Part 3 – The Excellent
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
The strongest films in this tier build their horror into a rule instead of a creature. It Follows states one law and never breaks it, Ringu runs on a seven-day clock, and Kingdom binds its infection to temperature so both sides can plan around it.
The other pattern is the film that will not stay in its own form. The Wailing shifts between procedural, comedy and folk horror without warning, Pontypool stages a catastrophe entirely by telephone, and One Cut of the Dead spends its second hour explaining why its first looked incompetent.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of nine parts.
It Follows states four rules and never breaks one, Ringu runs a seven-day clock, and Kingdom binds its infection to temperature. Build the rule in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
1. Beetlejuice (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Beetlejuice (1988)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The ghosts are the protagonists and the living are the intruders."
Tim Burton made it for around fifteen million dollars and it took over eighty and paid for Batman the following year. The script by Michael McDowell was considerably darker and Warner Bros. asked for the comedy to be brought forward. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin play the Maitlands.
The structure is genuinely unusual and almost nobody notices. The protagonists are the ghosts, the living are the intruders, and the film asks an audience to root for a dead couple trying to evict a family from a house they no longer own. Danny Elfman scored it.
Michael Keaton is on screen for about seventeen minutes and the performance defined his career. He improvised a substantial portion, the makeup was built to look decayed instead of comic, and Burton has said the character was written as genuinely dangerous. Winona Ryder was fifteen when it was shot.
The afterlife bureaucracy is the best world-building in the film. A waiting room full of people who died in the manner they still appear in, a caseworker with a slit throat, a handbook nobody can understand, and a numbered ticket system. Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones play the Deetzes.
The Day-O sequence works because it is the only moment of joy in a film about people stuck. The possession is played as a party trick, the guests are delighted, and Burton shoots it with the shrimp cocktail as a genuine practical effect. A sequel arrived in 2024.
2. Misery (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Misery (1990)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Her objection to the ending is one a real reader might raise."
Rob Reiner adapted Stephen King and Kathy Bates won the Academy Award, still the only acting Oscar a King adaptation has produced. William Goldman wrote the screenplay and fought to keep the hobbling in some form. Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen play the local police.
The novel uses an axe and a blowtorch and the film uses a sledgehammer and a block of wood. Reiner has said he expected to lose the audience entirely and the softer version is still the most difficult thing in the picture to watch. Marc Shaiman scored it.
Bates plays Annie as sincere instead of unhinged, the decision that makes it work. She is a fan, her opinions about the books are coherent, her objection to the ending is one a reader might actually raise, and none of it is performed as madness.
The film is a two-hander in one room and Reiner shoots it as one. Bed, typewriter, window, corridor, and the geography is established early enough that every escape attempt is legible without a word of explanation. Columbia released it in November 1990. Reiner also directed Stand By Me.
James Caan spends most of the film immobile and does the harder job. The performance is almost entirely face and voice, he is playing a man calculating constantly, and the scenes where he pretends to be grateful are the best thing he ever did. King published the novel in 1987.
3. Scream (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Scream (1996)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"It names the rules and then has to be cleverer than the films it named."
Wes Craven made a film about the rules of his own genre while obeying all of them, and it revived the slasher single-handedly. Kevin Williamson wrote it on spec in three days and Miramax bought it in a weekend. Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette lead the cast.
The opening twelve minutes are the best-constructed sequence Craven directed. Drew Barrymore was the biggest name in the marketing, she is killed before the title card, and the audience is told immediately that nothing is protected. Marco Beltrami scored it. Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard play the friends.
The self-awareness is structural instead of decorative. Randy states the rules at a party, the film then obeys them, and every character knows enough about horror to make reasonable decisions, forcing the picture to be cleverer than its predecessors. It took over one hundred and seventy-three million dollars.
The two-killer solution is the element nobody guesses and it holds up on a rewatch. Both are visible throughout, both have motive, and the reveal reorganizes a dozen earlier scenes without any of them having cheated. Six further films have followed. Rose McGowan appears as Tatum.
The violence is more upsetting than the reputation suggests. The kills are slow, the victims fight back and do not stop fighting, and the garage door sequence is genuinely hard to watch because it takes so long. Craven had made A Nightmare on Elm Street twelve years earlier.
4. Ringu (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ringu (1998)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Seven days, and a haunting becomes an investigation with a deadline."
Hideo Nakata adapted Koji Suzuki’s novel and produced the film that started the entire J-horror export cycle. It cost around one and a quarter million dollars and its influence across two decades is out of all proportion to that. Nanako Matsushima plays the reporter. Toho released it in January 1998.
The seven-day clock is the structural engine. Watch the tape and you have a week, giving the film a countdown, a deadline and an investigation with a stated end point, and every scene can be placed against it. Hiroshi Takahashi wrote the screenplay. Rie Ino’o played Sadako.
Sadako’s emergence is the most copied image in modern horror and the technique is why it works. Nakata filmed the actress walking backward and reversed the footage, so the movement is wrong in a way an audience registers without identifying. Gore Verbinski remade it in 2002.
The film is quiet almost throughout. Long static takes, rooms with no score, a video tape of still images that runs for a full minute, and the restraint is what makes the last five minutes land as hard as they do. Several sequels and a television series followed.
The mechanism is a curse that spreads by being copied, a considerably better idea in 1998 than anybody credited. The only way to survive is to pass it on, and the film ends on a mother doing exactly that for her son. Suzuki published the novel in 1991.
The Sixth Sense survives a second viewing because it never concealed anything, and One Cut of the Dead spends an hour explaining its own first half. Structure in the Plot Handbook.
5. The Sixth Sense (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Sixth Sense (1999)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Every scene supports both readings and none of them cheats."
M. Night Shyamalan’s film took over six hundred and seventy million dollars and was nominated for six Academy Awards, and the ending has been so thoroughly absorbed that younger viewers arrive already knowing it. Toni Collette was nominated for a supporting Academy Award. Donnie Wahlberg appears in the opening.
The construction is the achievement and the film cheats at no point. Nobody addresses Malcolm except Cole, the anniversary dinner is a woman eating alone, the door to the basement is always locked, and every scene supports both readings on a second viewing. Tak Fujimoto shot it.
The red is the signal nobody catches. Shyamalan uses it only where the two worlds touch, on a door handle, a balloon, a sweater and a tent, and the rule is obeyed with complete consistency across the whole film. James Newton Howard scored it. It was nominated for Best Picture.
Haley Joel Osment was ten and the performance is the reason the film works instead of the twist. The scene in the car with his mother is four minutes of a child telling the truth and being believed, and it plays without any supernatural content.
Bruce Willis is doing quiet work that the reveal makes retroactively sad. He is trying to repair something, he does not know what he is, and the film’s real subject is a man unwilling to notice that his life has ended. Disney released it in August 1999.
6. Shaun of the Dead (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Shaun of the Dead (2004)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Every zombie beat played straight, with the comedy in the dialogue around it."
Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg wrote it out of an episode of Spaced and made the first film in the Cornetto trilogy. It cost around six million dollars and Romero was sufficiently impressed to cast both of them in Land of the Dead. Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield and Bill Nighy fill out the cast.
The first act is the joke nobody in the film notices. Shaun walks to the shop twice, the world deteriorates visibly between the two trips, and he registers none of it because his life was already a routine performed without attention. Dick Pope shot it.
The structure obeys zombie film rules completely. The rising action, the fortified location, the group thinning out, the bitten friend, and Wright plays each beat straight while the dialogue around it stays comic. Universal released it in April 2004. Penelope Wilton plays Shaun’s mother. Jessica Hynes appears in the mirrored group.
The Winchester sequence is where the tone turns and the film earns it. Shaun’s mother dies, the comedy stops, and the material with Pete and with Ed in the cellar is played entirely for loss with no joke offered anywhere in it. Two further Cornetto films followed.
The visual grammar is the technical achievement. Whip pans, synchronized cuts, a long take through a pub, and a montage repeated twice with different content that tells the audience exactly how far things have gone. Pegg and Wright wrote it together. Chris Martin has a cameo.
7. Constantine (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Constantine (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Hell is Los Angeles with a nuclear wind through it, street for street."
Francis Lawrence adapted Hellblazer with almost none of the source material intact, relocated it from Liverpool to Los Angeles, and cast a dark-haired American as a blond Englishman. The comic readership objected for a decade and the film has aged well anyway. Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello wrote the screenplay.
The theology is the best thing in it and the film takes it seriously. A balance between heaven and hell maintained by influence instead of force, half-breeds on both sides working through people, and a protagonist damned for a suicide attempt at fifteen. Rachel Weisz plays Angela and Shia LaBeouf plays Chas.
Tilda Swinton plays Gabriel as androgynous, bored and contemptuous of humanity, and the performance is the most interesting angel in any film. Peter Stormare arrives as Lucifer for six minutes at the end and takes the picture apart. Klaus Badelt and Brian Tyler scored it.
Keanu Reeves is playing a man dying of lung cancer who continues smoking, and the exhaustion in the performance is the right choice. He is not charming, he does not enjoy the work, and he is doing it to buy his way out of a debt.
The visual design of hell is genuinely distinctive. A nuclear wind blowing permanently through a burned mirror of Los Angeles, with the geography identical and everything in it on fire, and the film renders it in about four shots. Warner Bros. released it in February 2005.
8. The Descent (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Descent (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"An hour of broken friendship before a single creature appears."
Neil Marshall shot the entire film on constructed sets in Britain instead of real caves, the reason the geography works. Every passage was built, lit and rigged, and the cast were genuinely unable to see beyond the practical light sources. Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza lead the cast.
The first hour has no creatures in it at all. Six women, an unmapped cave system, a collapse behind them, and a group dynamic that was already broken before anybody went underground because of what one of them did. David Julyan scored it. Marshall had made Dog Soldiers in 2002.
The crawl sequence is the most effective claustrophobia ever filmed. A woman wedged in a passage narrower than her shoulders, the rock shifting, and Marshall holds it long enough that a substantial number of viewers cannot watch. Sam McCurdy shot it. Alex Reid plays Beth.
The crawlers work because they are almost an afterthought. They are blind, they hunt by sound, they are not supernatural, and the film’s actual subject is what Juno did and what Sarah decides to do about it in the dark. A sequel followed in 2009.
The British ending is the correct one and the American release removed it. Sarah escapes, drives away, and then the film reveals that she has not. The studio cut ends on the escape, turning a film about grief into a monster picture. It cost around three and a half million pounds.
9. [REC] (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of [REC] (2007)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"The camera has a reason to be running before anything happens."
Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza shot it in a single Barcelona apartment building with a cast who were given individual instructions they did not share. Several reactions in the film are genuine because the performers did not know what was about to happen. Manuela Velasco plays the reporter.
The found footage is justified instead of assumed. A television reporter is embedded with a fire crew for an overnight documentary, the camera has a reason to be running, and the cameraman is a character with a job instead of a device. It ran seventy-eight minutes.
The building becomes the whole world in about fifteen minutes. Health officials seal it, nobody inside is told anything, and the film’s most effective stretch is a group of residents on a staircase demanding information from people who will not give it. Three sequels followed across seven years.
The last four minutes are the best ending in found footage. The penthouse, the night vision, the tape recorder and the Medeiros girl, and the film supplies its explanation and its worst image in the same sixty seconds. Filmax produced it. Javier Botet played the Medeiros girl.
The American remake Quarantine reproduces it almost shot for shot and is worse in every respect. The infection is given a scientific cause, the religious material is removed, and the trailer showed the final image. It premiered at Venice in 2007. The English remake arrived a year later.
The Descent breaks its group before the cave does, and The Lighthouse removes the exit before the first conversation. Apply pressure properly in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. Pontypool (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pontypool (2008)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"An entire catastrophe delivered by telephone, and nothing is shown."
Bruce McDonald adapted Tony Burgess’s novel and staged an entire catastrophe inside a radio station in a church basement. Almost nothing is shown, the budget was tiny, and the film is one of the most genuinely original horror premises of its decade. Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly complete the cast.
The infection travels through the English language. Certain words become carriers, understanding them is the transmission, and the only cure is to break the connection between a word and its meaning, staged as a man being talked out of a word. Burgess adapted his own novel.
Stephen McHattie carries almost the whole picture with his voice. Grant Mazzy is a shock jock demoted to a small town, he is bored, he is performing, and the film’s horror arrives while he is still trying to be entertaining about it. Claude Foisy scored it.
The information arrives entirely by phone and that is the constraint the film is built on. A traffic reporter describing a crowd, a doctor who cannot get through, a BBC producer asking for an eyewitness account, and the audience never sees any of it. It premiered at Toronto in 2008.
11. The Cabin in the Woods (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The archetypes are imposed on screen, with drugs and lighting."
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon wrote it in three days and MGM’s bankruptcy delayed the release for three years. The delay meant the film arrived after a wave of imitators and it still reads as the last word on its own subject. Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth and Fran Kranz lead the cast.
The structure is stated in the first shot. Two men in short sleeves discussing a childproofing problem in an office, then a title card, and the audience knows something is being managed before they know what. Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford play the technicians. Amy Acker plays the biologist.
The archetypes are assigned instead of inherent. The film makes the point explicitly, with drugs and lighting used to push five people into roles they do not naturally occupy, and the whore is a scholarship student who had to be chemically persuaded. David Julyan scored it.
The elevator sequence is the payoff for the whole construction. Every monster the audience has been shown on the betting board is released at once, the security footage is the best five minutes in the film, and the unicorn gets the biggest laugh. Lionsgate released it in April 2012.
The argument underneath is about the audience. Somebody has to watch this happen for the world to continue, the ritual requires suffering observed, and the film’s final position is that the demand is the problem instead of the people supplying it. Sigourney Weaver appears at the end.
12. The World’s End (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of The World’s End (2013)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"A comedy built on a man nobody in the story wants to see."
Wright closed the Cornetto trilogy with the least liked and most serious of the three. A man in his forties assembles four friends who have moved on without him to finish a pub crawl they failed at as teenagers. Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan complete the five.
Gary King is an alcoholic and the film is direct about it. He is lying constantly, he is wearing the same coat he wore at eighteen, he has come from a treatment facility, and the comedy is built on a man nobody wants to see.
The science fiction turn arrives at the midpoint and is the least interesting thing in the picture. Blanks, blue blood, a network and a Network, and the invasion material is mostly a mechanism for keeping five men in a town together. Rosamund Pike plays the sister.
Simon Pegg is doing the best work of his career and it was not what the audience wanted. The bathroom scene where he pushes up a sleeve is played without any joke and reframes the entire first hour retroactively. Steven Price scored it. Allan also worked on Shang-Chi.
The fights are choreographed by Brad Allan and are genuinely good. Nick Frost’s transformation from reluctance into fury is staged physically instead of written, and the bar sequence with the stools is the best action Wright has directed. Universal released it in July 2013. The pub names map the plot in order.
13. It Follows (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of It Follows (2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"Four rules stated once and never broken afterward."
David Robert Mitchell made it for around two million dollars and it became one of the most influential horror films of the decade. The setting is Detroit and the period is deliberately unplaceable, with cars, televisions and clothing from four different decades. Maika Monroe leads and Keir Gilchrist plays Paul.
The rule is stated once and never broken. It walks, it is always coming, only you can see it, and if it kills you it goes back down the line to the person before. Everything the film does proceeds from those four sentences. Mike Gioulakis shot it.
The camera work is the delivery mechanism. Slow three hundred and sixty degree pans that force the audience to search the background themselves, and long static wides where somebody may or may not be walking toward the frame. Radius-TWC released it in March 2015. Rich Vreeland records as Disasterpeace.
Disasterpeace’s score is doing enormous work and the film would be considerably less effective without it. Synthesizers pitched to distort, a recurring motif that arrives before the threat is visible, and long stretches of silence between. A sequel was announced a decade later. The film was shot in and around Detroit.
The beach sequence is the best-constructed scene in the film. A plan that should work, a clear line of sight, and the thing arrives in a form nobody expected while the audience is watching the wrong part of the frame. It premiered at Cannes in 2014.
Annie Wilkes has a reasonable objection to a novel, and Midsommar’s Christian is negligent instead of cruel. Two harder villains, in the Antagonist Handbook.
14. The Witch (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Witch (2015)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The dialogue comes from court records, so it carries a worldview."
Robert Eggers built the film from period court records, pamphlets and diaries, and almost every line of dialogue is taken from seventeenth century writing. The farm was constructed with period tools and the interiors are lit by candle and window only. Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play the parents.
The horror is the family before it is anything supernatural. A household expelled from a plantation over a religious disagreement, a failing crop, a missing infant, and five people with no neighbours and a theology that explains misfortune as personal sin. Jarin Blaschke shot it and Mark Korven scored it.
The film commits to the witch being real, the decision most viewers argue about. There is no ambiguity and no psychological reading available, and the first twenty minutes establish it in a way that leaves no room for one. A24 released it in February 2016.
Anya Taylor-Joy was unknown and the film is entirely her. Thomasin is blamed by every member of her family in turn for things she has not done, and the performance holds the audience’s sympathy through material that gives her almost nothing to say. Eggers won the directing prize at Sundance.
The ending has been read as a horror and as a liberation, and Eggers has declined to settle it. Everybody who ever accused her is dead, she is offered the only thing anybody has ever offered her, and she signs. Black Phillip was played by a goat named Charlie.
15. The Wailing (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Wailing (2016)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"He is destroyed by love for his daughter. That is the whole tragedy."
Na Hong-jin made a two and a half hour film that changes genre three times and refuses to confirm which reading is correct. It was a major commercial success in Korea and divided audiences everywhere it played. Kwak Do-won plays the policeman and Jun Kunimura the stranger.
The first hour is close to comedy. A bumbling village policeman, an incompetent investigation, mushroom poisoning as an official theory, and the film establishes a tone it spends the remaining ninety minutes dismantling. Hong Kyung-pyo shot it. Chun Woo-hee plays the woman in white. It took over fifty million dollars.
The exorcism sequence intercuts two rituals happening at once and is the most sustained set piece in Korean cinema. Drums, a goat, a girl convulsing in a house, and the film cuts between them at increasing speed for close to eight minutes. It ran one hundred and fifty-six minutes.
The question the film will not answer is which supernatural figure is which. The Japanese stranger, the woman in white and the shaman are each presented as the threat at different points, and the evidence supports more than one arrangement. Na had made The Chaser and The Yellow Sea.
The final act punishes the protagonist for the thing an audience would have done. He is told to wait, he is given a clear instruction, and his failure to obey it is a father acting on love in exactly the way that destroys everything. It premiered at Cannes in 2016.
16. Get Out (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Get Out (2017)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Every plant plays. Nothing in it is decorative."
Jordan Peele made his directing debut for around four and a half million dollars and it took over two hundred and fifty. He won the Academy Award for original screenplay and the film was nominated for Best Picture. Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener lead the family.
The construction is the achievement and nothing in it is accidental. The deer, the cotton in the chair, the bingo auction, the photographs in the cupboard, and every element planted in the first hour is used in the second. Michael Abels scored it. Peele had come from sketch comedy.
The horror is social before it is physical. Well-meaning liberal remarks delivered at a garden party, a father who would have voted for Obama a third time, and an hour of accumulated small wrongness before anything overt happens. Toby Oliver shot it. Marcus Henderson plays Walter.
The sunken place is a genuinely new image and Peele stages it in about forty seconds. A man falling backward through black while the room recedes to a rectangle above him, and the metaphor does not need any explanation. Blumhouse produced it. Peele cut a considerably bleaker ending.
Daniel Kaluuya’s audition tape is the reason he got the part and the single tear in the hypnosis scene is not an effect. Betty Gabriel’s performance as Georgina does the film’s most disturbing work in about four minutes of screen time. LilRel Howery plays Rod.
17. One Cut of the Dead (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of One Cut of the Dead (2017)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Thirty-seven minutes of looking incompetent, entirely on purpose."
Shinichiro Ueda made it for around twenty-five thousand dollars with a cast of unknowns from a workshop, and it took over thirty million in Japan. It is the most profitable film in the country’s history by ratio. Takayuki Hamatsu plays the director. Yuzuki Akiyama plays the lead actress.
The first thirty-seven minutes are a single-take zombie film that looks badly made. The performances are stiff, the camera wanders, there are long pauses, and a substantial number of viewers stop watching before the structure is revealed. It ran ninety-six minutes. The single take was shot six times.
The remaining hour explains every one of those flaws. The film goes back to the preparation and then runs the same thirty-seven minutes from behind the camera, and each apparent failure turns out to have a cause the audience now finds funny. A French remake followed in 2022.
The construction is the most disciplined comic writing in modern film. Nothing is added in the second half, every payoff was already visible, and the audience’s own initial judgment becomes the material the picture works with. It played two cinemas on release before expanding. Kazuaki Nagaya plays the actor.
The human element is what makes it more than a trick. A director who has compromised everything, a daughter who cannot compromise anything, and the last shot is a human tower built to get a crane shot nobody will pay for. Ueda wrote it from a stage play.
Pontypool stages a catastrophe by telephone and Get Out pays off every plant it makes. Two kinds of discipline in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
18. The Lighthouse (2019) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Lighthouse (2019)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Two men, a rock, and no way for either of them to leave."
Eggers shot it in black and white on orthochromatic film stock in a nearly square aspect ratio, using a lighthouse built for the production on a Nova Scotia headland in genuine storm conditions. Jarin Blaschke was nominated for the cinematography Academy Award. It was shot in Cape Forchu.
The dialogue is constructed from period sources again. Melville, sailors’ diaries and Maine farmer records supply Dafoe’s speech, and the curse he delivers over a badly received meal runs close to a full page and was shot in a small number of takes. Mark Korven scored it.
The film is a two-hander and the escalation is the whole structure. Two men, a rock, alcohol, no relief, and a steady loss of any agreement about what is happening or how long they have been there. A24 released it in October 2019. Dafoe grew the beard for the part.
Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are both extraordinary and the performances run in opposite directions. Dafoe expands into theatricality and Pattinson contracts into something animal, and the film ends with one of them on a rock being eaten by gulls. Max Eggers co-wrote it. Pattinson has described the shoot as miserable.
The light itself is never explained. Wake will not let Winslow see it, the film shows the audience nothing about what it is, and the last act supplies an image without supplying a meaning for it. It ran one hundred and nine minutes. Gulls were trained for the production.
19. Midsommar (2019) [full review]
► Read the full review of Midsommar (2019)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The antagonist is not cruel. He is negligent, and negligence does more damage."
Ari Aster made a breakup film disguised as folk horror and shot almost all of it in daylight. The Harga village was built in a Hungarian field and the summer light is sustained across the entire running time with almost no night at all. Jack Reynor plays Christian and Will Poulter plays Mark.
The opening twenty minutes are as bleak as anything in the genre and have nothing supernatural in them. A family death, a boyfriend who does not want the responsibility, and a phone call that establishes he was going to end the relationship anyway. Pawel Pogorzelski shot it and Bobby Krlic scored it.
The horror is the relationship instead of the cult. Christian is not cruel, he is negligent, he forgets her birthday, and the film’s argument is that a community offering to share grief is more attractive than a partner who cannot be bothered to. A24 released it in July 2019.
Florence Pugh’s performance carries the film and the grief sequences are genuinely hard to watch. The screaming in the airport bathroom, and the later scene where women surround her and match her breathing until the sound becomes communal. A director’s cut runs twenty-four minutes longer.
The ending is the most divisive of the decade. She chooses, she smiles, and Aster has been explicit that the film is meant to be read as a liberation for her and as a horror for everybody else at the same time. Vilhelm Blomgren plays Pelle.
20. Kingdom (2019-2020) [full review]
► Read the full review of Kingdom (2019-2020)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"Dormant in daylight, so both sides can plan around it."
Kim Seong-hun and Park In-je directed two seasons set in the Joseon period, with the infection arriving into a court succession crisis. It is the most expensive Korean series Netflix had funded at that point and the production design is the reason. Ju Ji-hoon plays the crown prince.
The temperature rule is the best structural idea in any zombie property. The infected are dormant in daylight and active in darkness, until the plot moves north and cold changes the rule, and both sides can plan around a mechanism the audience understands. Kim Eun-hee wrote both seasons.
The politics carry more weight than the infection. A dying king, a pregnant queen, a clan holding power through a forged succession, and a famine in the south that produced the outbreak through people eating what they should not have. Bae Doona plays the physician.
The costume and production work is extraordinary and the hats became a topic in themselves. Every rank is legible on sight, the palace interiors are period accurate, and the series uses the architecture for staging instead of backdrop. Twelve episodes were released across two seasons.
The Ashin of the North special reframes the whole series and is better than either season. A woman’s family destroyed by a political calculation, the resurrection plant explained, and a revenge that was in motion before the first episode began. Jun Ji-hyun appears at the end of season two.
Honorable Mentions: Horror Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
The Medium (2021)
Banjong Pisanthanakun made a Thai found-footage film about a shaman lineage and a niece who refuses it, produced by Na Hong-jin. The last thirty minutes abandon the documentary calm entirely.
The Host (2006)
Bong Joon-ho shows his creature in full daylight in the first fifteen minutes and then makes the film about a family and a bureaucracy. The riverside attack is the best monster staging of its decade.
A Field in England (2013)
Ben Wheatley shot a Civil War deserter film in black and white on a single field, with mushrooms, a treasure hunt and a sequence that has caused genuine physical reactions in cinemas.
Shutter (2004)
A Thai film about spirit photography and what develops in the frames afterward. The final image explains a physical symptom the protagonist has carried for the whole running time.
Whispering Corridors (1998)
A Korean school ghost story that made the education system its actual subject and launched a six-film sequence. It was a major commercial success at a point when Korean horror barely existed.
Noroi: The Curse (2005)
Koji Shiraishi built a found-footage documentary out of television clips, home video and a missing director, assembled so patiently that the pieces only connect in the last twenty minutes.
Dark Water (2002)
Nakata made a second Suzuki adaptation about a mother, a custody case and a water stain on a ceiling that grows. It is sadder than Ringu and considerably less discussed.
Under the Shadow (2016)
Babak Anvari set a djinn story in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, where the missile strikes and the religious police are as dangerous as anything supernatural. The taped window is the film in one image.
Tumbbad (2018)
Rahi Anil Barve spent years on an Indian folk horror about a god of greed kept in a womb beneath a house. The rain, the gold and the rule about never taking more than one coin are all handled beautifully.
Hausu (1977)
Nobuhiko Obayashi asked his eleven-year-old daughter what frightened her and filmed the answers. A piano eats a girl, a cat paints a wall with blood, and nothing in it obeys any rule of continuity.
The Ring Virus (1999)
The Korean adaptation of the same novel, made a year after Nakata and closer to Suzuki in several respects. It is the only version that keeps the book’s explanation of the curse intact.
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)
Jung Bum-shik put a streaming crew in a real abandoned hospital with head-mounted cameras and live viewer counts. The device justifies itself and the last twenty minutes are relentless.
Dishonorable Mentions: Horror Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the premise, the cast or the source material and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Ring Two (2005)
Nakata directed the sequel to the American remake of his own film and supplied Samara with a motive and a maternal need. The deer sequence is the moment the series stopped being frightening.
Scream 3 (2000)
Williamson left, the rules material became a Hollywood satire, and the killer is given a family connection nobody had asked about. Craven has said the Columbine aftermath forced substantial changes.
The Grudge 2 (2006)
Three timelines are intercut without signalling, a structure in the first film and here is confusion. Shimizu was directing his fifth version of the same material in seven years.
Blair Witch (2016)
A sequel that explains the house, the geometry and the time distortion, replacing seventeen years of speculation with a creature design and a drone shot.
Truth or Dare (2018)
A game that compels participation is a workable rule, attached to a demon with a stated origin, a loophole and a smile effect achieved digitally on every face.
Slender Man (2018)
A figure that worked because it was crowdsourced and inconsistent, given a single canonical version, a backstory and rules. Substantial footage was cut after a real case connected to the folklore.
What Do You Think?
The best films in this tier state a rule and obey it. It Follows, Ringu and Kingdom all give you the mechanism up front and generate everything from it. Tell me whether a horror premise is stronger for having limits or for refusing them.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures