Editorials
‘Valentine’ Kicked Off 2000s Horror With a Fun Trip Right Back to the 1980s [You Aughta Know]
Hello, true believers, and welcome to You Aughta Know, a column dedicated to the decade that is now two full decades behind us. That’s right, it’s time to take a look back at one of the most overlooked decades of horror. Follow along as I do my best to explore the horror titles that made up the 2000s.
Thanks to the success of Scream, the slasher was revitalized in the late 1990s, with Valentine coming along in 2001 to capitalize on the trend. Based loosely on a novel by mystery writer Tom Savage, it’s pretty much what became standard fare for the films of this era. A group of friends who are twenty-something are stalked, and eventually killed, by our mystery killer. The cast were all young actors and actresses who were budding stars at the time (Katherine Heigl, Marley Shelton, David Boreanaz, Denise Richards), although numerous other names were attached at some point, including Jennifer Love Hewitt and Tara Reid. It was also originally offered to Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly (HOLY SHIT, what would that movie have been?!), but it eventually fell into the lap of Jamie Blanks.
Blanks is a name that probably isn’t too well known but should be. He’s the man who crafted the cult classic Urban Legend in 1999, which is arguably one of the best slashers to come out of the post-Scream mania. It was also wildly successful at the box office, raking in almost five times its budget, so it makes sense that Warner Bros. would hand off a film in the same vein to someone who had proven himself competent and financially successful. So two years after Urban Legend (and a solid year after Scream 3), Valentine was released twelve days before Valentine’s Day and caught the tail end of the teen scream revitalization.
We start at a sixth grade Valentine’s dance in 1988, where Jeremy Melton is the stereotypical nerd, and is asking girl after girl if they’d like a dance. These all end up being the women that we will follow for the rest of the film. Jeremy finally asks the other social outcast, Dorothy, if she would like to dance and they are soon found making out under the school bleachers. Embarrassed to be caught with the boy her classmates have all dubbed “pervert,” she claims he attacked her and he is beaten up, stripped, and left bloody.
Flash forward thirteen years later where all of these same women are still friends but they begin to be targeted by a Cupid-mask wearing, Valentine’s Day themed murderer.
Blanks actually makes a bold move with Valentine. While the films of the genre at the time were all copying Scream, Valentine instead presented itself with the same modern day sheen but was decidedly eighties in its execution. It was an exercise Blanks explored in Urban Legend, with a themed killer in a “costume” of sorts, but he fully commits to it in Valentine. Not only do we get a Cupid mask-wearing stalker who is sending delightfully macabre Valentine’s, but our cast of characters aren’t quite as referential as the characters we had been meeting in the late nineties and early aughts. The twist ending is also a direct shoutout to the slashers of twenty years prior, swerving into a classic curveball ending that could potentially lead directly into a sequel if need be.
The kills feel blunt and brutal with wickedly smart Valentine’s Day lead ups. A knife to the throat, three arrows in the chest, an electric drill jamming through the top of an enclosed jacuzzi. Sure, this is 2001, but Blanks is giving us kills straight out of Friday the 13th classics. The tone of the film feels poignantly directed to be a throwback as well. The characters, although dying off and being stalked, spend much of the movie joking about men and partying. Even Boreanaz, our main lead and possible suspect, spends the film far less brooding than his Angel counterpart, and makes loads of goofy jokes with silly physicality. The score by Don Davis even reaches back in time to give that discordant jovial soundtrack that was so often found in the hack and slash of yesteryear.
It’s fun because Blanks leans so easily into these tropes but also casually flips others on their heads. Where we are used to seeing a bunch of sex-crazed males spend every minute either begging women to take their tops off or getting flayed, this female-dominated cast spends most of the movie rejecting men for their oafish advances. The women actually mock men for their ridiculous behavior, spurn guys who are chauvinistic assholes, and are in complete control of their sexuality. It’s refreshing and in 2001, it was way AHEAD of its time cinematically.
At release, the film was slammed, to the point where Blanks apologized for it and said they “did the best they could.” Mister Blanks, I’m here to tell you that you have nothing to apologize for. It seems Valentine perhaps suffered from a generation riding the high of the post-Scream meta slashers that wasn’t ready for such a tongue-in-cheek wink at the foundation of the slasher genre. Two decades later, Valentine has received a small, welcome and deserved resurgence as a fun and charming hack and slash in a decade that was overall lacking in the subgenre.
It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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