Sara's Spooky Selections - Horror (and Horror-Adjacent) Recommendations from Someone With Bad Taste

Happy Friday the 13th! Apparently people talk about horror movies in October? It's about Halloween, right? I'm Australian, and I'm honestly unfamiliar with the whole tradition. We aren't big on Halloween. We do like binge drinking and ignoring our deep systemic issues, so that's kind of the same thing. 

What I am a big fan of is the horror genre. It started with my fascination and terror over The Ring, which I was first exposed to through its parody in Scary Movie 3 at a sleepover when I was much too young. All the while an avid reader of the Goosebumps books, this visual embodiment of fear was something new to me, and something I found absolutely petrifying. The idea of a ghost girl climbing out of the VCR had me sleepless for weeks. I hid my scariest Goosebumps books in boxes buried under clothes in the back of my wardrobe so that whatever monsters might ostensibly climb out would at least have to battle through a few layers of cotton. At some point, my fixation turned to obsession. It would have been around the first time I saw Psycho, and then shortly after when I started watching the Saw movies. 

I love the construction of horror, the way it is built so tightly around getting an audience response. I used to love the thrill of them - watching from between my fingers or with my nails digging into a friend's palm - but now I love their adherence to formula, their familiarity, the way they deal solely in blood and guts and torture...d metaphor. With all things I love, I recognised the patterns that made me feel gross: the lack of female content creation, the treatment of female characters and inability to handle female narratives, reliance on stereotype especially with regards to race, mishandling of sexuality and race and disability...and yet, it's a genre that I want to explore. My full archives of horror reviews can be found here, and it's ever growing. I still haven't transferred/expanded everything, and I'm constantly seeing new ones - I devour horror at an accelerated rate. I spent a few years of my life just reading plot synopses before I was game enough to really immerse myself in it.

In no particular order, and bearing in mind that I have terrible taste in movies, here are my personal favourite picks for horror movies (and horror hybrids) this spook season. They are also not going to necessarily be movies I would rank perfectly, or even well - these are movies that max out my enjoyment, that have rewatch value.

• Suspiria (1977) - I'm going to be hyperbolic here: Suspiria is more than a movie - it's an experience. You'll notice that my favourite movies tend to have a recency bias, and a lot of that comes from my age. My horror fanaticism grew from a time when production values were at post 2000s levels, so often in spite of stories or themes, I find older movies less resonant than newer ones (not to mention the persistently gross treatment of marginalised identities in a lot of older movies). I watched Suspiria when I was studying film, and bar perhaps the hairstyles, there is a timelessness to it that makes the prospect of a remake seem baffling to me. The visual distinctiveness of this movie makes every scene fascinating, even when the plot starts to thin - the final confrontation flies by, for example - but the whole time you're drawn into this technicolour fantasy world scored by Goblin, and it's entrancing. The specific shade of blood or the purple of the lights; Suspiria goes beyond standard movie summation for me. I've never seen another Argento film, and I kind of don't want to?
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• The Descent (2005) - You'll see Neil Marshall's film on a lot of people's "Best Horror of the 2000s" lists, and I'm sorry for caving. The thing with The Descent is that when you talk about feminist horror, the list is pretty dire (and it always features Rosemary's Baby, which I will not be watching again at any point during known rapist and general gross dude Roman Polanski's life). Women aren't expected to know a lot about what's scary, they're not expected to be able to carry horror movies, and the movies that feature them are almost always entirely about motherhood/childbirth/rape (the only female fears, naturally, and so biologically focused) or rooted in stereotype. A lot of it comes from the lack of women, I believe, writing and directing in horror - I won't be telling you to watch The Babadook, because everyone already has, but you should and you should also watch XX and just keep supported female fronted horror projects - but more of it comes from the mass perpetuation of those same stereotypes by those same people, over and over and over again. The Descent takes an overused horror cliche - people stuck underground somewhere I guess - but those people are a group of women and those women all have stories and purely from the strength of storytelling, this film is one of the more intense horror movies that has surfaced in recent memory. The women carry this film and they carry each other, and there's motive to actions and a clear pressing threat (they're trapped underground somewhere, I guess). It might not sound like much, but The Descent is a claustrophic person's worst nightmare, and it is wonderful - wonderful and scary - film.
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• Saw (2001-) - Here's where this list comes of the rails in terms of movie quality. I refuse to do "guilty pleasures". I feel no shame in my embracing of bad media. The first Saw movie isn't that! James Wan has proven time and time again that he is no fluke when it comes to directing effective horror, and man, Saw hit me (and the rest of the world) pretty hard. The first movie is gritty and really dramatic and was something brand new to grip the horror scene, flavoured by movies like Cube. As an impressionable youth with depression, I was hit really hard by that "people aren't appreciating life enough" message. I was at least 50% sure some copycat killer was going to make me cut my limbs off. And then...the second one. And the third one. The twist became the twist. It was what you watched the movies for. Twists and traps. And somehow I became utterly addicted. What can I say? They hooked me young, with the hypocrisy and nonsensical messaging and absurd traps, and kept me on with increasingly sadistic traps and splatter and out-of-thin-air twists. I love these goddamn movies. I rewatch them when I'm feeling down. There's something so fun about the gradual unraveling of the ridiculous timeline and logical throughline. Watching the Saw series is possibly what immunised me to horror. It's the reason I have such a high tolerance for gore and guts and weirdness, and I love that about it. I am absolutely psyched for the new one to come out later this month, and I feel no shame. I would absolutely recommend the first Saw movie to anyone, and then I'd recommend caution to others. If you love laughing at horror movies and picking them to shreds, man, you'd have a field day with Saw 3D. But let's play a game: to get to Saw 3D and understand it, you have to sit through all the other ones.
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• Scream (1996-2011) - Speaking of franchises that started strong, Scream is great. I feel gross writing about anything Harvey Weinstein's companies were involved in the distribution of, but it disgusts me to think about the broad spectrum of Hollywood projects (god, especially horror - Rosemary's Baby, Jeepers Creepers 3) are tainted by real life grossness. The first Scream movie took the slashers of the eighties and nineties and shamelessly poked fun at them while still crafting an interesting slashie universe. He might have a flop here and there, but Wes Craven knows his craft, and these movies taught me the importance of a tongue placed firmly in the cheek of a horror movie. The first and second movies are spectacular, the third is still fun despite a weird quality break, and the forth deserves more credit than it gets. It's easy to get people into horror with Scream, but it's even better to watch Scream with enough horror behind you to get its in and outs.
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• What We Do In The Shadows (2014) - I'm a simple woman. Involve Taika Waititi in something, and I will probably watch it. I do think that this movie takes a bit of adjusting to if you're more used to the Americentric sense of humour, but I saw this one three times in theatres and found myself belly laughing each time. It's about the troubles of...vampire housemates in mockumentary form, I guess, and it wrings every last inch of humour from that premise. I bought this on DVD as soon as it came out, and each rewatch delivers some pretty solid enjoyment. There are a couple of jokes that I don't like - two or three that have some problematic content - but the rest of it is just some top notch horror comedy. The rest of the hall of fame horror comedies are on my list too, but this is the one I feel deserves a special shout out. Still, if you haven't found time to also watch Shawn of the Dead and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, you're absolutely missing out.
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• Ginger Snaps (2000) - I wanted to include one of my favourite feminist-horror-movies-that-doubles-as-an-allegory-for-puberty-and-sexual-awakening, and Ginger Snaps is one of the best in that field (I'd also wholeheartedly recommend the recent Raw which is one of my favourites of the year, and hesitantly recommend Teeth which is good fun but can be read in other ways). Ginger Snaps is about women and werewolves, two wonderful things. It's a nostalgia fest, but it's also a movie that remains excellent when watched through a modern lens. Being a woman is gross and dirty and unsavoury, and Ginger Snaps wasn't afraid of that.
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• Ghost Ship (2002) - I've actually written about Ghost Ship! Having just rewatched it, I cannot sing its praises enough. This is one of the best combinations of genuinely unsettling with over the top gore and great tableaux. The opening scene of this movie is still one of my favourite scenes in horror, and there's a late-movie kill montage that gets me every time. It does a great twist but doesn't rely on it, and manages to tell a human story while still giving me all the gore and over-the-top absurdity my weird little heart craves. Most of my favourite horror movies are pretty widely loved, but this one deserves way more credit than it gets. I mean, it's called Ghost Ship, for crying out loud. Please give it a chance.
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• Final Destination (2000-2009) - There are a few horror collections that I will constantly rewatch and return to - I mentioned Saw, Scream...I'll even find myself rewatching the Hostel films occasionally - and one of my absolute favourites is the Final Destination series. For over the top absurdity in death, Final Destination is where it's at. Death is the damn series antagonist. When I used to watch these movies, I found the concept petrifying: death will get you, no matter what. Now, I've become that weirdo who is immune to scares and just enjoys the gamification of the series. Like Saw, FD is about the deaths: also like Saw, the first movie is a completely different animal. Final Destination is a somber movie about losing your friends and feeling like you were the one who should have gone; everything from the second movie onwards is death via tanning bed or pool drain or rollercoaster. I just love it when content leans in to its own flaws; these guys aren't trying to make serious, terrifying horror movies. They're making over-the-top melodramas to fill the time before the exaggerated sequence leading to a ten minute death. Not for everyone, but a whole lot of fun.
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• Funny Games (1997/2007) - Watch the original with subtitles or because you're worldlier than me, or watch the 2007 shot-for-shot remake because you're hot for Naomi Watts. Either way, I cannot tell you that Funny Games is an enjoyable movie. That would be a blatant lie. Funny Games is cruel and it is relentless. Funny Games wants to take aim at its audience for their sadism and buying into its commercialism. Whether or not you agree with whatever Michael Haneke was trying to say about horror and the film industry, Funny Games is undoubtedly an effective movie. It hit me in the stomach, and then it hit me a few more times for good measure. If I'm going to recommend something strong, bleak, this would probably be it.

Other movies I'd recommend but that didn't warrant the full blurb because so many other people have done that already: 10 Cloverfield Lane (barely horror, but wickedly intense), The Babadook (polarising, but an excellent depiction of the isolation of mental health issues), Raw (as mentioned: beautiful, allegorical, full on), 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (the best zombie movies on the market), Cube (Saw's older, cooler, grungy, pro-anarchy Canadian cousin), The Collection (standard horror done well), The Faculty (Invasion of the Body Snatchers-meets-Scream), Get Out (subverting lazy horror tropes about race and making fantastic horror comedy at the same time), American Mary (Katherine Isabelle in a lot of latex), Cabin in the Woods (yeah, it's a lazy pick, but it's really all about that scene where every horror monster gets loose), Hellraiser (but my god, stop after the first two, please).

Go forth and get spooked, be spooky, spook unto others as you would yourself.