The 2016 Horror Halftime Report

We're halfway through 2016 - well, okay, a month and change after - and I'll be goddamned if this isn't already one of the best years for horror in a long time.  In previous years, sorting out the best horror film around was often a no-brainer (The Babadook, It Follows), but this year, two films are already wrestling in my mind for the title of Best Horror of 2016 (the fact that they're wrestling nude is incidental).

8. The Forest

Written by Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai

Directed by Jason Zada

The Forest grabs the Japanese suicide site of Aokigahara, slaps in two white leads, and shoves the viewers through dismal jumps and pauses and shrieky pale ghosts, all before closing with one of those insufferable Carrie boo-scares.  Don't horror filmmakers understand that when every horror film does this, the scare stops working?  But as hacky as the thrills are, what depresses about The Forest is how cynically barren the film is.  Aokigahara is a real place with recent victims in a country currently facing significant suicide rates, and all the creative team could think to do is fly in Natalie Dormer and force her to trip her way through foggy trees with a local white hunk.  Imagine if this material was overhauled by Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Hideo Nakata, and then weep for what might've been.

RATING: D

7. Hush

Written by Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel

Directed by Mike Flanagan

Home invasion flicks have the deck stacked against them, because the villains can hide behind 99-cent store masks and non-motivations (y'know, because it's real life, man), while the heroes take it upon themselves to make as many stupid decisions as possible (y'know, because it's real life, man).  One scene in Hush, where someone watches a friend battle a villain and does absolutely nothing tops that scene in Jurassic Park where the little kid doesn't just hand Sam Neill the fucking shotgun.  Hush attempts to distinguish itself with its heroine's deafness, but the handicap never feels fundamental to the story in the way that, say, Susy's blindness felt in Wait Until Dark.  The villain would be attacking her in more or less the same way regardless of her affliction.  Flanagan's work here sometimes succeeds on sheer craft (a rooftop walk raises a few goosebumps), but I miss the confidence of character development that gave Oculus such surprising effect.

RATING: C

6. The Boy

Written by Stacey Menear

Directed by William Brent Bell

A spring horror release that you'd want to see?  Well, almost!  Hard to believe, but The Boy nearly pulled off the impossible.   The flick's not great and sometimes dull (its prefab cat-and-mouse finale could come from any film), but there's a tenable interest here in the living doll at the center of all the drama: is the "boy" just a doll, or is there something more sinister at work?  A late-film twist legitimately surprises, even though it leads to the aforementioned chase (replete with the kind of Backstory Room that The Cabin in the Woods sent up years ago), and Conran's performance elevates thanks to an arc that puts her neuroses on full display as she schleps the boy from room to room.  Those bits recall the psychological edge of Pin and Magic, and if The Boy doesn't match them in patience and style, at least the flick cares enough to give it an honest fucking shot.

RATING: B-

5. The Conjuring 2

Written by Carey Hayes, Chad Hayes, James Wan, and David Leslie Johnson (phew)

Directed by James Wan

After last year's annual James Wan Ghostravaganza Insidious: Chapter Three generated real cash and few scares, The Conjuring 2 tags in this year.  This time, Wan trades his usual American setting for London but otherwise leaves the formula intact.  Why mess with (pop) perfection?  Other minor tweaks include more of Patrick Wilson's charming Ed Warren and a wider variety of ghosts, including a nun and a post-Babadookian "Crooked Man."  Apart from that?  Business as usual, since these films are more about Wan and Company flexing their muscles with individual sequences in between the opening frightfest and overloud climax.  The biggest highlight here?  A scene where Ed Warren must look away from a ghost before it agrees to speak.  As we watch a possessed girl sorta... shift in the background, the single-take conversation proves more unnerving than a hundred jump-scares.

RATING: B

4. The Witch

Written and Directed by Robert Eggers

The Witch is the horror film to beat for 2016, right?  Its art design, its period dialogue, its subtitle (A New England Folk-Tale), even its text-on-black epilogue demonstrate director Robert Eggers' admirable rigor.  But Eggers tries to eat his cake and have it too by playing up the supernaturalism, all the way to a finale that mocks the film's presumptive accuracy-- what self-respecting Puritan "folk-tale" would end that way?  If The Witch committed to reality, it might've been a stunning, focused depiction of the corrosion of family and faith (and truth be told, it still kind of is).  If The Witch tossed aside accuracy and thrived in its imagery, it might've gained some of the demented joy of Rob Zombie's uneven but feverish The Lords of Salem.  Instead, it's post-modern pre-modern, an open-faced "folk-tale" aware of contagious paranoia and sexual repression, a film that joins unambiguous devilry with half-assed hedges - blink and you'll miss ergot forming on rotten corn.  Here's a film that knows exactly how to produce a movie about witchcraft, but never really figured out the why.

RATING: B

3. Green Room

Written and Directed by Jeremy Saulnier

Sure, it's a movie that doesn't have any Big Important Themes on its mind (beyond the quiet irony of watching a "dangerous" punk band stumble into life-threatening danger), but who needs a theme when a movie like Green Room creates so much empathy for its heroes?  Plays them up as panicked, sweat-covered victims?  Hell, even the film's villains - neo-Nazis who can't let the punks get away with seeing a dead body - underestimate their opponents, fight fissures in their own ranks, try to think their way out of a situation they didn't anticipate.  Imagine if the Coen Brothers remade Assault on Precinct 13, and you get an idea of what Green Room's up to.  Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier gives attention to specific little details, like how the villains signify Nazi promotions with footwear, and how a wandering dog ends its own little side-story.  Green Room doesn't bother to reinvent the "siege horror" wheel, but I can't remember the last time the wheel rolled so damn well.

NOTE:  This is one of the last times we'll see Anton Yelchin.  I've had so much affection for the actor over the years, ever since he starred in Hearts in Atlantis.  Yelchin was an ingratiating presence; he had those big eager eyes and that reedy voice that made him sound immediately vulnerable.  He was endearing in movies like Charlie Bartlett and Star Trek, and he's the beating heart of Green Room.

RATING: B+

2. 10 Cloverfield Lane

Written by Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg

Now here is a goddamn movie, a blast of imagination that uses its high-concept end-of-days sci-fi premise to test its characters' identities.  10 Cloverfield Lane starts small, when Howard (John Goodman) rescues Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) from a car crash and sticks her in his fallout shelter.  He tells her the world just ended.  The rest of the film operates as a series of reversals, power-grabs, and brinksmanship, and there's a pleasurable video-game quality to how the film more or less opens with Winstead waking up in a room and using every object in that room to further her escape.  Does she escape?  Well, as the film suggests, "escape" is complicated.  Director Dan Trachtenberg tightens the screws between his two leads with precision.  Goodman's twitchy paranoiac makes plans, uses sturdy tools like concrete walls, guns, and his own size.  Meanwhile, Winstead proves once again that she's the kind of classic Hollywood star that Hollywood forgot how to make.

NOTE: What a shame that some people thought, not unfairly, that this movie was a sequel to Cloverfield, or that the two films took place in the same universe (it's not a spoiler to say they don't).  Hopefully the idea of a Cloverfield anthology series-- the movie equivalent of The Twilight Zone or Amazing Stories-- catches on in the way it never did with Halloween: Season of the Witch.

RATING: B+

1. The Invitation

Written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi

Directed by Karyn Kusama

The Invitation kicks into gear the very second we learn an erstwhile couple just returned to Hollywood after a journey of self-discovery off the grid in Mexico.  If that doesn't clang the warning bells hard enough to rattle your teeth, the couple host a party for their friends and promise a path to spiritual awakening.  Astute viewers will notice all they really have to offer is shallow, unexamined cheer (at one point, they play a self-absorbed twist on "Never Have I Ever" called "What I Want").  Director Karyn Kusama demonstrates total control of her compositions, the lights and shadow, the overall warmness of the house that's straight out of a Williams-Sonoma shopper's wet dream, and the striking white dress of Eden (Tammy Blanchard), far too spotless to remain that way.  The Polanski-style tension borders on unbearable at times, not just because of the craft, but because of those clear eyes, those disarming smiles.  Whenever I see the confidence of the true believer or the born-again, I can't help twisting in my seat.  Lack of doubt is the first step toward lack of mercy.

RATING: A-