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.
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
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