A "short" list of Shudder reccomendations

 

It’s dark out there folks. Cold. You know what that means?

Prime reading time!

Also you could watch a horror film, I guess. They do rather suit the darkness.

Here’s some Shudder recommendations:

Shudder has loads of things in it you’ve probably seen already, but if you haven’t why haven’t you? There’s Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, which helped redefine modern cinema as well as standardising the zombie mythology within the West that will (ironically) outlive us all. What about Romero’s Season of the Witch? It’s from the rough-around-the-edges era of Romero’s filmmaking, where he produced such oddities as the entirely excellent Martin. Season is a clumsily feminist story that hits all the modern beats of witchcraft as female empowerment, as an unfulfilled housewife decides to stop putting the needs of other people ahead of her own, and it has an off-beat rhythm that I found rather hypnotic. The Crazies is from a similar-ish time period, but is a lot more hinged than either The Season of the Witch or Martin, and is remarkable for the way it plays with who really is the antagonist of the movie.

The good Hellraisers (1+2) bring some fantastical body horror, whilst Cronenberg’s Scanners brings some sci-fi body horror, and it is worth nothing that the other Cronenberg (Brandon, David’s son) also has a body horror on there: Possessor. I didn’t love it the way that some do, but it’s a worthwhile watch for its slickly oozing visual set pieces and some stark portrayals of existential identity crisis in a way that is very visual indeed. Cold and controlled throughout, laced with strong but underdeveloped sci-fi concepts, it might be more your bag than it was mine. There’s also some very tactile, not to mention effective, body horror to be found the Spanish language Shrew’s Nest, a domestic drama set in the 50s. It is about an agoraphobic shut-in who one day finds herself having to nurture an injured man back to health in her claustrophobic flat. It all goes brilliantly. Obviously. Benson and Moorhead’s Spring does a very remarkable thing, in that it actually finds away to have me enjoy narrative and dramatic beats normally found in YA fiction. It’s a YA body horror, and as someone with no love for the genre (notice the lack of the much beloved Tigers Are Not Afraid on this list), it’s an effective low key journey, beautiful and quiet.

Confusingly, there’s no Stephen King adaptations on this list at all, so we’re just going to have to make with the excellent 1980 film The Changeling. It’s your traditional haunted house horror fare, but very well executed. Sad, spooky and surprisingly full of imagery that is reminiscent of a certain J-horror movie. In a similar vein, the Iranian-American produced movie The Night is a solid and entertaining modern horror movie. It very much toils in the shadow of The Shining but is still a strongly paced ride, paranoid in all of the most fun-borderline-silly ways. Part of me wants to stick up for it, too, because there is a twist in the movie that a lot of critics decided meant that the movie was saying something that I just don’t think it is; you’ll know it when you see it. There’s some really great sequences where the very setting itself seems to warp, which is similar to The Witch in the Window and Room. Room has done itself dirty by giving itself a title that two much more famous movies have already made imbued with some, well, strong connotations, but it’s a high concept and shorter movie that I enjoyed quite a lot without letting my internet-corrupted brain get in the way. Of all the films I have mention in this loose collection of haunted houses, my favourite is probably the aforementioned The Witch in the Window. It moves at slow pace in all the right ways, it’s very sad in an empathetic and has a sequence near the end which is as successful a piece of dislocation of place as I’ve ever encountered in any visual medium. Worth also highlighting Goodbye Mummy too, an Austrian psychological thriller that feels like a haunted house film without necessarily being a haunted house film. Film makers Fiala and Franz do an excellent job making the middle class over-clean splendour of the protagonists’ house feel alien and creepy, despite being an elegant piece of straight-out-of-a-flat-pack minimalism.

Takata’s Ring brought modern technology into the world of horror in a way that was decisive and immediately impactful, and we’re still waiting for that moment in our new internet era. There’s three movies that explore found footage gimmicks to make that leap: Host, a movie about a group of friends doing a séance over Zoom, is an entertaining foray, lingering as it were in the shadow of COVID, and was a real darling of the horror scene in early lockdown days. Better yet is Deadspin, a rollicking live stream of an obnoxious prankster looking to make his big comeback after being kicked by his sponsors for, uh, “comments”. It’s a tricky balance to have us spend ninety minutes with an annoying protagonist, but Deadspin’s poise and tonal balance between humour and horror is impeccable. Last, but certainly not least, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, is quite possibly my favourite film of the year. It’s about a young woman participating in a viral creepy pasta craze. Anna Cobb is mesmeric, which is just as well because it is almost a single hander. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. There’s also Broadcast Signal Intrusion, a film that is about the past from the point of view of people who have internet access, a paranoid conspiracy thriller with J-horror aspects and psychological uncertainty throughout – also not a found footage film, for the sake of variety.

Talking of Ring, there’s more than a few East Asian movies worth checking out on Shudder. No doubt Battle Royale and Oldboy very much go without saying. What about the South Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters? It’s a structurally unusual movie that slides between being a tense and psychological domestic drama to some of the best horror set pieces I’ve literally ever seen on screen. It has a really communal feel, being about more than just a single person’s journey; Pulse is very much the same, but in a very different way. Pulse is a smothering film, directed by my favourite director called Kurasawa (not joking), unrelenting and extraordinarily downbeat. It’s one of my favourite movies, but it’s emotionally quite difficult to get through – and, again, like A Tale of Two sisters it has some truly remarkable horror set pieces. For something a little emotionally lighter than the two previous films look no further than Noroi: the Curse. A found footage gem, Noroi is a reminder that this period of films from Japan that really broke into the West just delivered so consistently. It’s creepy and just weird enough. Moving a bit more into the South-East of the continent, Laotian film The Long Walk is a quiet, deliberate film that is rather a brilliant sit. The film always teeters on the edge of being ponderous, but Mattie Do’s controlled instincts are well judged enough that the films pace is introspective and weighty rather than dull.

Enough of this heavy stuff, I hear you say, let’s have some fun! Well Slaxx, confusingly, is a film about haunted jeans, but also a social commentary. It’s a fun time, although at times it tries too hard to make jokes rather than letting the natural absurdity or the set-up do the heavy lifting. There’s a couple of classics from the post-Raimi world like Demons and Night of the Demons, but if you want a real piece of absolute eighties nonsense there’s Chopping Mall. It’s pretty bad, watch it with mates, get drunk and have a great time. Shutting your brain off for Body at Brighton Rock is not the worst idea either, a film which strands its protagonist in the middle of nowhere with a body and manages to maintain tension without overcomplicating itself. Daniel isn’t Real, a movie that sort of belongs alongside such luminaries as Malignant and The Perfection in many ways, but with a far stronger sense of intention and control. Daniel isn’t Real, a film about a young man and the evil invisible friend he’s had since he was very young, is exactly silly and serious enough at the same time. Senagalese supernatural western thriller Saloum was a film I actually saw in the theatre, and is full of lots of very effective constituent parts. It's a driving action film, then it's a slowburn thriller, then it's a very fast burn dark fantasy. Does it work as a cohesive whole? Not particularly, but the parts are great at least.

On the outright comedy side of things Psycho Goreman, somehow, side-steps being annoying and lands on being awesome. For my money the best comedy I’ve seen in ages is a pretty little ditty called Greener Grass. It’s the best movie Paul Verhoeven never made. It’s Lynch, it’s Waters; it’s a tension headache, it’s toothache, it’s a migraine. It’s about that US phenomenon of “soccer moms”, and it is as damning an indictment of the Western middle classes as you can imagine.

Want something a bit more worthy? Well, there’s Donnie Darko, but since you’ve no doubt seen that already let us visit France. Eden Log is a movie that I am recommending, the first half an hour of which involves a man crawling through mud, and yes I do actually think it’s pretty good. Not as good as Evolution, which is so French and artsy that it is practically painful, so obviously it is completely great. Be ready to not worry too much about conventional narrative structures. There’s also Antrum, which might not be pretentious at all, but definitely carries itself with the airs of pretension, and a very big dollop of insanity. Most of the talk around the movie is the gimmick that frames it – the idea that the film you are watching is cursed – but for myself that is the weakest part of the movie. Going further down this weird old rabbit hole, Eyes of Fire, is an American movie directed and written by then artist Avery Crounse. It’s a western, and definitely remains a western for the first third of the movie; this initial section is blandly competent and decently paced, but when it really loses itself it really loses itself, and hoo boy. The psychedelic folk horror nightmare that results in many ways feels like a very strong forerunner to Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Talking of folk horror, there’s Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, both stone-cold classics that are worth watching, with the caveat that they are also both disarmingly extreme. The unfettered nihilism of Witchfinder General is especially striking, and within a time where we are all desensitised beyond recognition it is still really, really fucking grim. Talking of really fucking grim, have you seen The Hills Have Eyes? It’s amazing that Craven, whose name would become synonymous with fun, produced such a gruelling effective piece of ugly violence early in his career.

If you haven’t seen any Argento yet, there’s Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Tenebrae and Phenomena lurking here. The latter, especially, is all of his most ridiculous predilections in a high-art schlock masterpiece I find irresistible. If you can’t get enough of the music in these films, Piercing has you covered. It’s an American adaptation of a Japanese novel filled with music from 70s Italian moves. There’s an intensity and singularness to the film, about a man who is planning to murder a prostitute, that is compelling and fascinating, but also belie a disarmingly funny experience. Big reccs.

Metaphors. We’re in a horror world of horror as some sort of metaphor for trauma. You can talk about Heriditary or Get Out if you want to blame someone, but for myself The Babadook remains a gold standard for extremely emotionally complex spooky times. A strong and comparable Australian film, that does all of the same things to a comparable level of devastating effect, is Relic, a film about three generations of women living together and dealing with the realities of ageing and illness, specifically around dementia. For my mind it’s a better movie than Hereditary for dealing with things that are actually hereditary. A Banquet evokes a much more specific comparison with St Maud, and although it sort of loses its way halfway through, I really found it an effective and affecting watch. Good Madam fits excellently here as a film nakedly about the country it was filmed in, South Africa, and the race relations therein. It isn’t in a rush to coddle the viewer, and rightly so.

So, when organising this list of recommendations, to peek behind the curtain, I organised movies into subgenres of sort. There was one subcategory I named “Chris What the Fuck is This?”, and I think it is time for some of that nonsense. You’ve read over two thousands words of this, I’ve written over two thousand words of this, so we’re all a bit loopy. The Baby is a dark comedy or a psychological thriller or a, I dunno, film. It is a film I watched. You should watch it too. While you’re at it watch the Phenomena films, they’re entertaining and weird and really feel like some interesting weirdo’s authentic vision. They sort of know exactly what they are and kinda sorta can’t decide what they are and I love all of them unconditionally, although I’ve not seen the fifth, and last, one. They’re about an alien who comes to earth with nefarious intentions, not unlike the B-movie glory Xtro. Apparently there’s a genuine link between Phenomena and Xtro, too, with the cult success of Phenomena encouraging producers, in an out of character move, to encourage Xtro’s writer and director to be more weird and niche to get that cult audience dollars. A different time. Xtro is weirder than can be articulated with mere words, and as such brilliant fun. Low budget auteur Frank Hennenlotter’s Basket Case is also available, and you should watch it even though you also definitely shouldn’t. At least it isn’t Brain Damage, which is also amazing.

You’ve – surely – already seen Carnival of Souls, a little slice of nightmare that feels like Lynch’s existence hinges on, but have you seen Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood? It’s not remotely similar beyond the carnival theming, but watch it anyway. It is also a ridiculous psychedelic B-movie that feels like it has an epic scope beyond its actual low budget jankiness. Edited with the same incompetent charm as an early Romero, to take us back to the start. If you like drinking blood, Bliss is a striking, kinetic and simple story done with lots of style and character. It’s not a complicated narrative maze, but it also rules despite the unfortunate deadweight of it being about vampires.

Finally, and broadly uncharacterisable, is Phil Tippet’s Mad God. A stop motion animation full of vomit and shit and blood and puss; a descent into hell, or maybe some other place. It’s incredibly uneven but also incredible. You need to sink into it, drown in it.