joker’s sometimes-girlfriend Harley Quinn (voiced by Melissa Raunch).

  Meanwhile, original stars Adam West (in his last film role) and Burt Ward recreated their 1960s TV incarnations of Batman and Robin for the animated Batman vs. Two-Face. William Shatner voiced Harvey Dent/Two-Face, and various other villains turned up, including both Julie Newmar and Lee Meriwether as Catwoman.

  Mark Hamill, Jeffrey Combs, Christopher Plummer and Doug Bradley added their voices to Sean Patrick O’Reilly’s CGI animated Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom, an adaptation of a graphic novel and sequel to Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom.

  Flicker Alley’s restored and newly-scored Blu-ray of the 1925 The Lost World was the most complete version of the movie to date, and included deleted scenes, two short films made by Willis O’Brien and a booklet essay by Serge Bromberg.

  Criterion’s deluxe restored version of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) came with an additional commentary by film scholar Tony Rayns, a 1966 documentary and a booklet by Mark Le Fanu and Kim Newman.

  The Film Detective’s re-mastered Blu-ray of the 1933 movie The Vampire Bat, starring Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, featured UCLA Film & Television Archive’s 35mm restoration, which recreated the hand-coloured effects done for the initial opening prints by the Danish-born Gustav Brock (who also worked on the release prints of the same year’s The Death Kiss), and featured an audio commentary by film producer Sam Sherman.

  Arrow’s Blu-ray/DVD reissue of Caltiki the Immortal Monster not only featured a new restoration from the 1959 Italian SF film’s original camera negative, but also an audio commentary by Tim Lucas and on-screen interviews with critics Kim Newman and Stefano Della Casa, and film-maker Luigi Cozzi.

  Blue Underground’s Blu-ray/DVD combo pack of the cult 1972 film Death Line (aka Raw Meat) was limited to 3,000 copies and came with a host of extras, including commentaries and interviews with, amongst others, director Gary Sherman, producer Paul Maslansky, and actors David Ladd and Hugh Armstrong.

  Blue Underground took the same kind of care with its three-disc limited edition of Dario Argento’s psycho-sexual thriller The Stendhal Syndrome, which included bonus interviews with the director, star Asia Argento, assistant director Luigi
Cozzi, and various other people involved in the 1995 movie.

  Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman returned as, respectively, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, for a much darker fourth series of BBC’s Sherlock. The three linked feature-length episodes revolved around the death of Watson’s wife Mary (Amanda Abbington) and ended with a series of Saw-like challenges and a not all too surprising revelation about a third Holmes sibling. Guest stars included Lindsay Duncan, Toby Jones, Andrew Scott, Art Malik, Timothy Carlton, Wanda Ventham and Siân Brooke.

  Meanwhile, Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat pulled out of an appearance in Moscow in January after an online leak of the series finale—a day before the episode was screened in the UK—was found to have originated in Russia.

  Released on Netflix two weeks after It premiered in theatres, Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game was another adaptation of a Stephen King novel, as Carla Gugino found herself a little tied-up after the unexpected death of her husband (Bruce Greenwood) during a sex game in a remote lake house.

  Robert Redford’s scientist proved the existence of the afterlife in the Netflix Original movie The Discovery, which also featured Mary Steenburgen, Jason Segel and Rooney Mara.

  Adam Wingard’s Death Note starred Nat Wolff as a high school outcast who was egged on by a Shinigami Death God (voiced by Willem Dafoe) to write the names of those he wanted dead in a mysterious notebook. Based on a Japanese manga comic and anime, the American film-makers were accused online of “whitewashing”.

  Not all the Netflix Original movies received good reviews, and that was especially true of David Ayer’s $90 million Bright, in which Will Smith’s LAPD cop was teamed with Joel Edgerton’s rookie Orc to find a magical weapon. However, despite being panned by the critics, the Max Landis-scripted film attracted an audience of more than 11 million during its first three days of streaming through TV sets in December, according to Nielsen estimates. That loosely translated to a $98.2 million theatrical opening weekend had the movie been launched in a more traditional manner.