Editorials
The Top 10 Doomsday Horror Films!
Humankind’s fascination with its own extinction has led to some of the most popular and enduring cinematic nightmares ever put to film. Not only is it a cathartic experience to witness the fragile mortality of the entire human race coming to a frightening end before our very eyes (while wrapped safely in the warm cocoon of the local Cineplex), it’s also very often a cerebral one. What could be more thought-provoking than the very reminder that we’re not as invincible as we often go through our lives pretending to be? Luckily for us, we’ve had a wealth of ambitious filmmakers tackle a variety of doomsday scenarios in inventive (and sometimes gut-bustingly hilarious) ways. Will any of their movies lead to humankind changing its destructive tendencies? Doubtful. Listen, the apocalypse is bound to go down eventually, maybe in your lifetime. To prepare yourself, check out my list of the Top Ten Doomsday Horror Films ever made. Armageddon ain’t gonna be as much fun in real life as it is in the movies, but taking in a few of these picks might help ease the transition.
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Humankind’s fascination with its own extinction has led to some of the most popular and enduring cinematic nightmares ever put to film. Not only is it a cathartic experience to witness the fragile mortality of the entire human race coming to a frightening end before our very eyes (while wrapped safely in the warm cocoon of the local Cineplex), it’s also very often a cerebral one. What could be more thought-provoking than the very reminder that we’re not as invincible as we often go through our lives pretending to be? Luckily for us, we’ve had a wealth of ambitious filmmakers tackle a variety of doomsday scenarios in inventive (and sometimes gut-bustingly hilarious) ways. Will any of their movies lead to humankind changing its destructive tendencies? Doubtful. Listen, the apocalypse is bound to go down eventually, maybe in your lifetime. To prepare yourself, check out my list of the Top Ten Doomsday Horror Films ever made. Armageddon ain’t gonna be as much fun in real life as it is in the movies, but taking in a few of these picks might help ease the transition.
I’m including this movie not for its remarkable quality, but purely for its `80s-era cheese factor. Get a load of this premise: Two Valley girls survive an apocalyptic event brought on by a rogue comet passing into Earth’s atmosphere, only to be confronted by the sizable number of the walking dead left in its wake. Luckily, their father was in the Army and taught the girls how to kick some major ass. Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only with zombies and totally heinous `80s hairstyles. Oh yeah, it also has a bitchin’ shopping montage set to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Lucky for cult-movie lovers everywhere, this one finally became available on DVD back in 2007 after toiling for years in VHS obscurity.
That’s right, motherf*ckers. I’m on record as being one of the three people that actually enjoyed The Happening. First off, the Darwinian premise (what if Mother Earth started fighting back against our destructive human ways?) isn’t as dumb as everyone made it out to be. Sure, plants aren’t scary, but that’s not what’s supposed to be scary about it. What’s scary is construction workers throwing themselves off of buildings, en masse, and women sticking themselves in the neck with hairpins in the middle of Central Park. In other words, people losing their shit on a massive scale. The way people criticized this movie, you’d think the plants grew fangs and started chasing people. Listen, think what you want to think. To me, this is M. Night’s best outing since The Sixth Sense.
The 1956 original is an undisputed classic, but this 1978 version of the tale really milks the horror inherent in the premise for all it’s worth. The first half-hour is a supremely effective exercise in paranoia-building, as San Franciscans everywhere come forward with claims that their friends and loved ones have become emotionally-unrecognizable versions of their former selves. It goes on to boast some spectacularly creepy scenes, not to mention the shock ending to end all shock endings. Of all doomsday scenarios, this is the one that comes with the most psychological heft. Sure, comets and tidal waves are scary to think about, but what if everyone you knew suddenly started acting like the dead-eyed, emotionally vacant cast of “The Hills”? Creepy.
Somewhat shockingly, director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo managed to craft a more-than-worthy follow-up to Danny Boyle’s nail-biting original, when all we could have reasonably hoped for was a mildly diverting but watered-down-by-the-studio, bigger-budget sequel. Not only does this entry boast more action than the first film, it also doesn’t lose sight of what made 28 Days Later so compelling in the first place – genuinely satisfying character relationships. Sure, it utilizes the tired cliché of bringing in the military and blowing more shit up that has been the bane of so many sequels, but Fresnadillo catches you up so fully in his vision that it hardly matters. While it doesn’t quite reach the full-blooded, humanistic heights of 28 Days, it comes pretty damn close.
Robert Rodriguez got the low-budget feel of `70s grindhouse cinema just right with this splatter-movie throwback, which pits a machine-gun-legged go-go-dancer (a perfectly cast Rose McGowan) and an assorted cast of other assorted badasses against a horde of zombies transformed by the release of a deadly biochemical agent. Rodriguez employs liberal doses of tongue-in-cheek humor very effectively, but it functions less as spoof than homage to the ultra-low budget exploitation films of yore. More than anything, it’s a seriously entertaining ride that boasts a dead-on, hilarious post-apocalyptic denouement. Tip: watch it in tandem with Death Proof, Tarantino’s equally compelling film that followed Rodriguez’s in the original theatrical release.
I really do prefer Dawn of the Dead to Night, if only for its more ample gore content, but this first entry in the series is nearly as good. It feels a little dated now, and some of the acting is downright awful, but the grainy, low-budget feel without a doubt makes this the downright creepiest of all the Living Dead films. The sparseness of the setting also adds to the sense of unease that Romero so expertly captures here, and succeeds in creating the sort of lo-fi atmosphere-building that has largely been lost in modern-day, handheld-centric filmmaking. Budding directors, listen up: enough with this “shaky-cam” bullshit. Let’s get back to making real movies, the kind that won’t send people running to the bathroom to puke their guts out from motion sickness.
Another movie made in the last ten years? Blasphemy! Listen, I love the old standbys as much as the next guy, but there are a few new kids in town that deserve a little recognition. The Mist is one of those. A flop upon its release in 2007, Frank Darabont’s almost uniformly-excellent apocalyptic nightmare deserved a bigger audience. The creatures expelled from the titular mist are frighteningly vivid, Lovecraft-ian creatures (love those skull-headed wasps), and the end-of-the-world scenario (not to mention the ending) is one of the grimmest you’re likely to encounter. Trust me, you’ll be thinking about it for days afterward.
I’m sure many horror fans would take me to task for placing George Romero’s piece de resistance beneath 28 Days Later and Shaun, but too bad – you want it in the top slot, write your own damn list. Listen, Dawn of the Dead is still awesome more than 30 years later, a distinction that Boyle and Wright’s films can’t claim. In addition, its satirical jabs still resonate, possibly even more strongly than they did in 1978. It’s zombie movie as mass-consumerism metaphor, but even more importantly it’s a horror lover’s dream – wildly entertaining, scary, and gory as hell. I don’t know about you, but if the zombie apocalypse ever does happen, I’m so heading for the mall.
Shaun of the Dead, Edgar Wright’s vigorously entertaining zombie-comedy masterwork, is one of those left-field, doesn’t-get-its-due-until-DVD crowd-pleasers that only comes around once in a blue moon. Kudos to me for being there opening weekend, and laughing my ass off while simultaneously pitying the suckers who’d shelled out their hard-earned cash for that Julianne Moore snooze-fest The Forgotten (which opened the same weekend) in the next theater over. Laugh for laugh and scare for scare, Shaun of the Dead is the best horror-comedy I’ve ever seen, and so it deserves its high ranking here. I also blame it for nearly ruining my enjoyment of Zombieland when I saw it a couple weeks ago -Wright just couldn’t help but set the bar unreasonably high for this sort of thing.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a morbid son of a bitch, but give me 28 Days Later over Slumdog Millionare any day. Where the hell was the Academy – which heaped so much praise on Danny Boyle’s overhyped fatalistic drama – when this post-apocalyptic masterpiece was released? Oh yeah, they were too busy turning up their noses at genre films (as usual). Listen, this is at the top of my list for a reason. Not only is it an ingeniously calibrated exercise in fear, it’s also a bleakly beautiful and startlingly immediate vision of a world gone mad. Not to mention, it’s authentically touching and thought-provoking, and loads more subtle than Slumdog, which peddled Oprah-certified, superficial nonsense to an inexplicably adoring public. – Chris Eggertsen
I’m relatively new to the Bloody Disgusting family, but I feel the need to admit something that you might find disturbing, distasteful, and downright disappointing. Basically, and with the utmost respect for your feelings, I’m of the opinion that Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is the best entry in the entire franchise.
To be clear, I like Sam Raimi’s original trilogy well enough, especially 1987’s Evil Dead II, but the zaniness can’t help but neuter the horror for me. They’re fun movies! I’m entertained by them, but I’m just drawn to Alvarez’s meaner, gorier, and more tonally unrelenting take on the same material.
A new Evil Dead film is now in theaters, and just as 2023’s Evil Dead Rise followed this same brutal vibe, Evil Dead Burn is continuing that wet slide into utter carnage.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Evil Dead (2013)
Commentators: Fede Alvarez (director/co-writer), Rodo Sayagues (co-writer), Jane Levy (actor), Lou Taylor Pucci (actor), Jessica Lucas (actor)
1. The family watching in the basement at 3:11 includes producer Rob Tapert’s son and a local actor from New Zealand, the one with the disfigured face, who has survived two separate plane crashes.
2. The decision to flip the opening shot (post title) upside down came in editing as Alvarez recalled being unsettled by a shot from Raimi’s original Evil Dead. “Something that really impressed me about the original was all the camera work, and there’s a moment… where Bruce [Campbell] runs from one side of the room to the other, and the camera looks back and upside down.”
3. It was composer Roque Banos who came up with adding the siren sounds. His inspiration came after living in Los Angeles for a short time and hearing many, many sirens.
4. It was Pucci’s idea for his character, Eric, to have a beard and long hair – partly as a visual nod to the film’s 1970s vibe, and partly because “you never have to do anything” with it.
5. “In any good story you have one of the main characters taking a bad step in the beginning,” says Alvarez as David (Shiloh Fernandez) fails to simply turn around and apologize to his sister Mia (Levy). “He makes another mistake,” adds Levy when he ignores her pleas for help after she’s been assaulted by the tree, but Alvarez says that choice is far more understandable.
6. Pucci is asked if it was his choice to be playing with the deck of cards on the porch swing, but he says it was Alvarez’s suggestion. The director adds that he had just tried impressing Pucci with a card trick – turns out they’re both amateur magicians – and Pucci carried it into the scene. It’s also a nod to the original film.
7. The clock at 14:56 is the actual one from the original film.
8. Most of them agree that the blood would send them packing in real life well before the book would. They’d be curious about the latter.
9. “It smells like burnt hair” was improvised by Pucci.
10. The script called for dead crows in the basement, but Tapert suggested they try something different, so they went with cats. A dead one had been found “in an alley” somewhere, and they took a mold of it to craft additional prosthetic cat corpses.
11. All of the closeups of people touching the book feature Alvarez’s hands.
12. Mia’s front yard vomit consisted of cold soup.
13. Early scenes of a wet and angry Mia were preceded by her doing sprints or jumping jacks offscreen to make her seem more exasperated. She was so amped up while driving the car that Alvarez, who was hidden in the backseat, was scared “while Jane is going crazy.”
14. Levy recalls Alvarez suggesting a similar scene from Wild at Heart as a reference point for her own performance after crashing the car into the pond.
15. They shot the film mostly chronologically, and that left producers a little concerned as they were seeing a lot of character drama. “They didn’t know what we were doing, and they were really anxious to get to the horror.” Those concerns were put to rest when they saw the dailies for the assault and bunkbed scene that follows.
16. It was Tapert who suggested they include the tree vine assault, and Alvarez was happy to see it used as more than just a shocker. “Being raped is her being injected with the devil,” says Levy, and he adds that it moves the story forward rather than just disturb.
17. The shower burn was the first bit of graphic mutilation that the writers conceived when they started working on the script.
18. The attempted escape in the Jeep after Mia is burned originally included a shot of David trying to call for help on his cell phone only to be stymied by a lack of service, but Alvarez took it out. He doesn’t think the audience needed it, and he didn’t want it to knock viewers out of the scene’s intensity.
19. The flooded river at 35:16 “is a real river.” It’s the same one the Jeep passes through at the beginning, and they simply waited for a heavy rain and then filmed the result.
20. Alvarez asked the sound department to come up with a unique sound for the Deadites, and the result was the crackling, “bug in a jar” noise.
21. “This was the hardest thing ever,” says Levy at 37:54 as her character projectile vomits blood onto Olivia’s (Lucas) face. They did four takes of the scene with Lucas having to be completely rinsed off and reset each time.
22. That’s not digital trickery at 39:32 as Olivia’s reflection gives an evil grin. “This was a timing thing because the mirror had to go away from me, and as it went away from me I had to actually do that face.” We see mostly the back and slight side of her outside of the reflection at this point, and the result is a cool little shot.
23. The bathroom encounter between Olivia and Eric originally ended with her hitting her head, but Raimi watched the dailies and asked Alvarez to milk the horror and gore a little bit longer.
24. “So everyone actually kills each other,” says Levy, “Mia never kills anybody in this movie.” Alvarez adds, “That’s the whole beauty of the story; Mia is the only innocent person, she’s a victim all the way.”
25. Alvarez recalls that one of Raimi’s “three rules of horror” is that “the innocent must be punished.” Does that contradict the point immediately above? Maybe, but she went through hell, and at the end of the day, are any of us actually innocent?
26. He acknowledges that the film, like many horror movies, is filled with characters making questionable choices, but he defends most of them as being understandable given the context.
27. “It’s my first sex scene,” says Levy at 1:31:11 as her character licks Natalie’s (Elizabeth Blackmore) leg. “This one was her stunt double’s leg.” She adds that “Kiss me, you dirty cunt!” is the favorite thing she’s ever said.
28. Natalie’s attempt to rinse her hand wound was originally written to include a black worm coming out of the gash, “but we didn’t want to be too supernatural.” Mr. Alvarez, my good man, have you seen your own movie?
29. Alvarez sees the theme of the movie as accepting that sometimes the only way out of a problem is through it – and here that means killing your friends before dismembering or burning their bodies. A good lesson for us all, really.
30. Eric’s laughter at Natalie saying “My face hurts” was real as Pucci found the line – one that Alvarez added on the fly – to be very funny given the situation and the fact that both of her arms are gone.
31. “Those woods were really, really creepy,” says Pucci, and Lucas adds that their New Zealand filming location was near a Maori burial ground.
32. Mia, gasping for her life in the hole with the plastic bag over her head, was apparently Levy’s audition scene.
33. They see Mia’s resurrection – the real Mia coming back to life after her brother’s janky defibrillator attempt – as a reward from beyond for David finally apologizing to her like he should have done from the start. I don’t mind saying that this is an odd take given how clear this film (and franchise as a whole) makes it that there’s absolutely no good supernatural entity looking out for these characters. Characters in these movies are absolutely and utterly fucked, and they should probably just accept that. Alvarez ultimately concedes that you can also just believe that the defibrillator actually worked.
34. For those who missed it, the necklace chain on the ground at 1:16:51 is in the shape of a skull as a nod to the scene in the original film where Ash (Campbell) goes for a necklace and sees a skull.
35. The machete comes through the wall at 1:20:10 and slices Mia’s leg, and they used Natalie’s prosthetic arm for the shot – it’s getting cut at the elbow.
36. They went through various versions of the Abomination Mia (Randal Wilson), including one that was made up of all five of the friends.
37. The original ending saw Mia walking on the road, but they cut it. The image still made it into the one-sheet poster.
38. The end credits feature extremely bloody shots filmed at high speed and meant to reference various beats from the film itself in tighter, close-up detail that viewers might have missed.
Quotes Without Context
“You kind of want to put the rape idea in people’s minds.”
“The car, of course.”
“I would definitely open the book.”
“Swimming through the swamp was fun.”
“Duct tape fixes everything.”
“How come David is such a bad boyfriend?”
“This kiss, I was really suffocating her.”
“I’m such a perv.”
“It’s like Beetlejuice.”
“Fede kept telling me this is my Bruce Willis moment to pump me up.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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