Editorials
5 Horror Movies to Help You Ring in the New Year!
There’s not a lot of horror movies set around New Year’s Eve; Christmas hogs the spotlight in terms of holiday horror. It’s almost a shame, too, since there’s a lot more freedom in the holiday since it’s not bound by specific iconography like Santa Claus, elves, snowmen, or other Christmas traditions. Even still, there are enough great titles to fill out a fun night in, ringing in the New Year in the best way – watching horror movies. The most obvious selection is 1980’s slasher New Year’s Evil, but I’m assuming you’ve already seen it and skipping it in favor of less obvious and more interesting (i.e. wackier) selections. After all, it’s New Year’s Eve and you’re probably imbibing. To help you ring in the New Year, here are five horror movies worth checking out.
Cronos
Ok. So, it’s not exactly as though the plot hinges on the holiday, but New Year’s Eve does factor into the narrative and a major scene set at a New Year’s ball. Guillermo del Toro’s feature film debut takes a unique approach to the vampire mythos in a way that only del Toro can. Antique dealer Jesús Gris (Frederico Luppi) finds a 450-year-old mechanized scarab hidden within a statue in his shop. It stings him, injecting him with a mysterious substance, and he soon finds himself growing young again. Albeit with a thirst for blood. Gris’ new-found hunger for blood creates a path of destruction, and really rears its ugly head at a New Year’s ball that he attends with his wife, when he finds a man bleeding from an injury and loses control.
Terror Train
It turns out 1980 brought two New Year’s set slashers, and Terror Train is the more entertaining of the two. It’s also the year that Jamie Lee Curtis starred in two slashers involving pranks gone wrong, as Terror Train follows a masked killer targeting six college students responsible for a botched prank as they party away at a costume party on a moving train for New Year’s. The other is Prom Night. Again, it’s the more entertaining of the two. It also helps that the killer wears the costume of his previous victim, making for a fun twist on a typical masked killer, and that the train setting is unique. Plus, Jamie Lee Curtis.
The Signal
Set over New Year’s Eve into New Year’s Day, a mysterious signal that invades radio, TV, and cell phone transmission turns anyone who hears it into rage-fueled killers. What makes The Signal so much fun and special is that it’s one cohesive story with central characters, but it’s told in three parts by three difference directors. This gives it varying tones, from serious to black comedy, and an anthology feel despite not actually being an anthology. A.J. Bowen plays Lewis, the infected husband to lead character Mya (Anessa Ramsey), who spends most of the film chasing her down as she attempts to escape him with her lover Ben (Justin Welborn). The second segment, directed by Jacob Gentry, takes the film into horror comedy as Lewis crashes a nearby New Year’s party being hosted by the infected. It’s a bloody riot. But the film works great as a whole.
The Night of the Virgin
Warning, this film exists to be polarizing. It’s a gross-out horror comedy, emphasis on gross, that follows awkward, lonely Nico (Javier Bódalo) who attends a New Year’s Eve party with the sole goal of losing his virginity. There he becomes attracted to Medea (Miriam Martín), and he follows her home in the hopes of getting laid but is regaled with stories of a Nepalese goddess Naoshi instead. Medea’s boyfriend arrives, and Nico is trapped in her apartment with the realization that perhaps Naoshi isn’t just a myth. It’s grimy, weird, gross, and gory, and will likely test your boundaries of taste. So perhaps this one is best viewed with friends while buzzed, just maybe don’t eat beforehand. It is New Year’s, after all.
End of Days
Maybe you just want to party like it’s 1999. What better way to do that than with Arnold Schwarzenegger? Schwarzenegger stars as Jericho Cane, a former cop turned alcoholic elite security officer with a crisis of faith forced to save the world when Satan comes to New York to claim his bride and have her bear his Antichrist child on New Year’s Eve. And ring in the end of the world, of course. Action horror meets apocalypse meets church conspiracy equals more fun than this movie has gotten credit for. Gabriel Byrne co-stars as Satan, and Robin Tunney as his unwitting chosen bride Christine, but who doesn’t want to see a grizzled Schwarzenegger battle cultists and monstrous iterations of Satan? It doesn’t get much more holiday appropriate than this one.
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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