Que Horror!
By David Hontiveros

So it’s October, and Halloween’s a few weeks away, and I thought, Why not compile a list of the Ten Best Horror Films of the Recent Past?

The thing is, though there’s been a surplus of horror on the silver screen in the past few years, very few of these films are actually any good. Most are tired, formulaic retreads trundled out by Hollywood to provide instant (and ultimately, short-lived and ephemeral) gratification for the MTV generation.

Think about it: how many of the horror films you’ve seen in the past months can you actually still recall with any degree of accuracy, much less awe? How many do you think will be “classics” twenty years from now?

More so than ever it seems, Hollywood has been looking backwards, remaking not just the newest Asian horror film du jour, but horror movies from the heyday of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Evidence of this remake madness can perhaps best be seen in the list below, as two entries are actually remakes themselves; at least not all the recent remakes have been big fat losses.

Now, as any Top Ten list is always, in the end, a subjective thing, bear in mind: I haven’t watched every single horror film ever made, so, it’s entirely possible I may have missed a gem or two. Also, my definition of “horror” is pretty broad, ranging from the extreme grand guignol of splatterpunk, to the delicate atmospherics of quiet horror.

So, without further ado, and working our way backwards in time…

2005

Dark Water: armed with an impressive cast, Walter Salles delivers, doing justice to Hideo Nakata’s original, transcending the idea of horror as genre/marketing category, and diving into the realm of horror as emotion

The Descent: written and directed by Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers), this is intense and takes no prisoners; six female friends on a cave exploring trip in the Appalachians discover the multiple meanings of the film’s title

The Ring Two: Nakata’s remake of his own Ringu II turns out to be a better film than both the original, and its English-language predecessor, a slick Hollywood horror film with intelligence and depth

Upcoming Film(UF): the remake of The Entity, the English-language remake of Jian Gui (The Eye), and the film adaptation of the savage feminist thriller, Out

2004

Dumplings: quiet horror from Hong Kong way, brought to us by Fruit Chan, this ultimately chilling tale of the price women must pay in our patriarchal society won a number of Asian films awards

Saw: dark and malevolent, with twists and flips running through its blood-soaked frame, this is the Se7en I wish Se7en had been

UF: Saw 2, though it’s directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, while James Wan (director of Saw) is helming Silence

The Village: horribly misunderstood by the critics, reviled by audiences thoroughly misled by the trailer, this is about the horror of the metaphorical beast lurking outside the security of hearth and home, and of the lengths some people will go to curtail its advance

UF: Lady in the Water; think Splash, M. Night Shyamalan style

2003

Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters): the best I’ve seen from Korean horror, here, director Kim Ji-woon deftly mixes the supernatural with the psychological; currently being developed for an English-language remake

UF: the non-horror Dalkomhan insaeng

2002

Cabin Fever: the film with the meanest streak of black humor on the list, directed by David Lynch protégé Eli Roth, this one’s pretty visceral and gets you to shudder and cringe in all the right places

UF: Hostel, The Box, the remake of The Bad Seed, and the comedy Scavenger Hunt

Darkness: Jaume Balaguero’s English-language debut with Anna Paquin and Lena Olin in a haunted house in Spain; the cinematography, editing, and scoring are brilliant

UF: Fragile, with Calista Flockhart as a nurse suddenly faced with children whose bones become brittle for no apparent reason

Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Dark Water): arguably, Nakata’s best to date, this ghostly tale of love and abandonment is, of course, the basis of the first entry on this list

Parting shot: Nakata takes up two slots (and a third is for the remake of one of those films)! Also, half of the list is made up of films that find their roots in the Asian horror film scene.

Parting shot 2: the other 2002 horror release that just got edged off the list is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which reanimated the zombie film, paving the way for Zack Snyder’s slick remake of Dawn of the Dead, and George Romero’s socially-weighty return to the Land of the Dead