Top 5 Horror Movies of the 21st Century | Archive

22:53Adam Kempenaar:Book by April 9th and take up to$400 off international and Hawaii vacations. or up to$125 off domestic getaways. Plus, kids stay free at select resorts when you travel through December 15th. From Cancun to Jamaica to Punta Cana and beyond. Reconnect in paradise. Plan your getaway at applevacations.com or contact your trusted travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. And now, the No Panic Party Save. Brought to you by Grand Appliance. Your party is safe. Wow, Amy, great party. And the food? Incredible. Thanks. And did I tell you my stove died two days ago? What? Did you panic? Nope.

23:29Adam Kempenaar:I called Grand Appliance and got a great deal with next day install on the Frigidaire gallery I wanted. Next day? Wow. GrandAppliance.com, right? That's it. My family's shopped there for decades. Shop Grand Appliance. Appliance experts since 1930. Let's give a little bit of attention to a guest expert here, Michael. I did solicit a voicemail from one of our local Chicago critics who sees a lot of horror movies and who has seen a lot of horror movies. I asked Steve Procopi, a.k.a. Capone from Ain't It Cool News, for his pick for the best horror film of the 21st century so far. And this is what he came back with.

24:06After much thought and viewing over the years, I've got to say, I've narrowed it down to director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett's film, You're Next, which came out a couple years ago after sort of being on the shelf, inexcusably on the shelf for a couple years. I was really in love with this film because these two guys, these two filmmakers are so aware of genre tropes from just being fans of it that they know exactly when to avoid them and when to embrace them. The hardest thing to get right in horror films is not the scares, it's the surprises. It's giving us something we haven't seen before and are not expecting.

24:50And Your Next is a tightly wound and sometimes very nasty piece of work with a lot of character development, which is something else we don't get a lot in horror films. So we actually care whether someone dies or whether they're in jeopardy. As I said, without compromising the horror elements, the movie does justice to its home invasion story, but still keeps it fresh and unpredictable and, of course, terrifying. that is my pick. You're next for the best horror film of the 2000 so far.

25:20Adam Kempenaar:Thank you, Steve, for that great pick. A film spotting confession. Had never even heard of you're next until I started preparing for this list, but Steve makes a very compelling case. I like what he had to say, Michael, in terms of filmmakers understanding those genre tropes and knowing when to avoid and embrace them. I think that's a dance a lot of horror filmmakers do have to figure out. And what he said, too, about the surprises being just as important, if not more important than the scares. I think that applies to my number three pick, Everything Steve Said. It is the 2009 Ty West film, The House of the Devil.

25:49Adam Kempenaar:Michael, you joked off air that I was going to find some way to sneak a movie from 1973, The Exorcist, onto this list. I did not come up with a way to break that rule, but I got to have Satan represented somehow. He's the big guy. He is, right? And this film includes a ritual scene where a super gross, super scary creature cuts her arm, pours the blood into a goat skull, then draws occult symbols onto another character using that blood. This is from, what, the Going Clear, the Scientology thing? No? Well played. Well played. She also forces the character to swallow a couple gallons of it. All that does freak me out, but I think what really freaks me out is how Taiwes draws out the dread and sustains the dread.

26:31Adam Kempenaar:Those scenes actually end up kind of being a relief because it's been so dreadful. You're waiting for that payoff to finally happen, and I do think that Wes delivers. Speaking of my last pick, the others and the capacity for rationalization, you know from the moment this main character, Samantha, hears the job to babysit for Tom Noonan, originally his kids, then he changes the plan on her and makes it, well, actually his wife's mother. You know that she should get out of there. Listen, this is not anything like you're imagining. There's nothing medical that you have to do whatsoever. In fact, you don't have to do much of anything.

27:10I find this all a bit awkward, but you have to understand I have only the best intentions. I've been putting advertisements out for the past two weeks to get someone for tonight, but nobody responds to elderly assistance or home care anymore. So I thought maybe babysitter would get better response.

27:26Adam Kempenaar:And I think that's the real fear here. And what scares me the most as I watch the house of the devil, it's not knowing when you should truly be afraid. This character is always saying to herself, get it together, settle down, everything's going to be okay. Even though all these things keep happening that show her that something is definitely off and she should be worried, she keeps calming herself down saying, no, it's going to be fine, and then it's not fine. And I think we've all been in situations like that where we wonder, okay, is this going to go somewhere I don't want this to go? I mean, every taping of film starting I've had has had an element of that, you know?

28:00Adam Kempenaar:Well, hopefully it's not quite as bad as, you know, ending with goat skulls and blood, Michael. But hey, the night's young. The night is young. Is it midnight yet? I don't know. It's not. No, it's a really good film. I like it a great deal, too. And I think, you know, we always expound. I think both of us tend to really seek out and we respond to horror films that don't necessarily rely on a lot of blood and gore. This is different because this has got a lot of it. It does. It's really shrewdly judged because I think what I remember is the first act of violence comes very suddenly and it's placed just perfectly in what is a very simple story.

28:40That's it, yeah. Yeah, it's, and yeah, this is a film that definitely knows all its precedents, acknowledges them, Halloween, Rosemary's Baby, you name it.

28:50Adam Kempenaar:It's there and it's at the very beginning too. I knew I was going to have fun with this movie when I saw that old school 70s font for the title, the freeze frame on the title. that music, everything about it where the freeze frames happen in time with the music. There was something about the fun Ty West was having that cued me in right away, that this was going to be fun but also a little bit scary. And we talked about It Follows and whether or not these horror movies, you can read into them larger sort of metaphors. If you want to go there with this film, for me, it's really all about what happens when you compromise yourself, like compromise your integrity or you do something that you know you really shouldn't be doing.

29:23Adam Kempenaar:It's not just that it could go off the rails here, But she does this whole thing that she doesn't really want to do for money. She just needs to pay the bills. And she says, OK, I'm going to do this thing that I know I shouldn't be all because I'm desperate. And that sense of anybody in any walk of life, when you do something for that reason, can something horrible go wrong to you? And, well, you hope that it doesn't go wrong the way this goes wrong. But it's a heightened scenario in a horror film. You know what, for me, the most frightening thing that I remember from this film is? And it's only been, what, like five years, I think, five, six years since it came out.

29:55But there's a great use of the answering machines of the 1980s where the voice is, you know, instructing. It sounds very kind of alien and robotic, like, you know, please leave a message. It just makes me think of like, is this some sort of, is this like the twisted stepfather of Siri? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like the early version of Siri. It's like Siri's horrible uncle. I love it. You know, that's the film I want to see. Well, we can make it.

30:21Adam Kempenaar:All right. Someday. that brings us to our number two picks for the best horror films of the past 15 years michael what do you have all right this is another uh genre bender for sure and people will just you know who to write out of there because it's not a horror film really but lars von trier's antichrist to me qualifies in many ways i think i i love it uh in its sick way especially for the first hour and really, I hate to say only, but when the first hour of Antichrist, I think is, is truly a masterwork. And it's, it's just a, a unique coal black comedy of a marriage that just isn't going to work out.

31:04And that, that's how I look at it. I, you know, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple that whose young son dies in this miserable accident. Um, And this is in the prologue. And as part of their grief therapy, they do a couple of really, really, really unfortunate things. They retreat to their cabin in the woods so that the wife can finish her thesis on witchcraft and violence against women throughout the ages. And the other dubious idea is that Defoe, who's a psychotherapist, decides to kind of really press his point and say, look, I'm going to be the one to cure you. And he's got this just enough of a trace of smugness and patronizing sort of authoritarian nonsense in this guy's whole makeup that you just know on some level he's asking for trouble.

31:55He's going to deserve what happens to him. And my God, when von Trier starts delivering what happens, it's second half is a whole different story. Some of the images are just so outlandishly explicit and painful to watch. Yes. That it throws you out of the film and throws you out of the theater. I remember people leaving the theater in Cannes. But I guess I just find the first hour so crafty and gripping and really psychologically astute. And even if the film eventually goes the way of you can't trust the women, which is too bad. And it reduces the thing to a different kind of stupid or horror movie for sure.

32:40And yet, Adam, I got to say this one, I will just defend that first hour of Antichrist until the day I quit talking about movies. That's another one I need to revisit. I don't know if I'm ready for the pain of Antichrist. Such an easy revisit, isn't it?

32:56Adam Kempenaar:I think when we talked about that movie on the show, we joked about needing a T-shirt that says, I survived Antichrist. I mean, it's a haul to get through it. I keep waiting for the right holiday to kind of like have the occasion to see it again. And there is no holiday. No. No, there's no hall. Well, my number two is a little more straightforward than Antichrist. It is another Spanish horror movie and another Spanish ghost story, The Orphanage. Oh, I love The Orphanage. El Orfanado, which is more fun to say. Actually, Josh Larson's number one terrifying character from 2012 came from this list, Tomas, the not-so-imaginary friend in this film.

33:31Adam Kempenaar:And this ghost story is about a woman who returns to the abandoned home she left when she was adopted 30 years before. her name's Laura, her husband Carlos, they have a great plan to turn the home into a center for special needs children until their seven-year-old son Simone goes missing. And he has this imaginary friend, actually has a few imaginary friends, but he just disappears without a trace. And that then starts this whole mystery that unravels with Laura trying to get at the secrets of not only what happened to her son, but maybe what happened to all of the orphans that were originally at this home, the kids she grew up with.

34:08Adam Kempenaar:And I look back at my notes from this movie when we reviewed it, and I actually said I didn't think it was very scary. I meant it in that context as praise for the way it doesn't rely on cheap scares. Yeah, the shock. Yeah, it's not about those jump out of your seat moments. The suspense is almost entirely psychological, and it requires us to fill in certain blanks that we don't really want to fill in. And I love that about this movie. I I mean, Geraldine Chaplin shows up as a woman who's hosting a seance. Oh, that's the scene. It's so good. Juan Antonio Bayona, the director, doesn't show us what she's seeing.

34:40Adam Kempenaar:It's just her take on what we imagine she is seeing. And that fear is really palpable in it. Looking back on it, I misspoke, though. I mean, it's legitimately scary. It really is. Yes, it's psychological, but it's really scary. That Tomas character freaks me out. And there's also a sequence where Laura, played wonderfully by Bielin Rueda, She tries to contact the spirits of those dead orphans that she grew up with, and they basically play this game of red light, green light. It's chilling. It's really chilling. That takes your breath away. At least it does for me. I thought it was interesting, again, looking back at my notes, that my last comment was, with Bayona's direction, I can't wait to see what his next project is.

35:21Adam Kempenaar:And, of course, that ended up being one of my least favorite movies of a few years ago, The Impossible. Right. I still have faith. This is the tsunami picture Naomi Watts. Naomi Watts. Yeah, and Ewan McGregor. Ewan McGregor, not a fan. Interesting, because all the craftsmanship and technical preoccupation of that film is all about just how literal and bombastic can you make real-world horror? Yes. This massive tsunami that killed so many people, and how realistically can you render that? And yet, yeah, does it have even a tenth of the kind of lingering effectiveness of The Orphanage? No. No. It doesn't.

36:02Number one then, Michael, what's your favorite horror movie? Man, this was tough. This was really tough. This was a tough assignment. And I know you've talked about this, and I actually tried to pick a different one just to avoid vampire films for some reason, just because it is a type of monster that we've seen so much of that we're all a little weary. but the Swedish version of Let the Right One In, the one that led to the American remake called Let Me In, which is pretty good, but director Thomas Alfredson's original version is just amazing. Now, I think when you talk about what scares you, Adam, I think for me it's not really like an easy list of like the Mark Harris list of like woods, you know, stairwells, whatever.

36:41But one thing I find always wrenching, and I kind of resent it in movies, is any kind of severe bullying situation. Maybe it's because I just didn't have much of it in my own life and I had a pretty easygoing childhood. I'm with you. Lovely brother and all the rest of it. But this is a key component in Let the Right One In because this is a severely bullied young boy who's kind of at the center of this story. But every time you have to actually deal with this behavior and its effects in the film, it's taken just seriously enough without being kind of lingering and sadistic in the wrong way about it, that once you start getting this supernatural element and this friendship with this girl who is, in fact, a vampire, I don't know, it opens up a whole other world.

37:24And somehow all the vengeance that comes out of this feels not just kind of justified by the story, but emotionally in some sick way. You just can't wait for it. You know, and I think that's a horrifying impulse. But why is Let the Right One In good? Simply because it does what you've seen a million times before. You know, when is the vampire going to attack the next victim? Every time this happens, every jump, every placement in the frame, every time you see somebody crawling up the outside of a building or leaping down from a bridge, it's all a second earlier than you expect. And it's handled just masterfully.

38:02It is. It's a marvelous film. Yeah. And I don't know what lessons could filmmakers take from it. I guess just that you can, if you take the time to figure out how you're going to handle these things visually, then you can do almost anything with familiar material.

38:16Adam Kempenaar:probably would have made my list if not been near the top, if not for the fact that it recently came up on a top five, that pool scene in particular. Oh, great. At the end is so well-crafted. And I'm with you as well. I like that you bring up the impulse there, Michael, because I remember talking about this on the show, and I didn't read everything about this movie, certainly, or anything that's followed really since that review happened. But not a lot of people that I saw talked about that sort of bloodlust, which, of course, the vampire is a perfect fit with that, where it is about that bullying.

38:45Adam Kempenaar:It's about that sense of revenge. And as a viewer, you find yourself asking yourself, when are you almost waiting for that blood to spill because you think it's justified? It's forcing you to confront that. And so much of popular entertainment in the non-horror genre is all it's completely built on our blood on stoking the audience's bloodlust. And I frankly kind of hate it. I've had it. And I resent it just as a movie. because it's the easiest thing to get out of an audience is that impulse. If you just simply mistreat or, you know, grind down the characters and the audience hard enough, then all you want to do is you're sort of whimpering and you see it sort of psychologically, you know, subconsciously and saying, you know, strike back, strike back.

39:25Well, you know, this is Mel Gibson's entire directorial career. Truly, it is. And I just think it's an easy, cheap way to go. But if it's done well, you know, the paragon for me would be De Palma's Carrie, You know, because I mean, I mean, you know, Sissy Spacek in that film is just enacting a revenge fantasy that is so fully invested and so kind of operatically crazy and really violent. And it's all about bloodless. And I just loved every second of that.

39:53Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. My number one is a film that maybe is my one departure from sort of the standard horror movie fare. and I was looking at various lists because we're not the first to think of this sort of review of the past 15 years or so and look at the horror genre and there were lots of lists that had picks like Under the Skin which I would say were just a little bit, you even said, isn't really a scary movie but it does fit in terms of its dread and its kind of creepiness whether they're movies that don't have any ghosts or monsters or paranormal activity but they do have a lot of that dread and discomfort.

40:26Adam Kempenaar:I get it but I was surprised that I didn't come across any Michael that listed this movie, despite the fact that serial killers are horrifying, partly because serial killers actually exist, and the movie is David Fincher's Zodiac. Oh, great pick. One of my favorites of the first 10 years of the century. So good. Never thought of it in the horror genre. Well, I guess what really crystallized for me is I was thinking about this movie in the context of a few years ago, I remember late at night, flipping channels, couldn't fall asleep or whatever, landed on some A &E special, I think it was A &E, where they were talking about the original Night Stalker.

40:59Adam Kempenaar:Not Richard Ramirez later, but this violent criminal who, as far as we know, still unapprehended, killed 10 people, sexually assaulted like 50 women in Southern California between 1979 and 1986. And they don't know who he is, obviously. They never caught him. But he left a message on a woman's answering machine that the police are sure is this character. And they play the answering machine message. and it's this psychotic man basically repeating, I'm going to kill you. You talk about being just scared to the core of your being. I was watching that and Zodiac has a similar effect on me. How about just the surreality of that moment when the Zodiac killer comes across those two teens who are just hanging out by the lake and he ends up killing those kids.

41:50Adam Kempenaar:It's broad daylight. They're talking about just the vivid colors and the way Fincher realizes it that just takes you back as you see that whole thing unfold. Jake Gyllenhaal, when he goes into Charles Fleischer's basement. Oh, that's a great scene. Oh, so good. Everybody in the theater is on the edge of their seat during that scene. But the one that I always go back to, Ione Skye appears as a mother of an infant driving along who ends up picking up, unwittingly, the Zodiac Killer. Right. And here's the best part of me mentioning this, Michael. Right now, our co-producer, Sam Van Halgren, is up really late at night in his dark house.

42:27Adam Kempenaar:Everyone's asleep. He's trying to put this show together. He's listening to my voice, realizing that he's got to go pull this scene and watch the whole thing so he can find the best piece of audio to embed in the show right here. Nice. I think we just passed a filling station. It was closed.

42:52Adam Kempenaar:Do you always go around helping people in the night? When I'm done with them, they don't need much help.

43:01Shh, it's okay. Before I kill you, I'm going to throw your baby out the window.

43:08Adam Kempenaar:It's okay, Sam. There's nobody in the house. There's nobody outside your window. You really are safe. I tell you, the most frightening thing about Zodiac, and I love that film, I think it's Fincher's best film. I think it's truly his most, I hate the word mature, but it's like his most mature work, I think. And at the time, he gave interviews that said, you know, look, after this, I don't think anyone ever should need to make another serial killer movie. Now, ironically, the guy went on to make a lot of lesser, pulpier, you know, just lower down the food chain, serial killer movies, I think. Like, you know, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you know, Gone Girl's very good pulp.

43:45But there's something about that frustration of not solving the case in Zodiac where the film is really about human frustration, inability to kind of provide themselves and the audience with a kind of a satisfying ending. And that film, God, it's got nerves of steel. It just won't give the audience what it wants.

44:06Adam Kempenaar:Well, Zodiac is my number one horror movie of the 21st century. Michael, let's get to a few honorable mentions. What were some of those movies that were really tough for you to leave off? I mean, really tough. And the ones that don't quite fit the standard horror genre, I would include the two David Lynch films, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. I think both of them have moments that are truly sinister and nightmarish. Not really horror films, but I really love 28 Weeks later, the sequel to 28 Days. I think 28 Weeks is actually, it's politically really a student kind of of the moment. This is why you're my favorite film spotting guest host, Michael.

44:43Adam Kempenaar:because we share love for 28 weeks later. We don't need two of us here. We don't need anybody else. We don't need two of us here. I really love The Descent in terms of spelunking for humanoid demons. I think that's a subgenre. Can't watch it. Again, my claustrophobia. Really good film. I'm not claustrophobic. I enjoy tight spaces. It's fine. And then there's a few I'll just close out with that I would consider kind of, you know not minor but but they're just sort of less ambitious but i really love sam ramey's drag me to hell i do too i really love slither i really love the crazies the remake of the romero film and bung joon ho's the host is technically a monster movie but to me it's next door to horror and it's got serious serious style and wit and uh not enough people know it i mean if they haven't seen the host yeah they should see it i mean the guy's going on amazing work he did most recently he did snow piercer which was a big success and that's another one that doesn't really fit easily in any kind of simple science fiction genre but the host it's monster movie enough for me horror movie enough for me and i love it yeah it's a good film and you covered a lot of the ones i wanted to get to let the right one in obviously made your list the babadook made your list 28 days later and 28 Weeks Later, both highly considered by me.

46:04Adam Kempenaar:And I just couldn't have three Spanish ghost stories on my list, but I considered a movie I finally just caught up with this past weekend, Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone. Never seen it. Really good. I'm overdue. There you go. And The Mist, another one I like a lot, and Drag Me to Hell. You mentioned the Raimi film The Loved Ones, a recent movie nobody saw that is really good. Kind of a throwback horror movie. guy trapped in a basement by the girl that wants to take him to prom. You know, everybody's nightmare, really. So good film. And I mentioned a few of those movies or how I avoided movies that maybe didn't fit that category, whether they were simply not scary to me or just didn't feel like horror movies.

46:46Adam Kempenaar:But if you do want to talk about just being terrified by certain situations that characters find themselves in, four months, three weeks, and two days, the Romanian film from Christian Munju. And recently, IndieWire, in their CriticWire survey, they asked people in honor of It Follows, what is the best horror movie since 2000? And Jordan Hoffman said Beyond the Hills, another Romanian film from Christian Munju. Well, it's got an exorcism. It does have an exorcism. I almost put it on my list for that reason. Yeah. And it's certainly the most plausible, realistic exorcism. You don't have to, you know, it's the one for the secular humanists, you know what I mean?

47:23You don't need to be a believer to be frightened.

47:33Adam Kempenaar:We would love to hear your picks. What have been your favorite horror movies of the 21st century so far? Which ones did we overlook? Email us feedback at filmspotting.net and check out all the benefits of being a Film Spotting family member at filmspottingfamily.com. They include access to the Film Spotting Archive at any time via whatever podcasting platform you use, bonus shows every month, a weekly newsletter, early access to events like Film Spotting Fest 2, discounts on those tickets for Film Spotting Fest, and more. Once again, filmspottingfamily.com. Thanks for listening, everyone. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore.

48:16Goodbye.

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