Editorials
Horror Pub Crawl: The Best Horror Movie Bar Scenes to Revisit for St. Patrick’s Day
For St. Patrick’s Day, the Leprechaun franchise tends to be the easy choice for holiday horror viewing. The holiday began as a feast day to honor Saint Patrick on the anniversary of his death and has evolved to become a celebration of Irish culture involving parades, food, the color green, and a whole lot of drinking.
It’s with the latter in mind that we curate a whole new viewing selection for St. Patrick’s Day. There’s no need to leave your couch for this pub crawl through some of horror’s best pub and bar scenes. Seventeen memorable genre stops for the 17th of March, to visit at your leisure!
Demon Knight
The Collector, like many cinematic demons, is perceptive at discovering the vulnerability in humans. For Uncle Willy, The Collector targets his addiction to alcohol, presenting him with a fantasy bar explicitly tailored to his tastes featuring a lot of nude women and liquor. The Collector plays the role of a plucky bartender to perfection, and Uncle Willy becomes a converted lesser demon to wreak havoc on his fellow survivors.
V/H/S: “Amateur Night”
“I like you.” These three small words marked one unforgettable anthology segment that inspired a spinoff feature film. For three pals that embark on a bar-hopping spree in the hopes of luring women back to their hotel room to secretly film amateur porn via hidden camera, well, karma is monstrous. Clint encounters the timid and awkward Lily at a bar, and she only ever utters those three little words. Clint and his friends won’t find out the reason why until it’s far too late.
The Bar
In Alex de la Iglesia’s dark horror comedy, an unseen sniper traps a group of strangers in a downtown Madrid bar. It becomes clear that they’re being quarantined due to a diseased patron, prompting paranoia to surge through the group. When they find a drainpipe in the basement that leads to the sewers, well, things get pretty gross. This movie has a nasty mean streak and takes a very non-traditional approach to the bar setting.
Jennifer’s Body
For poor BFFs Jennifer and Needy, a trip to their local dive bar to see their fave band Low Shoulder perform comes with permanent consequences. Unbeknownst to them, Low Shoulder chose the tiny town of Devil’s Kettle to sacrifice a virgin in trade for fame. They think Jennifer to be that virgin. The bar going up in flames offers up enough chaos and confusion to begin their plan, which goes catastrophically awry.
The Wicker Man
Police Sergeant Howie Neil travels to a remote island in search of a missing girl. He quickly discovers his Christianity doesn’t fit in with the free-spirited residents, and this bar scene is one of the earliest indicators. The moment he walks in, the jovial crowd goes silent, though they burst into song and dance just as quickly. The crassness of their lyrics and dance is in direct opposition to his stuffy demeanor; it’s only the beginning of Howie’s nightmare.
My Bloody Valentine
Thanks to the potential resurgence of Harry Warden, and a string of murders in his wake, Valentine Bluffs’s town mayor Hanniger and police chief Newby decide to cancel the Valentine’s Day dance. The youthful protagonists gather at the local bar to lament the cancellation and plot a party of their own. The bartender, Happy, overhears and delivers a strong warning. The tale of Harry Warden isn’t enough to stop them, though, so he plots a prank meant to shake the group to their core. Naturally, he’s murdered before he can enact his scare, but both Happy and his bar remain memorable nonetheless.
Grabbers
When tentacled and man-eating aliens invade a remote island in this Irish creature feature, it eventually becomes apparent that the aliens have an aversion to alcohol when the town drunk miraculously survives his attack. Enter this critical third act scene, in which our heroes round up the villagers and get them completely drunk at the local pub to keep them safe. Hilarious drunken battles with aliens ensue.
Death Proof
Quentin Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse kicks off with a bar scene that seems lighthearted and straightforward at first glance. A group of women gathering to celebrate a birthday, and lurking in the background is Stuntman Mike holding conversations of his own. But this dialogue-heavy scene holds far more depth than meets the eye; it’s here that we meet our charismatic villain and learn all that we need to know about his modus operandi.
Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film doesn’t get enough attention. The plot involves a serial killer brutally raping and murdering women, and the police suspect the wrong guy. In typical Hitchcock fashion, it’s incredibly suspenseful; the audience is forced to watch in terror as the killer preys upon unsuspecting victims. Truthfully, much of the plot centers around the pub, but it’s this bone-chilling scene that features the protagonist’s girlfriend Babs that packs the biggest punch. An employee of the pub, Babs arrives intending to collect her and her lover’s things, but she’s intercepted there by the killer. What plays out is wrought with tension and heartbreak.
Feast
When the entire film is set within a dive bar, the inclusion of the ultra-fun creature feature Feast might feel like a cheat. While you could take your pick of memorable moments from this gross, gory, and gnarly movie, we’re going with the fantastic opening that presents each character intro with a card that shows their survival odds, then quickly shatters them. It’s a hell of a way to get things started.
The Shining
Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic, accepts a job as the Overlook Hotel caretaker during the off-season in an attempt to get his writing and family life back on track. After being accused of abusing his son Danny, who’d earned nasty bruises after wandering into room 237, Jack winds up in the Gold Room bar. He relays his marital woes to the bartender Lloyd, who offers up a sympathetic ear as well as a glass of Jack Daniels. Never mind the fact that the hotel is technically empty of both staff and booze. It’s the point of no return for Jack and the haunted Torrance family.
An American Werewolf in London
At nightfall, backpackers Jack and David pop into a local pub, the Slaughtered Lamb. The locals are a strange bunch, but things are going okay until Jack asks about the pentagram on the wall. The crowd turns hostile. Jack and David opt to leave, and the locals send them off with a warning, “Keep to the road, stay clear of the moors and beware of the full moon.” Do the Americans listen? No, they veer off the road and onto the moors. A werewolf attacks. Moral of the story? Pub locals might be weird, but it’s best to heed their drunken warnings.
Gremlins
This iconic scene perfectly encapsulates the mischievous spirit of the pint-sized green terrors that take over the small town of Kingston Falls. From taking a spin on the ceiling fan, playing poker, and indulging in every possible lousy vice and behavior, these menacing monsters give poor Kate the worst shift a bartender could ever have. Much to our delight, of course.
Shaun of the Dead
Edgar Wright delivered one of cinema’s most iconic pub scenes of all time with this beloved ZomCom. For Shaun, his best friend Ed, love interest Liz, and their friends and family, they seek refuge in the Winchester bar during a zombie outbreak. The jukebox kicks on, playing Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Cue the synchronized battle for survival.
From Dusk Till Dawn
Granted, the entire second half takes place within the Titty Twister bar. Still, it’s the iconic scene that introduces the seductive Santanico Pandemonium and her subsequent lust for Richie Gecko’s bleeding hand that sparks a vampiric feeding frenzy. Santanico’s arrival marks a pivotal scene that transitions the narrative from action film into full-blown horror.
The Fly
Seth Brundle and Ronnie Quaife’s budding romance dies quickly when his experimentation with teleportation pods leave him permanently altered. When she refuses to enter his teleportation pods, he leaves her and heads to a nearby bar to find a new companion willing to undergo the experiment. He sets his sights on a bar patron to bring home, but not before giving another one gruesomely painful bone fracture in the process. Even more horrific, this is only the early stages of Seth’s transformation into the grotesque Brundlefly. As Ronnie puts it best, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
Near Dark
Caleb Colton thinks he’s wooing a pretty lady, Mae. Instead, she turns him into a vampire. The leader of her vampiric clan gives him a week to prove himself, and this fantastic bar scene marks the beginning of his initiation. Moreover, it demonstrates just how ruthless these vicious vamps tend to be with their prey. Severen sadistically taunts his food while encouraging Colton to explore his heightened strength. Bill Paxton proves to be the ultimate scene-stealer here. “It’s finger-lickin’ good!”
Found footage movies rely on immersion and a particular kind of suspension of disbelief in order to scare viewers, so it stands to reason that playing along with the “kayfabe” of it all is necessary for these movies to be effective. However, despite being something of a purist when it comes to in-universe recordings, I’ve come to accept that traditional productions can benefit from the occasional injection of found footage thrills.
For instance, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation makes genius use of the analog gimmick in order to trap us in the titular rooms alongside our main characters before effortlessly switching back to a more cinematic language. In honor of these dynamic films that manage to combine the best of both worlds, today I’d like to share six other hybrid horror movies that successfully incorporate found footage into their scares!
For the purposes of this list, “hybrid” horror movies are defined as any flick that shifts between diegetic recordings and traditional filming techniques for a significant amount of time (or at least for pivotal scenes).
As usual, don’t forget to comment below with your own hybrid favorites if you think a particularly freaky one was missed.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. The Last Broadcast (1998)
Internet critics may have overstated the influence that Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast had on The Blair Witch Project, but the found footage subgenre still owes a huge debt to this underrated piece of avant-garde filmmaking. However, while the movie sets itself up as a documentary about the disappearance of a group of cryptid-hunters attempting to track down the Jersey Devil, things take a darker and much more grounded turn towards the final act.
I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that the jarring shift in perspective actually helps to sell the idea that everything we’ve seen before the finale was an attempt at using filmmaking to manipulate the public perception of a “real” incident.
Not bad for a movie with a $900 budget!
4. Cam (2018)
When you consider just how much the internet affects our daily lives, it’s strange that we don’t see Screenlife elements pop up in more movies these days. For instance, Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber’s highly underrated Cam only works as a freaky parable about online sex-work because it masterfully balances Madeline Brewer’s intimate moments with highly immersive segments within cyberspace.
While one might argue that the entire film could have been produced as a Screenlife experience, the hybrid approach allows the filmmakers to explore our main character’s life beyond the screens – with the duality of modern human existence actually becoming a recurring theme in the story.
3. Banshee Chapter (2013)
Most of H.P. Lovecraft’s popular stories were told in the epistolary format (where the text is presented as an in-universe compilation of letters or personal notes), so it makes sense that a spiritually faithful adaptation of his work would incorporate elements from the modern-day equivalent to epistolary fiction – found footage!
That’s why Blair Erickson’s Banshee Chapter is such an effective scare-fest, as this hybrid adaptation of From Beyond -retold through a conspiratorial lens as it references MK-Ultra and even secretive numbers stations- immerses viewers in a mind-bending tapestry of Cosmic Horror that blurs the line between fiction and reality.
2. The Deep House (2019)
The underwater setting does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House, with the film being especially uncomfortable if you’re already scared of tight spaces and being deprived of oxygen. However, even the universally unsettling elements of the flick only work because the POV often shifts into claustrophobic footage courtesy of our main characters’ GoPro cameras.
Telling the story of a couple of YouTubers who encounter a haunted house at the bottom of an artificial lake while vacationing in France, The Deep House’s first-person exploration sequences contain some of the film’s scariest moments. In fact, I’d argue that the movie didn’t even need ghosts, as becoming trapped in the titular House already sounds like a fate worse than death.
1. Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
My personal favorite instance of filmmakers successfully managing to combine traditional cinematography with POV filmmaking, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, is proof that the two formats can co-exist if the right story comes along.
After all, what better way to conclude a mockumentary all about reality getting increasingly more cinematic than by ditching the found footage gimmick altogether during the finale? Not only does this shift in presentation work on a conceptual level, but it also elevates Behind The Mask into a proper Slasher, which is probably why we’re so excited for that long-overdue sequel!
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