FEATURE: The Best Horror Films of 2011 (And a Few Bad Ones Too)

I tricked you.  This isn't a top list.  This is a full list of the horror(ish) releases I saw from 2011, listed from worst to best.  The good ones start at number 7, if you want to skip ahead.

First off, the disappointments...

14. John Carpenter's The Ward

There is exactly one good scene in this dull, uninspired, hackneyed work from John Carpenter, and it’s the scene where the imprisoned girls take a break in the rec room and dance.  I am not kidding.  This is a ghost story in a haunted asylum full of important secrets, and the best moment involves teenagers jumping and jiving. Anyway. The plot feels cribbed from Session 9, the aesthetic possesses little of Carpenter's classic camerawork and composition, and, honestly, nothing new happens in this familiar tale of people stuck inside a mental hospital. You have the ominous and authoritative staff. You have the threat of lobotomy and electro-shock therapy. You have the reality-redefining absurdities of the final reel. How can a film scare when it holds no sense of surprise?

13. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

Relentlessly disappointing.  Kevin Munroe directs the should-be-a-bigger-star Brandon Routh as paranormal investigator Dylan Dog, who informs us that the world we live in is a fake world, and beneath it lies a world of ghouls of the night.  Or whatever it was Blade said back in 1998.  The film noir narration and structure of Dylan Dog, with the hero careening from one shady informant to the next, would be a nice twist on a familiar premise.  Unfortunately, the dialogue isn’t funny or intelligent or even snappy in the way film noir ought to be, and Routh’s immaculate pretty-boy look doesn’t suit him to the role of a weary detective back for one last case.

12. Hobo With a Shotgun

So over-the-top and shrill and misanthropic that it becomes wearying instead of energetic, Hobo deserves a bit of credit for the strong central performance from Rutger Hauer.  Thanks to his direct and heartfelt performance, the film never quite spins apart, and energy rises midway through with the arrival of two knight assassins correctly named The Plague. They deserve their own movie, not this childish revisionist western that uses its premise for "outrageous" (re: forced) violence. It's all so over-the-top that the filmmakers have to burn children alive just to achieve dramatic punctuation. Jason Eisener got some attention for this story thanks to a over-the-top fake trailer, and his short film Treevenge shows a similar disregard for boundaries.  I love bad taste as much as the next guy, but a bit of context and restraint would make all the difference. This paradoxically feels like too much and not enough.

11. Troll Hunter

Found footage horror movies have become a dime a dozen, mostly because that’s what they cost.  Troll Hunter tries to apply the new aesthetic to a national cinema (Norway, specifically), both as a means of showing off the countryside and delving into folklore.  The problem is that the film never develops beyond its central conceit of trolls caught on tape.  The characters don’t gain personality.  One dies and gets replaced with surprising ease.  And even accepting the low budget, these trolls do not intimidate.  There’s certainly nothing here to equal the bed-scare with Trantor from Ernest Scared Stupid, and that is not a film I joke about.  Troll Hunter carries hints of a better movie in the way that the eponymous hunter Hans (Otto Jesperson) grows weary of his job and its bureaucratic absurdities.  I enjoyed watching him fill out a form after flash-freezing a three-headed goblin.  This is my receipt for your receipt.

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Now, on to the films that were mediocre, middling, and a little too average to fully recommend...

10. Vanishing on 7th Street

Brad Anderson’s a natural director of thrillers, and his previous films (even his Masters of Horror episode “Sounds Like”) deal with protagonists that play like the reverse of Hitchcock heroes.  Those men were wrongfully accused and punished for being innocent.  Anderson’s heroes escape judgment and, racked with guilt, punish themselves.  Vanishing on 7th Street carries none of that fundamental interest.  Instead, the film plays like a thin tribute to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s neo-classic Pulse.  It’s a bold film to set the bar so high, but Vanishing never reaches that magical spot between engagement and distance that made Kurosawa’s examination of human loneliness so disquieting.  What's here is stylish, even haunting on occasion, but finally underwhelming.


For more thoughts on Vanishing, click here.

09. Scream 4

If Scream 4 were Scream 3 or Scream 2, I’d hold it in higher regard.  It’s savvy, it’s sympathetic to its characters, and it wants to say some things about entertainment.  Craven and Williamson’s intentions are honorable.  Do they realize, though, that four movies of this sort might simply be too much?  That viewers can’t muster much sympathy for the same old characters falling into the same own traps?  Why does Sidney still have to pull knives from kitchens to protect herself?  Why can’t Dewey use his knowledge of masked killers?  Why must he be so, so, so completely inept?  What’s here is generally well-crafted, and more thoughtful than many major horror releases...but it doesn’t feel dangerous, and that’s an absence no amount of good intentions can replace. Sidebar: Hayden Panettierre is cute.

For more thoughts on Scream 4, click here.

08. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

The greatest inspiration behind this film is director Eli Craig realizing that teenagers don’t need any help when it comes to dying stupidly in the woods.  If anything, hillbilly psychos are a redundancy.  So this film - a reversal on movies like The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - stars Tucker and Dale as inept goofballs simply trying to fix an old cabin, and the teens are so terrified that they impale themselves on tree branches and dive head-first into woodchippers.  Alan Tudyk and Katrina Bowden do a fine job supporting the endearing Tyler Labine, who keeps the film lovable, but he can only do so much. The first forty minutes of this film carry a certain ingenuity that the rest of the film can't sustain. The film makes its joke (what an unfortunate accident!), then keeps on making the same joke.

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And now, onto the films that just about anyone should enjoy on some level...

07. Insidious

The popular assessment of this film is correct: the second half is not as interesting as the first.  Its outright theft from Poltergeist doesn't help either.  But there are elements to admire here, like the way the film doesn’t cheat with jump-scares, and the way the main characters leave their house as quickly as possible.  Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are fine as the parents, but they don’t hold much interest to viewers - it’s on the effectively eerie ghosts to carry the film.  Which is probably why the second half gets disproportionate hate.  It’s not that the concept of the “further” dimension is lacking.  It’s that the film never lays enough character foundation to make those scenes as impactful as they could be.  Still, the film offers some genuine chills, and there’s something satisfying about watching a non-found-footage, straightforward ghost story.

For more thoughts on Insidious, click here.

06. Burke and Hare

John Landis continues his horror-comedy streak of recent years with this relaxed, amiable, relentlessly nasty bit of absurdist history based on the exploits of the bumbling murderers Burke and Hare.  In desperate need of money, they take to grave-robbing, and then life-robbing immediately after. I know I shouldn't laugh at simple gags like two morons chasing a barrel down a street...or Isla Fisher destroying the words of William Shakespeare in an outsized Scottish brogue...or the goofy faces Andy Serkis makes during sex.  But God help me, I laughed.  I also appreciated the casual way the film reduces the dignity of life, with esteemed Doctor Knox displaying corpses like they were letters on Wheel of Fortune, and with a declaration of love laced with literal gallows humor.  Check it out.  Have a double-feature with Lewton's The Body Snatcher.

05. Fright Night

Unexpected.  This remake of the admirable eighties horror-comedy makes its motivation clear when Ed (perpetual teenager Christopher Mintz-Plasse) calls Jerry (Colin Farrell) the “fucking shark from Jaws!”  More notable than the line itself is the fact that the line occurs ten minutes into the movie.  Would that more horror movies were this efficient.  Marti Noxon’s script plays as a fun variation on the cliches of this exhausted sub-genre, with hero Charley (Anton Yelchin) and Jerry as thinly-veiled sexual competitors.  However, the film stumbles on occasion.  The 3D effects intrude on the otherwise-stylish photography, and the third-act retreat into excessive CGI dampens the overall impact.  No special effect will ever be as creepy as the way Jerry smiles to himself and chomps on an apple.

04. Red State

Kevin Smith once made an impressive movie about religion called Dogma.  That film was the work of a younger man more assured of his faith.  This is the work of someone frustrated by the failures of institutions and higher callings, someone who wants to take us on a tour of the depths of contemporary depravity. Or are these classic problems? Although it may best be classified as a dark thriller, the middle half is unrelenting and frightening, and the banal evil of Abin Cooper imposes.  The evil preacher villain is a cliche, but Michael Parks whispers and growls and re-invigorates the trope to intimidating effect. Red State is hardly perfect, but it’s inventive and twisty and caps off with a very sobering view of not just the characters in the film, but America in general.


For more thoughts on Red State, click here.

03. The Woman

Lucky McKee's third feature film (after May and The Woods) is the most uncompromising horror film of 2011, a doggedly perverse look at the savagery of human behavior.  The eponymous woman is a feral creature who catches the eye of a misogynist hunter named Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers, remarkable); he catches her, ties her up in a cellar and tells his family they'll train her.  What makes the film nearly unbearable is the suffering of this family, which includes a battered wife (McKee regular Angela Bettis), a frightened daughter, and a son who's all too eager to follow in Daddy's footsteps.  McKee and co-writer Jack Ketchum get lost in the symbolic meanings of their characters - should we read Chris as a lone sociopath or as a representation of patriarchy-gone-amok? - but this at least suggests that they have a lot on their minds, and the film builds carefully from its pitch-black domestic satire into all-out war.

02. Black Death

This isn’t horror, not really, but director Chris Smith gave us the savvy horror-comedy Severance (a film I enjoyed) and the twisty aquatic thriller Triangle (a film I haven’t seen), and so it’s okay to support his work here.  Black Death is a dark Medieval drama-thriller about witchcraft, religion, and the power and danger of superstition.  Expertly presented, the misty forests and glens call to mind the environments of Herzog’s Aguirre and Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and the ambivalent faith of those two movies might offer some clues to this film.  The story focuses on naive monk Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), who quests in pursuit of a potential necromancer.  His journey doesn't just test his faith - it rips his faith to pieces and throws the remnants on the muddy ground. The final twenty minutes of the film, with Osmund broken and then transformed, may polarize viewers, but I think it’s wise to go as far as Smith does.  This is a deeply angry movie.

1. Attack the Block

Joe Cornish’s debut is a wonder of a film, a relentless, funny, thrilling sci-fi-horror film about alien wolves chasing down delinquents in a London apartment block.  John Boyega leads the gang of thugs as quiet teenager Moses, who eventually teams up with the woman he mugged earlier, because there are bigger problems right now than their animosity.  The aliens are one-dimensional enemies, but their imaginative design (and understandable motivations) keeps them intimidating, and Cornish wisely lets the humor emerge from the discordance between the neighbors.  Like producer Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, the comedy comes predominantly from sticking discordant people together and watching them chafe and adapt.  This organic approach to the jokes allows for genuine horror when their situation crashes through windows and rears its blue-toothed eyeless head.