Editorials
Mr. Disgusting Picks the Best Horror Films of 2017!
*Keep up with our ongoing end of the year coverage here*
Other Year’s Lists: 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020
There is no question that 2017 was one of the best years ever for horror. Just a few years ago I was unhappy that The Babadook topped my best of the year list. It perfectly represented where horror was at the time, being that none of the films deserved the honor of “best of the year”. But then something happened – in 2015, there was an overload of independent films that made choosing a top ten immensely difficult. The momentum continued through 2016, setting the stage for what could easily be horror’s ultimate mic drop.
There’s panic across the board about getting people into theaters. The box office is shrinking. Studio tentpoles are failing. Yet, there stood several horror films that annihilated everything in their path. From Split to Get Out, Annabelle: Creation, and then IT, horror film after horror film continued to take the top spot at the box office, taking in hundreds of millions worldwide. Our genre is quite literally unstoppable right now.
They say when the world is in flames and there’s political turmoil, entertainment has the most to gain, especially horror. It’s pure and unadulterated escapism. People aren’t looking for superheroes to save them, they’re looking for the final girl to stab that bad mother fucker in the back. It’s the fantasy of self-induced power and the fight for survival. Horror movies give us the illusion of control when the world is coming for you, and there’s nothing more satisfying than standing up to life and kicking it right in the balls.
Horror does not discriminate. Horror is unity. Horror is for everyone. Horror is 2017.
Honorable Mention: Downrange (D. Ryuhei Kitamura; Eleven Arts)
Ryuhei Kitamura’s Downrange is quite simple, stranding a carpool of teenagers on the side of the road as an enigmatic sniper targets them one-by-one. The film is 100% pure rage, leaving brains splattered across the hot pavement, and murdering innocent children who accidentally end up at the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s about as mean-spirited as horror can get…and it’s glorious. While typically turned off by films this dark and unforgiving, Downrange is an uncomfortable and unapologetic breath of fresh air. It feels necessary. Horror has gone soft.
It’s also loaded with nonstop thrills that will have audiences on the edge of their seats until the shocking conclusion. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen anything with this much grit and guts, with Kitamura digging down deep to deliver a punch that’s going to knock audiences right on their asses.
Other Honorable Mentions:
- mother! (D. Darren Aronofsky)
- Split (D. M. Night Shyamalan)
- Happy Death Day (D. Christopher Landon)
- Wish Upon (D. John R. Leonetti)
- Annabelle: Creation (D. David Sandberg)
10. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (D. Yorgos Lanthimos; A24)
Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster) reunites with Colin Farrell (In Bruges) in this frightening thriller about the sacrifices one man has to make in order to protect his family. While Farrell is always entertaining to watch, Barry Keoghan carries this Shakespearean nightmare on his shoulders. Keoghan plays a young boy who befriends a doctor (Farrell) who may or may not have killed his father in the operating room. He’s plotted his revenge. His performance is seductive, manipulative, and even more so unnerving when you find yourself wondering if a young boy is capable of such horrors. The movie is a high-strung slow burn that terrorizes the audience with agonizing tension that’s never released.
9. Pyewacket (D. Adam MacDonald; IFC Midnight)
One of the biggest surprises of the year was the Adam MacDonald‘s under-the-radar Pyewacket, a frightening coming-of-age slow burn that delivers brooding heavy metal horror. Beautifully shot with impressive performances all around, what’s great about Pyewacket is that it never overplays its hand. MacDonald is never trying too hard to shock the audience and is more determined to make his film believable than anything else. In that regard, he still delivers on his promise and offers up a shocking finale that’s equally crushing as it’s mortifying. Pyewacket is a surprisingly simple movie, but it’s incredibly well made and entertains with the best of them. It’s brooding tension will get under your skin and leave you thinking about it for days after.
8. Tragedy Girls (D. Tyler MacIntyre; Gunpowder & Sky)
Tyler MacIntyre’s Tragedy Girls, powered by Alexandra Shipp and Brianna Hildebrand‘s performances, is fiercely entertaining. Boasted as a “new spin on the slasher genre,” the film delivers on this promise, approaching the killing from a different perspective. While the film is lightning fun, the deaths within it are brutal, Final Destination brutal, directed and edited with precision for maximum impact that surely will have audiences roaring in delight. Tragedy Girls is sweet and salty, the perfect mix of horror and comedy that surely will have you clicking the “heart” button over and over.
7. Brawl in Cell Block 99 (D. S. Craig Zahler; RLJE)
While this isn’t the best genre film of the year, it may very well be my favorite. I couldn’t tell you the last time I obsessed over a movie as much as Brawl in Cell Block 99, which stars a badass Vince Vaughn as a man who must fight his way through several prisons in order to save his wife (Jennifer Carpenter), and the baby inside her. The stakes are off-the-charts high as director S. Craig Zahler threatens the life of an unborn baby, setting the stage for Vaughn to go full Wolverine, brutally annihilating everyone in his path. The best way to describe the film is “Tarantino-lite”, told in a pulp-y, over-the-top manner that results in excessive (unrealistic) gore and ultra-violence. The practical special effects are weird and unnerving, tapping into old-school horror, turning Cell Block 99 into a massive bloodbath. I’m obsessed with this authentic cult midnight movie that’s more fun than anything else you’ll see all year.
6. Raw (D. Julia Ducournau; Focus World)
Garance Marillier delivers a powerhouse of a performance, playing a young vegan girl entering her first year of veterinarian school. There, she reconnects with her older sister, while battling new feelings, emotions, and urges in this coming-of-age horror film that can only be likened to Ginger Snaps.
Julia Ducournau’s film is as riveting as it is tense, chewing on complex issues while also hammering the audience with fucked up sequences (one in particular nearly made me vomit). And as gross as Raw can get, the camerawork and cinematography together are masterful, delivering one of the most gorgeous horror films in years.
Up Next: My Top 5 Horror Films of the Year
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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