Editorials
How 2016 Horror Brought Two Terrifying Internet Images to Life
It was the summer of scares. And it was awesome.
This year, despite any reports to the contrary, was a great one for the horror genre, and that’s true of both the indie output and the studio output. Oddly enough, horror reigned supreme at the summer box office in 2016, and two of the films that were both critical and financial successes in those warm months were sequel The Conjuring 2 and shark attack flick The Shallows.
Both films, though they deal with entirely different subject matter, share the common bond of bringing truly nightmarish images to the big screen this year, whether we’re talking about the demonic nun in The Conjuring 2 or that Jaws-like killer shark in The Shallows. And two of those images, well, they were plucked right out of the Internet’s “nightmare fuel” folder.
In The Conjuring 2, James Wan made good on a promise teased at the end of the first film by kicking off the hit sequel in Amityville, New York. Like in real life, Ed and Lorraine Warren arrive at the infamous Ocean Avenue home to help out the Lutz family, and it’s in the home that Lorraine comes face-to-face with one of the murdered DeFeo children.
The boy, who has glowing white eyes, stares at Lorraine from behind a wall, and if that terrifying image seemed familiar with you, it’s probably because you have indeed seen it before. A ghost photo taken inside the real Amityville house has become the stuff of legend here on the Internet over the years, and Wan brilliantly brought that very image to life in The Conjuring 2…
The real photo, seen at the top of this post, has never been disproven as a hoax, and while many believe that it’s the spirit of young John DeFeo that was captured by the camera, others are convinced it’s merely one of the investigators who was on the scene at the time. Why then are his eyes completely white? A camera glitch, perhaps? We may never know.
Either way, the creepy photo inspired James Wan, and made for one hell of a spooky scene.
And then there’s The Shallows, which similarly drew inspiration from a photo that has surely been shared to Reddit’s “Creepy” sub-site. It’s hard to tell whether it’s real or not, as many Photoshop experts over the years have conjured up nightmarish shark images, but this particular photo shows a surfer riding a wave… and there’s a big ass shark literally inside that wave…
The most striking image from Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows is almost exactly that image…
Pure nightmare fuel is the only way to describe the scene, which sees Blake Lively’s character get attacked for the first time by the shark she battles throughout the film. Like the surfer in the photo above the screen-grab, we see the shark but the ill-fated character does not, and the sight of it quickly approaching her from within the water is truly breathtaking in the scariest of ways.
Fiction? Reality? Horror is often at its most effective when it’s blending the two.
From child-eating witches to village-burning dragons, fairy tales have always had a foot in the horror genre. That’s why it makes sense that, for every The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, there are also darker and more adult-oriented stories about magical worlds inhabited by ravenous monsters and cruel villains.
Funnily enough, these sinister tales were precisely the ones that I gravitated towards back when I was a kid, and I was reminded of this while watching Netflix’s recently released I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first ever feature-length stop-motion animation and one hell of an entertaining parable about the intersection between fiction and reality.
In honor of this special kind of horror-adjacent fairy tale, today I’d like to share this list recommending six Dark Fantasy films that horror fans might enjoy.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be defining Dark Fantasy as fantastical stories that don’t shy away from the more macabre elements that fuel classic fairy tales. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own grim favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
I’m fascinated by bizarre attempts at blockbuster filmmaking – especially when the resulting movies are somehow still fun despite their corporate-mandated origins. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is precisely one of these strangely compelling studio projects, as this surprisingly successful action-thriller boasts a lot of heart (and tongue-in-cheek humor) for a CGI-heavy creature feature.
Directed by Dead Snow’s Tommy Wirkola, Witch Hunters re-frames the classic fairy tale as an origin story for a duo of badass monster-slayers. Of course, it’s the flick’s anachronistic aesthetic and overall visual flair that make it stand out from other action-horror endeavors from around the same time.
5. The Wolf House (2018)
Made in the tradition of faux cursed films in the same vein as Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, the eerie backstory to 2018’s Chilean animated flick The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo in the original Spanish) already makes it a nightmarish experience before the flick even really begins.
After all, the movie is presented to us as a faux propaganda film produced by the leader of a death cult (heavily inspired by the real life Colonia Dignidad), with this hybrid animated feature using complex movie magic to simulate a single uninterrupted shot as it tells the story of a lazy young girl who runs away from an isolated colony and encounters a creepy old house in the woods.
4. The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Out of all the Monty Python alumni, Terry Gilliam has had the most interesting career outside of the original comedy group. From fascinating canceled projects (such as his scrapped adaptation of Watchmen) to dystopian parodies that feel more relevant by the minute (1985’s Brazil), even his “lesser” films are still intriguing in their own way.
2005’s The Brothers Grimm is one such project, with this peculiar movie attempting to combine the comedian-turned-filmmaker’s unique visual style with a more blockbuster-oriented plot reimagining the titular brothers as con-artists rather than mere writers. The end result isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it’s still a legitimately fun ride with plenty of memorable monsters and wonderful performances by both the late, great Heath Ledger and Matt Damon.
3. Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
2010’s Dante’s Inferno game may have a reputation as something of an unapologetic God of War clone, but I’d argue that the now-obscure game was aesthetically unique enough to deserve a bigger fanbase. However, while the title remains trapped on the seventh console generation, its highly underrated anime adaptation is a lot easier to get a hold of!
Animated by 6 different studios in order to make the 9 circles of hell feel unique from each other, this may not be a completely faithful adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s poem, but it’s still one heck of a great (not to mention gory) time that I’d highly recommend to fans of Netflix’s take on Castlevania.
2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
My personal favorite entry in the Underworld franchise, Rise of the Lycans, is a highly ambitious prequel that actually works better if you haven’t had the story spoiled to you by the previous Underworld films.
While the rest of the series features plenty of urban fantasy elements as the movies combine machine guns and modern environments with gothic storytelling, Patrick Tatopoulos’ prequel fully embraces its fantastical origins and tells a classic tale about a doomed romance between a werewolf and a vampire amid a medieval uprising.
And the best part is that we get a lot more Michael Sheen as the fan-favorite Lucian.
1. Solomon Kane (2011)
One of my personal favorite movies on this list, MJ Basset’s criminally underseen adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s other iconic warrior is thoroughly steeped in horror ambience and features plenty of memorable monsters. However, it’s also a classic origin story for a swashbuckling hero that wouldn’t feel out of place in a tabletop RPG.
While I’ve already written about how the film deftly combines both horror and fantasy elements without breaking the bank, I’ll never pass up an opportunity to recommend the bizarre movie where James Purefoy expertly plays a puritan John Wick.
It’s just too bad that we never got the other films in this intended trilogy.
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