Having recently written about what a great horror year 2015 was made me nostalgic for that time. Undeniably, there's already a wave of promising new horror pics on the way, and I am hoping for a revival of a good horror year in 2025, ten years after. Time will tell if it will really happen, but until then let's have a look at and discuss the movies released from 2015 to 2020; those five excellent horror years, until the pandemic replaced the screen horror with a real one. Here the first two years 2015 and 2016.
2015
The painter soon starts painting a picture with the force of something outside of him, automatic painting so to say, and discovers an ugly truth about the people that are depicted in his work.
I love art horror, I've talked about it before, I may have talked about this movie too, I find it somewhat original plotwise. What makes the movie brilliant, though, is the absolutely authentic and believably chilling villain, amazingly played by baller character actor Pruitt Taylor Vince. He gave me quite some nightmares.
So in the forest, it is rumored, witches live and they'll snatch you if you aren't careful. Guess what happens!
The setting, the pictures of The VVitch might make you think you're watching some kind of documentary on the era. All the more unsettling are the scenes that aim to scare and disturb you; a snatched baby being washed in blood, cattle milk coming out bloody, children who forget their prayer and start speaking in tongues, a black goat named Philip... Among all these we have Tomasin, a young girl, who just can't please anybody despite trying to do her best. The way she is being treated by her family, especially her own mother, made me wish for her to join the witches and "live deliciously", as is promised by the devil.
Don't read this if you haven't seen this movie yet - Delicious is also the final scene, in which the motion of the witches ascending to the sky match the crescendo of the choir singing witchily. It is one of the most beautiful moments in cinema history, if you ask me.
The main character in this film is also left behind; first by her family during the February vacation at her boarding school. The picture will go full circle and connect this abandonment with another in a gut-wrenching final scene.
During the vacation she will make a different sort of connection, a supernatural one, and will from then on live her whole life in the hopes that she can find this presence again, this presence which was there for her when her own family wasn't or couldn't.
The quietude, slow pace and puzzle-like story telling in The Blackcoat's Daughter are sublime. It's too bad that it hasn't done better at the box office.
In all cinema history, there's no scene which gives me more joy than the gig scene in the Green Room, in which the fictional band the Ain't Rights sings The Dead Kennedy song "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" to an audience consisting of unamused alt rights and nazis. It makes me want to grab a can of beer and jump around like it's 1998, before my life went south and the world was a better place, possibly.
The premise is simple - a punk band is stuck in a room after they witness the killing of a guy and are soon surrounded by various high and low profile nazi personalities who try to make them come out of there, which they decline at all cost. The room becomes their little castle they are defending to the outside.
I think it is because of the background of the characters and their representation in movies, the music they make, they listen to that I love this picture so much and go back to watching whenever I can.
A group of police officers, one of them from the city, probably Istanbul, the others locals, are being called/lured to a house in the middle of nowhere where they discover a black mass going on, opening the doors to absolutely horrifying dimensions.
There are a few levels to this movie, we first have the whole group having dinner together where it is hinted at that one of them has some kind of trauma, then they are involved in a traffic accident and then only two of them sitting at a table having a candid talk. When they enter hell, we never know what is a dream, a hallucination or reality.
You know how there are in every country urban legends which young people or children tell during sleepovers to scare each other. The ones we told often involved police and army forces because of their (back then) uncontrolled brute force and us being born and/or raised in the aftermath of the military coup in 1980. One story we told involved a house outside the city, where especially high end political prisoners and journalists were being taken and incarcerated, and contrary to usual prisons and stations, the arrested people wouldn't be registered so that if they die, there would be no records. Today I'm not sure it's even a legend.
The director being from the same generation as me, I figured he probably also would have heard and told the same stories as me and thus I interpreted Baskın as a reverse-version of that narrative, of the police being taken out into a remote house and being tortured there instead of vice versa. But I think I'm wrong. Baskın explores a different kind of trauma and does so very impressively. Actor Mehmet Cerrahoğlu kills it, like literally.
2016
The way this movie is written, the way the mystery unravels, the acting, the horror elements, the stiffing and claustrophobic setting - everything about The Autopsy of Jane Doe makes this an almost perfect movie for me.
A pathologist father-son duo, who happen to have their workplace underneath their house, are perplexed when the body of a young woman is delivered to them. Contrary to what is believed the body is supposed to look like, it is beautiful and immaculate: no broken skin, no bruises, no wounds, no signs of decay... But her insides speak another language and it is up to these two to figure out what has happened to this girl. Only with every new step, what must have happened seems more and more impossible, but the consequences are there before their eyes.
So what is it the story of this body? Oh, this movie is so sublime, I want to re-watch it just talking about it. I know what I'm doing tonight!
And after finishing The Autopsy of Jane Doe I'll get to this beauty.
The emergency room of a small town in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, and strange people dressed in weird white robes populate the space before the hospital. They just stand there. In the dark. Terrifying.
What happens inside the hospital is no less scary, though, with doors to other dimensions of reality opening, a doctor literally playing god, a cult, and many many wonderful, beautiful hand-made special effects, presented in an 80's video cassette era aesthetic and underlined by synth music.
I love this movie so much, it's hard to describe. Please watch if you haven't.
Raw
It's a funny phenomenon; I know these are all props and fake blood and fake organs and special effects. I know if a person would take a piece of bone and meat from a chicken, I could watch it easily. And yet when a movie tells me that it's the pinky finger of someone that this actress pretends to be eating with a great appetite, I get faint to the point of revulsion and gagging. This movie has a very palpable physical effect on its viewers.
Raw, which is about a young vegetarian girl discovering her lust and hunger for human flesh, has so many gross scenes I don't even know where to start. Don't get me wrong, I do get repulsed and I do gag, but I somehow like this feeling, like so much shock and disgust concentrated, that I feel almost purged afterward. I also need to laugh most of the time when I see movies like this. Not because they're funny, but because of hysterics.
Really well done cannibal flick.
A mystery illness, a stranger in town, evil spirits? While a police officer tries to cure his little daughter from her fits and seizures, he slowly loses his sense of what is right and what is wrong, who is good and who is evil.
After a Christian priest fails, a Shamanic priest offers his help but a ceremony needs to be interrupted due to his unconventional methods, after which things go even worse. What curse is this?
I genuinely think this is a scary movie - the acting, the makeup, the idea of the blurred lines around our perception of others and how easily we can be fooled and tricked into believing things that aren't or are only partially true.
A bonus point constitute the beautiful landscape shots of South Korea, a country I definitely want to visit.
One of the strangest movies I have seen, A Dark Song revolves around a rich woman who buys a remote big house and seeks the help of a sort of a clairvoyant, medium, spiritualist, I have no idea what he is, because she needs to contact her dead child.
During their stay in the house, the grumpy spiritualist starts a sort of really weird boot camp, in which he forbids her to do some things, makes her do things which don't make sense and even abuses her. All the while he tells her she needs to be patient, it will start soon, or has already started.
So during the most part of the movie the viewer thinks this is a scam and he's hoodwinking her. What happens next is quite striking to be honest, and awaits you to watch it.
Really original indie film which will keep you guessing.
This has become such a monumental film that I feel like it is actually older than the other movies on this list.
As a person who is easily emotionally touched by drama in fiction and ends up crying more than I probably should, I try to steer clear from too emotional content. But that didn't help me while watching Train to Busan, which centers on a little girl whose workaholic father neglects her, taking the train to Busan to see her mom on her birthday. During their trip the Zombie apocalypse breaks out and a true race for their lives begins.
The trains in question, the South Korean KTX trains remind me a lot of the German ICE trains and that sense of connection to a certain setting makes the encounter with a monster all the more scary and surreal, in a sense. I like to take the ICE and can't even begin to think of how it would be to battle zombies or any kind of danger inside them. Hopefully I will never have to. The ending always has me whimpering uncontrollably.
These were my favorite horror films of 2015 and 2016. Next time I'll discuss the following two years which include absolute classics like Hereditary and Suspiria, but also lesser known gems like The Evil Within or Ghostland.
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