Editorials
Horror’s 10 Most Disturbing Moments of 2018!
*Keep up with our ongoing end of the year coverage here*
Horror films seek to evoke fear in a variety of ways; some opt for creeping dread, some for unbearable mounting tension, and others employ jump scares. And some decide to elicit a primal sense of revulsion, leaving viewers recoiling in their seats from disturbing imagery on screen. While horror tends to be subjective, not even the most hardened of horror fans are usually immune to this tactic. 2018 had no shortage of disturbing moments in horror, rendering audiences uncomfortable by getting up close and personal with taboo-breaking moments that left you feeling shook. From unrelenting torture and extreme horror to humanity at their most depraved, we look back at the year’s 10 most disturbing moments in horror. In case it’s not obvious, there will be spoilers.
Annihilation – Screaming Bear
Everything caught inside the weird alien bubble known as the Shimmer saw its DNA scrambled and rearranged, offering otherworldly combos of floral and fauna in Alex Garland’s Annihilation. Often it was beautiful, as is the case of the human topiaries, but sometimes it was downright terrifying. Such was the case for the scene-stealing bear, nightmarish in its appearance but even more so in sound. The bear first claimed group Cassie (Tuva Novotny), and later came back for a second helping during a tense standoff between the remaining members. Emulating Cassie’s dying screams as bait was off-putting enough, but the slow reveal of its mutated face was pure nightmare fuel. The human skull within skull made even creepier by the humanlike noises the bear made as it stalked its kill. Disturbing.
Suspiria – Olga’s Twisted Dance
For the witches at the dance academy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake, dancing is their primary form of spell casting. It’s something that becomes abundantly clear early on, during an intense sequence that leaves dance student Olga literally bent out of shape. When star pupil Patricia Hingle (Chloe Grace Moretz) goes missing, no one suspects anything is amiss except for her best friend Olga (Elena Fokina). Olga’s defiance against lead choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) finds her trapped in a mirrored room alone. Enter Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), who’s dancing progressively gets more aggressive. The problem for poor Olga, though, is that Susie’s dancing causes Olga’s body to contort in ways it never should. Her mangled body is horrific, but not as horrific as the gleeful witches that drag it away with hooks.
Incident in a Ghostland – Home Invasion Nightmare
Ten years after shocking audiences with Martyrs, writer/director Pascal Laugier puts his morbid spin on home invasion horror. Though most of the runtime is a display of Laugnier’s brand of unrelenting, brutal terror, the most disturbing moment comes early on, when mom and teen daughters Beth and Vera are getting acquainted with the very creepy house they’ve just inherited. It’s interrupted by the arrival of Candy Truck Woman and Fat Man, two vicious criminals that have been on a streak of invading homes to slaughter the parents and torture the kids. Watching Candy Truck Woman and Fat Man in action is downright harrowing, as mom tries in earnest to spare her teen daughters from a grisly fate while succumbing to injuries. Leave it to Laugnier to up the violence in an already violent sub-genre, interweaving ruthless twists along the way. There’s no shortage of pain here.
Hereditary – Floating Decapitation
Ari Aster’s debut has not one, but two shocking decapitations. Both are surprising and visceral, but at least the first one is brief; it’s more focused on the emotional fallout and devastation. It’s the second one in the film’s climax that wins for being more disturbing. Though Annie Graham (Toni Collette) spends most of the movie inadvertently trying to escape her fate, she eventually falls in line with the cult’s plans and her body becomes possessed. Soon after, her son Peter (Alex Wolff) comes home to a dark house, and eventually finds his mother levitating in the attic. Both he and the audience watch in horror as Annie slowly saws her own head off with a piano wire. The sounds it makes is cringe-worthy.
Revenge – Glass Shard in Foot
Writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s debut painted the dessert red with copious amounts of blood. Fargeat put a stylized emphasis on the revenge part of the rape/revenge format by having Jen (Matilda Lutz) survive insurmountable injuries to hunt down her trio of oppressors with intense ferocity. The most squirm-inducing moment of all, though, comes late in the film, during a cat and mouse chase between Jen and Stan on an isolated road. After injuries sustained on both sides, Jen successfully tricks Stan into stepping on a shard of glass, which promptly embeds itself deep in the arch of his foot. He spends what feels like an eternity trying to fish it out of the gaping wound, eliciting viewer sympathy pain in the process. The profuse bleeding doesn’t stop when he does retrieve it; he tries to use this foot to drive his SUV out of the danger zone with painful results.
Apostle – The Heathen’s Stand
Writer/director Gareth Evans spent a lot of time researching medieval torture devices during the creation of Apostle, and it paid off with the traumatic scene in which undeserving Jeremy (Bill Milner) is subjected to a terrible death by way of the Heathen’s Stand. The film’s true villain emerged at this major turning point, framing Jeremy for a crime he didn’t commit and having him strapped down to the wooden stand. His feet, hands, and head are bound by vices, and a hand crank slowly tightens the head vices while a drill winds down into the top of his skull. It’s a measured, excruciating death that Evans’ not only makes us bear witness to, but he puts us in Jeremy’s shoes with a POV shot the moment the blood spools within his skull and clouds the lens.
Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich – The Ruthless Money Lender
Craig Zahler wasn’t interested in subtle when penning the script of this reboot; he seeks to offend with his brand of horror and humor. The entire film is filled with off-color jokes and revelry in excessive gore. None of it holds a candle to the introduction of puppet Money Lender, a controversial puppet in appearance alone. Money Lender takes his offensive nature to new lows with the film’s most vicious kill – he attacks a pregnant woman in her hotel bed through her birth canal and emerges from her shredded open stomach with her baby in tow, dragging its corpse away by umbilical cord. There are breaking taboos, and then there’s S. Craig Zahler giving the middle finger to taboo while blowing it to smithereens.
The House that Jack Built – Incident 3
Lars von Trier’s psychological horror film follows serial killer Jack over the course of 12 years, depicting the murders that shaped him. Divided up into Jack’s 5 most formative kills, the entire film is full of heinous murders and ruthless imagery. But the third segment, incident 3, proves the most scandalous. Jack has lured a single mother and her two young boys to a hunting ground, in the guise of demonstrating how doting of a father figure he can be. Except, he quickly drops the façade and makes it clear it’s this family that he’s hunting. Von Trier holds nothing back, either, as Jack uses his hunting rifle to decimate the family in bloody fashion, starting with the youngest first. Jack likes to play with his prey, and the unexpected deaths are then made even more uncomfortable by what he does next.
Climax – Sibling Jealousy
Truthfully, there’s a vast number of moments in Gaspar Noe’s latest competing for a spot on this list. Revolving around a night of partying for a dance troupe that devolves into hellish madness thanks to LSD spiked punch, Noe follows the ensemble through a series of long tracking shots as the night gets more and more depraved. Noe successfully pushes the envelope again and again as the dancers turn on each other, and your jaw will remain on the floor for most of the run-time. But arguably the most disturbing moment of the entire film is that of Taylor (Taylor Kastle) raping Gazelle (Giselle Palmer). Rape is disturbing by any measure, but in Climax it’s incestuous. That’s right; Taylor is the far too protective for comfort brother of Gazelle. It turns out his jealousy over her love life stems from forbidden attraction, much to her (and our) disgust.
Trauma – All of it
Meet this year’s A Serbian Film. Written and directed by Lucio A. Rojas, Trauma is an indictment on the political horrors of Chile’s recent past, specifically the military dictatorship of Pinochet. In other words, it’s a malicious onslaught of extreme horror not for the weak hearted. It’s graphic, it’s sickening, and effectively repugnant. It opens with a boy being forced to have sex with his mother for being a communist. That’s just the opening. Rape, incest, necrophilia, torture, pain, and lots of gore, Rojas unleashes a deep well of pent-up rage on screen. It’s savage and gut-churning.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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