Horror goes back-to-back -- or does it?

If there is anything stranger than a horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2023, it's a second horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2024 -- when no movie with that genre tag had ever accomplished that feat before.

But is The Substance really a horror movie?

Skinamarink was/is, there's no doubt about that. But is it possible for a movie that's discussed by almost everyone as body horror, to not actually be part of the larger genre assignment in which body horror is presumably a subset? 

I think it's not only possible, but probable. 

Now, we know that at least for the purposes of Golden Globes consideration, The Substance was considered a comedy. I've always thought it was useful that the Globes breaks down its nominees between drama and musical/comedy, since it broadens the number of types of film on which they can shine the light of praise, beyond the five films that might fit into a single category. The Substance almost certainly would not have been recognised if there were only one category.

We can be snooty and cast serious doubt on whether we should grant the Globes any legitimacy whatsoever, but they do provide a useful role in helping us understand how we should think about a movie like The Substance. Although it is not "ha ha" funny in more than a few individual moments -- I think of that great moment where the already gnarled version of Elizabeth Sparkle storms out of her apartment and tells her neighbor to fuck off -- there is no doubt Coralie Fargeat's film is wicked in its intentions, and is a full-on satire even if it not a full-on comedy.

That does leave space for horror, and believe me, IMDB does assign that category to it. In fact, The Substance has a ridiculous number of categories assigned to it, four of which include the word "horror." In order of how they're listed, these are:

Body Horror
Dark Comedy
Monster Horror
Psychological Horror
Drama
Horror 
Sci-Fi

We can't necessarily trust whoever assigns the categories in IMDB, but the number of genre assignments alone -- more than I have seen for any other film -- probably indicates why this movie was such a fabulous success for me. After all, I've gone on the record saying I wanted my #1 movie to push the limits of an easy genre association, and The Substance passes that test with flying colors.

And despite the mention of horror four times in those categories, I still wonder if it is actually a horror movie.

Let's consider what makes a movie a horror movie. I'll start with the most obvious two:

1) It attempts to scare you by establishing a sense of dread, a sense of not knowing what might happen but knowing it will be bad.

2) It attempts to then spring that scary thing on you with a suddenness that makes you jump, which is why we call it a jump scare. 

These primary two building blocks of a horror more are, I would argue, not even present in The Substance.

Although Fargeat's film establishes a sense of eeriness, supported primarily through the facelessness of the company that provides Elizabeth the drug, nothing about what happens to Elizabeth Sparkle is supposed to be establishing a sense of dread. We might be discomfited by the grossness of it, but there are no things we can't see, hiding in the shadows, that might make the scenario more frightening. In fact, we are directly confronted with the things that happen to Elizabeth in so open a way that it is almost a case of over-sharing, while horror fundamentally relies on under-sharing.

Since there is nothing hiding in the shadows, there is nothing to jump out of those shadows. Therefore, no jump scares either.

Of course, to limit horror to those two basic components is to be rather reductive. I also, however, find it fairly useful in terms of deciding whether something is a horror movie or not. If you can think of any true horror movie that does not contain one or the other of these elements, I'd like to know what it is.

"Body horror," though, is absolutely an appropriate genre classification for The Substance, given how much body horror there is in this movie. Interestingly, this leads us to a distinction between the genre called "body horror" and the use of that phrase to describe something you specifically see within any movie. You can say that a movie contains body horror without actually being part of that genre. As a good example, there is body horror of a sort in the Deadpool movies in that the main character is always having awful things happen to his person. Yet you would not for a moment consider putting that as a genre tag on Deadpool & Wolverine. 

And yet if you were to say that The Substance contained body horror and yet was not part of the body horror genre, well that would be incorrect, now wouldn't it? I think it might have to do with the quantity of body horror. The Substance exceeds that standard by a country mile.

Then the question is, can a movie be in the body horror genre without being in the larger horror genre that surrounds it? 

I don't know if I have an answer to that, but then I can look back on the evidence of The Substance and how little effort it makes to "scare" us in the conventional ways that a standard horror movie scares us. Being a cautionary tale is not the same thing as being scary.

When it comes to the subject of body horror, you should always come back to David Cronenberg. The grandfather of body horror, the genre, includes body horror, the cinematic component, in almost every one of his films. Even A History of Violence has a knack for body horror -- remember seeing the close-up of that guy's face after Viggo Mortensen stomps it? 

Cronenberg's movie Existenz seems like a good example. Although I don't remember a lot of this movie, it is one of the first movies I think of when I think of the concept of body horror in the abstract. My memory of this film, though, is that it uses body horror more for the purposes of science fiction -- like The Matrix did -- than for anything that would truly be categorized as horror. And that provides a good template for what The Substance is, though in this case that primary genre might be satire.

Or it might be science fiction. Or it might be drama. Or it might be dark comedy. These are all possible genre associations for The Substance.

All these questions are to the good of Fargeat's movie. When trying to pick apart why a movie is my #1, our very inability to pigeonhole it is a strong asset in its favor. 

The only thing I know for sure -- and the only thing that really matters -- is that a really awesome movie has gone back-to-back with another really awesome movie.

I can't wait to see what awesome movie succeeds it in 2025. 

Vivarium is so getting that exemption

It's still early in the decade, but increasingly less so with every passing moment.

We've all just started watching movies from the fifth release year of the 2020s, which means there are only five more to go. The fact that most of us have seen only a handful of 2024 movies is what allows us to still think of this as the early part of the decade. A year from now, we will be officially midway. If the 20s were our age rather than an agreed upon convention for denoting the passage of time, first established more than 2,000 years ago based on the birth year of a person who claimed to be the son of God, we'd be calling ourselves in our mid-20s already.

And for an obsessive list maker like me, it causes me to ponder the paucity of serious contenders for my #1 movie of the 2020s. 

It makes for a very interesting contrast with the 2010s. At this same juncture last decade, four of my eventual top five movies of the decade had already been released, and all four of my top four. Only my #5, Tanna, still had its release on the horizon, in the year ending in 6 (2016). Three of the top four were all from the very first year of the decade (2010). 

I can't see the movies of the early 2020s dominating in this same fashion, unless it is going to be a really weak rest of the decade. I've named a #1 film in each of the first four years and I've loved those films, but each time I've anointed one of them, I've recognized that it was not a serious candidate to finish the decade at #1 -- and my secret hope was that none of these four titles would actually penetrate my top ten. They were the best of their year but of course that's all relative.

This is where Vivarium comes in.

I rewatched Vivarium on Friday night for the first time since 2020, having set myself the goal of scrolling until I found a heretofore undetermined title for my Friday night viewing. It didn't take long on Amazon Prime to see Lorcan Finnegan's film pop up and decide it was time for my third viewing. 

Vivarium was, technically speaking, my #3 movie of 2019. This was because I saw it at MIFF in 2019, well in advance of the rest of the viewing public, who saw it on its wide release in 2020 or sometime after that on video. But I gave it five stars without hesitation, and if I had just seen it in 2020 like everyone else, there would have been no doubt of its appropriateness to be ranked alongside all my other 2020 films. In fact, I feel pretty confident that it would have been my #1 movie of 2020, ahead of I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (Though how interesting would that have been as a 1-2 punch of noodle fryers.)

And as I thought about it, I thought Vivarium might actually have taken each of the next three #1s as well, if it had been released in those years. As I write this, I don't actually know whether Vivarium is ranked above or below those movies on my Flickchart, so let's find out right now in real time. I'll list each as a hypothetical duel based on the rankings they already have, rather than making this decision as though it were a live Flickchart duel, and you'll see which one is higher when I present the result: 

Vivarium vs. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Ending Things wins, 182 to 355
Vivarium vs. Our Friend - Our Friend wins, 209 to 355
Vivarium vs. The Whale - The Whale wins, 227 to 355
Vivarium vs. Skinamarink - Vivarium wins, 355 to 408

Not a very conclusive result in what I was hoping to prove, since Vivarium is only fourth ranked out of these five films. 

But I think this does indicate an interesting subconscious bias on my part. I believe the first three #1s of the decade were added to my Flickchart after I had already crowned them the best of their year, meaning I was inclined toward a confirmation bias and to elevate these films into comparatively august positions on my chart. Skinamarink was, if memory serves, the only of these movies to be ranked before it was officially named the best of its year.

In any case, if these movies came up against each other organically, I could see myself picking Vivarium in any of the four duels -- especially now that my third viewing reminded me how great it is. The film may have suffered a mild setback in my personal feelings during that second viewing, in which I think I forced my wife to watch it with me, as that was something I did in 2020 a lot more than I do now. When she inevitably didn't like it as much as I did, I think it made me a little more critical of it.

No such problem on this viewing. I was audibly laughing at twisted absurdities and saying things like "Oh my God," especially anything and everything related to that bizarre little kid. Not really a kid, as Jesse Eisenberg points out at one point, with a resigned sense of loathing: "That's not a boy." In fact, one of my big takeaways about Vivarium on this viewing -- and we might go into mild spoiler territory here -- is that the things that are observing our two protagonists may not be aliens, but rather, AI. That likely wouldn't have been what Finnegan was thinking in 2019, but today, it seems like an obvious conclusion to reach. The ways they get this "boy" wrong are very similar to the way an AI creates humans with extra fingers. This gives the film a whole creepy new interpretation that the director mightn't have even considered, which is one of the things good art is capable of doing. 

I won't go into too many more details about the movie itself because the purpose of this post is not to synopsize Vivarium or specifically to try to get you to see it, if you have not already.

What is the purpose of this post, if I can finally get to it?

It's to remind myself that I did not initially consider Vivarium eligible for the best of the 2020s. Like Agora the decade before it -- a film with a 2009 release year in its native country, but that I didn't see and rank until 2010 -- Vivarium had slipped into that crack between decades, not quite a 2019 movie but not quite a 2020 movie, and because I compiled my best of the 2010s list after I saw it, I felt like it had missed out on its one and only shot.

Now, I think there's a plausible reason to reconsider it -- to call it a 2020 movie even though it is listed on my 2019 lists, and is definitively associated with that release year by my own rules for determining such things. 

You may recall, though it's more likely that you do not, that I considered the Vivarium question in my post for the best of the 2010s. Unlike the other three movies that narrowly missed consideration due to similar release year ambiguities -- Agora, Mother and Mr. Nobody -- Vivarium was the only film that missed because of a future release ambiguity (post 2019), not a past release ambiguity (pre 2010). Here is what I wrote about it:

"The last is a film that had only festival premieres in 2019, including MIFF where I saw it, but for most of the world will be a 2020 film, meaning I have decided to consider it for the next decade even though I have already ranked it in my 2019 year-end list. We'll see how I handle the release year in parenthesis dilemma ten years from now." 

Well there you go. Just as I didn't check my Flickchart rankings before starting this post, I obviously didn't read this previous post, or remember what I had concluded from it, before I started writing either. 

So I had already made the decision that Vivarium could not slip through the cracks between decades, that it would be considered as part of the 2020s, despite the aforementioned disconnect between putting a 2019 release year in parentheses whenever I mention the film, and then including it for a consideration in a decade whose other movies start with a 2 rather than a 1.

Well, maybe not whenever I mention it. As you will see if you are reading this post relatively soon after I've written it, I have decide to challenge my own sense of the rules by listing the release year of Vivarium as 2020 in my "most recently revisited" section in the right margin. It is an ephemeral choice, as it will be gone as soon as I rewatch three more films, but I do it symbolically, out of recognition that, indeed, I am making the decision -- or rather, reinforcing a previously made decision -- to grant an exemption to Vivarium for consideration as part of the best of the 2020s.

Because who wants to get to decade's end and have a top ten bereft of the sorts of movies that decorated that most elite tier last decade? Here is a reminder of those titles:

10. Under the Skin
9. First Reformed
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter
7. Inside Out
6. Like Father, Like Son
5. Tanna
4. The Social Network
3. Rabbit Hole
2. Spring Breakers
1. Tangled

As of right now, all of those movies are better than any of my 2020 contenders, Vivarium included. (And if Vivarium does make my top ten of the 2020s, that'll mean two straight top tens for Eisenberg, star of The Social Network.)

Here's hoping the 2020s will be a backloaded decade. 

Horror's long and steady road to #1

One reason I was actively looking for some movie to supplant Skinamarink as my #1 of 2023 was a bias against horror movies.

Not a bias against what I wish horror was. A bias against the low ceiling of what horror, in my own personal experience, has any realistic potential of being. 

Don't confuse what I'm saying. I love horror. In fact, if you told me that a movie was guaranteed to scare me to death -- I guess not literally -- I would probably stop what I'm writing mid-sentence and go watch it. I'd be so excited to feel that rare feeling of being utterly chilled by something -- possibly the rarest feeling we get at the movies -- that I wouldn't want to wait a moment longer.

(Okay, maybe until it was dark out.)

Because that so rarely happens, I never imagined horror would have any chance to finish at the top of the heap in any year, what with at least 150 other movies competing for that same spot. 

In fact, any genre film has a tough row to hoe in that regard. Because you are making such a statement with a #1 movie, usually it has to tick a lot of different boxes to get there. Most of my #1s have been a mixture of a couple genres, or in a genre that is not consider a genre, in the sense of our term "genre film." For example, a drama is not a genre film. A horror movie is. 

But maybe I should have expected horror to make this big leap at some point, because it's gotten close in the past. Today, in my final piece about 2023 movies (I think), as I reflect on possibly my unlikeliest #1 movie of all time, I want to consider just how close.

So I'm going to go back all the way to 1996, when this whole thing started, to see what my highest-ranked horror movie was each year, and whether it had any realistic chance of scaling the heights that Skinamarink just scaled. I'll also tell you how many horror movies I ranked each year, just to get a sense of how my relationship with horror has changed over the years.

Also: For a movie to count as horror, IMDB has to include horror as one of the maximum three genres that are listed for each movie. 

1996 - The Craft (#33 out of 43, 22%) - And we're off to an inauspicious start. The Craft wasn't only the highest horror movie I ranked that year, it was the only horror movie I ranked -- and I think it was really more of a coming-of-age movie than a horror movie. But horror is indeed the third genre listed on IMDB after "drama" and "fantasy." This gives you an indication of the fact that I didn't, at first, flock to horror. It took time and I had to develop my skills. 1 horror movie seen (2% of total). 

1997 - Scream 2 (#22 out of 39, 44%) - Getting slightly better, up to three horror movies for the year. The explanation why the original Scream did not appear in my 1996 rankings is that I didn't see it until after my ranking deadline, which must have meant I saw Scream 2 fairly soon after that. And then didn't see another Scream movie until two years ago when they rebooted it. 3 horror movies seen (8% of total).

1998 - None. Wow. Were horror movies that bad or was I just that unlikely to seek them out? For the record, that's 58 movies without a single horror movie. 0 horror movies seen (0% of total).

1999 - The Blair Witch Project (#8 out of 57, 86%). Was this the moment it was all unlocked for me? First top ten horror, and still one of my all-time most memorable trips to the movie theater. I suspect that if I had had more courage, I would have ranked this higher. Sleepy Hollow and The Sixth Sense also made my top 20 at 12th and 14th, respectively, though today The Sixth Sense would be top ranked out of those three. Oddly, they were the only three. 3 horror movies seen (5% of total).

2000 - American Psycho (#16 out of 58, 72%). I will have to accept IMDB's definition of this as a horror movie. It's a horror movie that crosses several genres if it's a horror movie at all, which is what I said earlier in this piece I might need for a #1. Though this was not all that close to being #1. (Interestingly, The Cell came one spot later, and today it is close to the top of all my horror rankings on Flickchart -- though again this straddles several genres.)  4 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2001 - From Hell (#35 out of 73, 48%). I was getting desperate for my first horror so I checked IMDB and yes, they think this is horror. Fine. But I think I'm going in the wrong direction here. Only three and one of them is Scary Movie 2. So much for 1999 unlocking things. 3 horror movies seen (4% of total).

2002 - Resident Evil (#59 out of 80, 26%). I'm not sure what to make of all this. 1 horror movie seen (1% of total).

Maybe I should have started this exercise more recently.

I'll keep plugging away.

2003 - 28 Days Later (#16 out of 58, 72%). Rebounding a little bit here with a sigh of relief. 4 horror movies seen (7% of total). 

2004 - Shaun of the Dead (#17 out of 59, 71%). A classic that would be higher today compared with the rest of these movies. In fact, when I reranked them according to my current rankings on Flickchart in this post, it was my 7th overall from 2004. 3 horror movies seen (5% of total).

2005 - Constantine (#43 out of 73, 42%). Why did I start this exercise again? At least the total is getting decent ... -ish. 5 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2006 - Night Watch (#17 out of 77, 78%). This stylish Russian vampire movie from Timur Bekmambetov has the makings of a contender, but when I tried to watch it a few years ago without the stylized subtitles being available, I found myself stopped before the movie was even two minutes old. Most total horror so far and highest percent of total. 6 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2007 - I Am Legend (#10 out of 82, 88%). Second top ten, even if horror is only the third genre listed for this on IMDB and certainly not the first that comes to mind for me. Last place this year was also a horror (Captivity). Hey, look at that total grow! 8 horror movies seen (10% of total). 

2008 - Let the Right One In (#4 out of 87, 95%). Most credible bid yet and a movie I still cherish 15 years later. Cloverfield was also in my top ten and that is also considered a horror. Plus: double digits! 10 horror movies seen (11% of total). 

2009 - Zombieland (#14 out of 113, 88%). It's mostly comedy but there's some good horror. Finally over 100 movies watched (never to drop back below), nine of which were horror. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2010 - The Human Centipede (#14 out of 109, 87%). Still love it. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2011 - Red State (#2 out of 121, 98%). Well this is the closest any movie has gotten, I can already tell you that without doing the other 11 years. Horror may be a stretch as a genre for this, but I wouldn't have looked it up if I hadn't thought it was a possibility. Take Shelter at #3, tied for the second best bid, is also a bit of a stretch as a horror. And Tucker and Dale vs. Evil at #10 made three in my top ten. I'm sensing a real change here ... 8 horror movies seen (7% of total).

2012 - The Cabin in the Woods (#17 out of 119, 86%). It's encouraging how well some of these choices hold up, even if they were not realistic contenders for the top spot. 9 horror movies seen (8% of total).

2013 - Berberian Sound Studio (#5 out of 128, 96%). Another really credible run, especially by percentage, but I can tell you this wouldn't have had made it that year. Highest total yet by number. 11 horror movies seen (9% of total).

2014 - Enemy (#9 out of 136, 93%). To think this finished one ahead of Under the Skin, which was my #10 of the whole decade five years later. Still a pretty good movie I think. Big jump forward in numbers! 15 horror movies seen (11% of total).

2016 - The Nightmare (#18 out of 143, 87%). I can say for certain that this is my highest ranked horror documentary ever -- and possibly the only one I've ever seen. It's actually scary! 15 horror movies seen (10% of total).

2017 - The Blackcoat's Daughter (#3 out of 145, 98%). This is the title I really think of when I think of horror movies that almost made it. It got five stars and was my highest ranked horror movie of the whole decade, coming in at #8 overall. Not too shabby. Another new record in quantity and percentage. (For a moment I thought my #1, A Ghost Story, might have been classified as a horror, blowing the whole theme of this post out of the water. Fortunately, its three genres are drama, fantasy and mystery.) 18 horror movies seen (12% of total).

2018 - Climax (#5 out of 149, 97%). It's certainly horrifying, I just wasn't sure IMDB would classify it as such. Another 18 here. 18 horror movies seen (12% of total).

2019 - Vivarium (#3 out of 146, 98%). Another movie with multiple genres, Vivarium certainly has some horror images you can't get out of your head. As with The Blackcoat's Daughter, I gave this five stars -- the only two on this list that got that many, other than Skinamarink. And blowing past 20 in easily the highest by total number and by percentage. 23 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2020 - The Platform (#10 out of 149, 93%). That's a top ten movie in four straight years now. With more to come I think. 17 horror movies seen (11% of total). 

2021 - Saint Maud (#8 out of 170, 95%). I've already watched this again and am thinking of it as an early contender for my top 25 of the decade. That's five in a row. And approaching 30 total horrors ranked, though not quite a record percentage. 28 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2022 - Nope (#14 out of 175, 92%). Not quite a sixth straight top ten for horror, but a very respectable showing nonetheless. All year I have been desperate to show this to my wife and she's never in the mood. 28 horror movies seen (16% of total). 

2023 - Skinamarink (#1 out of 168, 100%). And we finally get there. But let's still see how many total I saw: 23 horror movies seen (14% of total). 

So what does all this reader unfriendly numbers crunching tell us?

Well it shows how far I've come as a horror fan in 27 years. Back from my meager beginnings when I saw one or zero horror movies a year, and the top one could be ranked as low as 59th with as low as a 26th percentile in that year's rankings, now it's been more than a decade since I've ranked fewer than 15 horror movies, and nearly 20 years since my top-ranked horror movie was outside my top 20. I've ranked as many as 28 horror movies in a single year, representing as high as 16% of my total viewings.

Of course, part of this can be explained by my huge increase in the number of movies I've ranked over the years, with as few as 39 back in the 1990s to as high as 175 in 2022. While that has a clear impact on the total number of horror movies ranked, you can't argue with the great equalizer: the percentile of the top-ranked horror movie out of all the movies ranked that year. While only one top finisher in the 1990s exceeded the 50th percentile (though other lower movies also exceeded it that year), you have to go back to 2016 to find a top horror movie that did not break the 90th percentile of my rankings.

This also includes 12 top ten finishes for horror in those 27 years. Wait, that's only 12 years where the highest ranked horror was a top ten. There were some years where more than one movie classifiable as horror, and as many as three in at least one year, finished in my top ten. So it's actually closer to 20 top ten finishes for horror movies in those 27 years.

Maybe I was too quick to talk about the low ceiling for what horror could possibly accomplish at the beginning of this piece.

All this is to say is that although it was a long time coming, there were definite indicators that this day would eventually arrive.

What genre is next to claim its first #1? Action? (I may already have one of those.) Musical? (Don't think I have one yet.) Torture porn? (Okay now we're getting ridiculous.)

Before I leave you and I leave 2023 behind until it's time to start talking about the Oscars telecast, I did want to give you a final word about Skinamarink in particular -- which functions as a final validation of horror's first #1.

There was another reason why Skinamarink was very unlikely to claim this spot in my 2023 rankings, and it has to do with the mood I was in when I started watching it.

Just a few minutes before I started watching back on June 22nd, I made a very insensitive remark to my wife. I didn't belittle her, I didn't make fun of her, I didn't undermine her or anything like that. But I did make a comment about a sensitive topic that I should have known was timed incorrectly, if there was ever any good timing for it at all. I tried to apologize but she was furious. I knew I had to give her time to recover, and nothing I said would immediately fix it, but the exchange left me shaken.

And then I started watching Skinamarink.

I should have been totally distracted and failed to get on this movie's wavelength, especially with its slow start that arguably never gets any less slow. Instead, I just got sucked into its world and basically had chills going down my spine for 50% of the running time.

You could say that having had an "argument" -- not really an argument in the sense that I said something insensitive and she stormed out of the room -- only put me in a more perfectly vulnerable headspace for Skinamarink. What greater horror can there be than your wife leaving you? (Which would of course be the catastrophist's worry about the worst possible consequences of such an exchange.)

But I don't know if that holds water. I think what's more likely is that thinking about this exchange would prevent me from paying attention to what was happening in the movie, which in this case is not much, so there's not a lot to grab onto -- at least at the start. I'd be rewinding and rewinding and wondering if I weren't just better off giving this a proper chance on another night.

Nope. I sat there rigid with fear, and it left an indelible impression that carried Skinamarink all the way to the top.

The skinny on 2023

When I first envisioned the subject for this post, it wasn't just a play on words about the title of my #1 movie. (Sorry, by tradition, I spoil that up front, though you can still be surprised by the ranking of my other 167 films.)

No, I was also convinced this year would be really skinny by the standards of my recent output, especially compared to my record-setting 175 movies ranked last year, which I referred to as "a whale of a year" -- also of course a play on words with last year's #1.

Twenty twenty-three ended up being skinnier, but not by a huge amount. The 168 I watched this year are only seven fewer than last year, though they're also two fewer than the number I saw in 2021, which at least makes this my skinniest year since 2020. (When I ranked only 149. Thanks COVID.)

When I thought I was going to see more like 160 movies at most, that was an intentional choice in reaction to thinking 2023 was a pretty bad year for movies. In reality, it was just a backloaded year. Every year is backloaded, a friend of mine pointed out, but 2023 seemed even more so, as a full half of my top ten are movies I've seen roughly within the past six weeks. That's sort of in alignment with the strategy to release awards contenders at the end of the year, but sort of not, as two of those five were movies released earlier in the year, that I only caught on video since the start of December. 

It's still a bit of an unusual year as it has produced possibly my least accessible #1 movie ever, though more on that in a moment. If there were ever any danger of me slouching toward the mainstream as I get older -- remember I turned 50 in 2023 -- then this choice seems to put that discussion to rest, at least for now. 

And I was glad to see that as the year got into its final weeks, I fed my movie need as intensely as I always do, turning an underwhelming movie year into one that had a lot of really good movies and some really tough omissions from my top ten.

But before we get to that top ten and then the rest, let me start by offering up ten movies you won't find on this list, in two different categories. One is movies I could have seen but didn't, and one is regrets that just weren't available to me. Let's take the first first:

Top five unlikely omissions, in order of how unlikely they are not to be on my list:

5. Thanksgiving - I was certainly interested in seeing Eli Roth's expansion of his Grindhouse trailer into feature length, but it only came down from the $19.99 premium rental price on the very day I'm posting this.

4. The Blue Beetle - I usually end up seeing all the superhero movies. This year I didn't, which brings us to ...

3. The Marvels - I would have seen this if Disney had made it available for free on Disney+ now rather than a few weeks from now, but I finally needed a theatrical break from Marvel movies, and this is the first I'm not ranking in the year of its release since Thor: The Dark World.

2. Wish - More Disney. What can I say, I don't have children young enough to want to see this anymore, and it just didn't make my adult list of priorities.

1. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One - I wanted to skip one of the big action movies, but ended up seeing John Wick 4 and Fast X for free on streaming. The M:I movies haven't really done it for me since Ghost Protocol, and that was 13 years ago. 

Now, five I would have seen if they had been available, increasing in level of regret from 5 to 1:

5. The Color Purple - A musical version of the classic Alice Walker novel? Intriguing. 
4. Fallen Leaves - Aki Kaurismaki is usually a middling pleasure at most for me, but I understand this could be his best.

3. American Fiction - Love Jeffrey Wright. Not available here yet.
2. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt - Oops. I only just noticed this actually is now available for $5.99 rental, when it's too late. I'll still include it. 

1. The Zone of Interest - It'll be a shame not to include this after Jonathan Glazer's last film made my top ten of the whole decade, but it doesn't come out here for another month.

Okay! You've been waiting long enough. Let's start with my top ten:

10. The Holdovers - When I was first really becoming a cinephile, Alexander Payne was one of two directors I considered "my guys," the other being David O. Russell. Payne hit my top ten with three consecutive films: Election, About Schmidt and Sideways. It's taken him nearly 20 years to get back, so welcome back, Mr. Payne. Payne's regular misfires since then are a thing of the past, as he's extracted incredible warmth from the surface cold of this film I was fortunate to squeeze in before Christmas (for my only $19.99 premium rental of 2023). The Holdovers takes place over a lonely, snowy Christmas in 1970, featuring three people who would like to be anywhere else than with each other, on the campus of a prestigious New England boarding school. Becoming something of an old softie now that he's in his 60s, Payne layers humanism and decency atop his usual acerbic wit, concocting an emotionally potent slice of nostalgia in which sad and angry people learn to provide each other the basic necessities needed for their mutual survival. Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa and Da'Vine Joy Randolph are by turns funny and contemplative and just plain real. If this is the most conventional film Payne has made, let's have more please, and maybe we'll see him here again in a couple years. 

9. May December - Todd Haynes' latest could have fallen victim to the differing distribution deals between countries. Instead of being available on my couch via the comfort of Netflix, as it was since December 1st for those living in America, the movie doesn't even hit Australian theaters for another ten days. Fortunately, I saw May December at an advanced screening, and it claimed one of the last spots in my top ten, awarding Haynes his first top ten in his tenth feature (six of which I've seen). My second favorite Haynes (Safe) is also a collaboration with Julianne Moore, and his first collaboration with Natalie Portman brings out the best in both of these increasingly selective, Oscar-winning actresses. A lisp is often a bad choice for an actor, but don't tell that to Moore, who uses this speech impediment as a crucial tool to bringing to life Gracie Atherton-Yoo, the woman made famous a quarter century earlier when she slept with a 14-year-old boy and ended up having three children with him. Barely keeping it together in a different way is the actress played by Portman, Elizabeth Berry, who descends on Gracie's life to study her for an upcoming portrayal, but has her own twisted psychology that regularly pokes through. In fact, the most centered (and most heartbreaking) is the boy himself, grown awkwardly into a man in his late 30s, played by Charles Melton in a role that really puts him on the map. Haynes is master of multiple tones as he both has devilish fun with these characters, a point emphasized by the melodramatic score, and takes their plight seriously, as we can see in the confused agony just below the surface of Melton's face. Few directors have it both ways like Todd Haynes.

8. Asteroid City - And the seesaw Wes Anderson has been riding his entire career goes back up again. After basically loathing The French Dispatch (#151 of 2021), I find myself in love with another Anderson project, as I seem to do every other film. This typically dense and probably needlessly ambitious structure is Anderson's fourth visit to my top ten and first since Fantastic Mr. Fox, which ties him with Joel Coen and the aforementioned Alexander Payne (just this year) for the most top ten finishes for any director. However, the fact that it is fundamentally no less fussy than The French Dispatch -- which was about a former career of mine, journalism, no less -- just means that it's the little details in an Anderson film that win you over or drive you away. And they all won me over here, from the performances (specifically those by Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman) to the set design (can I live in that tiny southwest town for the rest of my life?) to the comedy (the appearance of the alien was not the only time I cracked up) to the pathos at the core of the best Anderson films (the off-screen loss of Schwartzman's wife put me in mind of The Royal Tenenbaums). The fact that I love this film as much as I do, without its outer narrative layer (the black and white TV show about the making of the play) really registering with me, is saying something. 

7. Blood & Gold - While the Nazi revenge fantasy on everyone's lips in 2023 seemed to be Sisu, Blood & Gold was the one I stumbled over on Netflix and ended up loving. I won't get too into why Sisu's one note quickly tired me, and instead spend time on the higher entertainment value of a film structured as an old-fashioned western, where a Jewish town must be liberated from the oppression of a group of Nazis making their last stand rather than a group of bandits in black bandanas. The man with no name type is a German deserter who escaped the hangman's noose, and he teams up with a war widow whose brother is mentally challenged. The filmmaking by Peter Thorwarth gave me a sort of early Tarantino thrill, complete with a wit and kineticism in every fight scene and an overall high level of confidence on camera movements. In fact, if you told me Blood & Gold existed in the same universe as Inglourious Basterds, I'd believe you. The German language film gives us a delectable old school villain in the sadistic SS commander played by Florian Schmidtke, and watching these characters arcs play out, which include of course his comeuppance, had all the satisfactions of an old Saturday matinee. This fulfills my annual quotient for "a top ten movie you haven't heard of, but should have."

6. A Good Person - Florence Pugh is a regular on my top ten list. This marks her third appearance out of only 12 films I've ever seen. But this is a first for director Zach Braff, whom I think we all wrote off years ago. In 2004, Garden State was on the outside of my top ten looking in, but it accumulated backlash quickly, as though the book were written on Braff as an incurable romantic with pretentious indie sensibilities and a fetish for twee manic mixie dream girls. Imagine how impressed I was by the incredible maturity of A Good Person, which I'd been avoiding all year (despite the presence of Pugh) because I thought I'd heard somewhere that it was bad. I sat there at full attention during a period of exhausted December viewing in which I was falling asleep during every other movie I saw, taking in not only Pugh and long-time favorite Molly Shannon, but Morgan Freeman in a performance I had no idea he was still capable of giving as he has moved into the second half of his 80s. This sober look at tragedy, depression and addiction has the chance to play out like a movie we've seen on screen a thousand times before, but doesn't due to the sure hand of Braff. Pugh can play the frayed edges of her emotional spectrum better than anyone out there, and Freeman has his feet solidly planted in this role after some wobbly other performances from the past few years, both emotionally generous and wickedly resentful at various points of the plot. A Good Person is honest and true and extremely well written -- also by Braff. 

5. BlackBerry - When I finally see a Matt Johnson movie in the year in which it was released, this is what happens. I've been a big fan of the director's found footage-style filmmaking since I first saw The Dirties, and with BlackBerry, the guy who kind of seems like a geek who learned how to make movies has graduated to a widespread critical embrace. Johnson also co-stars in BlackBerry with Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton, the latter giving one of my absolute favorite performances of the year, and in a year in which we were practically smothered by movies that recounted how certain famous products came into existence, BlackBerry stood out for its unique style and for its ability to perfectly capture its era. There are few movies at which I laughed harder in 2023 than the first half of BlackBerry, though of course, given the eventual nosedive of the technology into obsolescence, those good times can't last. But then the sobering comedown is compelling in its own right. I've never been a fan of Howerton's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so I was completely taken aback by the bald-headed businessman he plays here, able to spin marketing gold (with a little creative and illegal accounting) out of the product devised by Baruchel and Johnson's Research in Motion, all while unleashing streams of expletives and while smashing pay phones against their chassis, metaphorically or otherwise. If you think you've seen this character before, you haven't seen Howerton do it. It's one of only two 2023 films I watched twice. 

4. Monster - I know it -- I'm a sucker for Hirokazu Koreeda. This is actually only the second of his films to make my top ten, though Shoplifters narrowly missed in 2018 (#11). The fact that Monster got almost as high as the #2-ranked 2014 film Like Father, Like Son, which is comfortably in my top 100 on Flickchart, is more an indication of the lesser competition than anything else. And because not a lot of people saw this, and therefore it hasn't been in year-end podcast conversations, I haven't done a lot of thinking about it since I saw it at MIFF. But in the midst of that viewing, I was wondering if it might have enough to overtake my then #1. It didn't, but that doesn't mean this Rashomon-style story of miscommunications and incomplete truths involving bullying at a Japanese school -- between students, but also between a teacher and a student -- isn't another superbly crafted slice of humanism by Koreeda, one that keeps revealing itself further over its running time as perspectives shift from one character to the next. There's also a touching "it gets better" message embedded within all the social drama. I'm not sure how Koreeda makes a movie every year and remains at such a high level. Finally sitting down with his film that came out too late in 2022 for me to rank it, Broker, is one of the most anticipated high points of finishing up my 2023 viewings and returning to watching whatever I want. I always want to watch Hirokazu Koreeda. 

3. All of Us Strangers - You'd think a movie that so thoroughly ensconces you in a world of memory, loss and loneliness, to the extent that it becomes and stays untethered from the real world, would become exhausting and tedious early on in its runtime. Someone who'd make such a movie might also tend to go heavy-handed and beat us over the head until it becomes an exercise in woe and empty solipsism. Andrew Haigh dodges every possible pitfall in All of Us Strangers, the film where his stand-in -- Andrew Scott in one of the year's best acting performances -- slides deep into the premise of the script he's writing, and starts visiting his childhood home to see his parents, who have been frozen at their age when they died in a car accident 25 years ago. The film doesn't suggest Adam has been struggling with this trauma that entire time, but that the headspace that comes with writing this script has left him almost drowning in emotions he had set aside, and considering how this early loss and his struggles as a gay man have dictated his intimacy with others. It's a similar thematic space as another recent Paul Mescal film, Aftersun from 2022, though this one had a far more intense emotional impact on me. Rarely have you seen an actor deliver underplayed emotions so devastatingly as Scott does here, as Haigh's dialogue does the other half of the work in giving us a true portrait that enriches us with the depth of its humanity. If not for some slight misgivings I have about the third act, which have primarily to do with unbearable melancholy about how the story plays out, this might have been my #1 of 2023. 

2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. - I wasn't the same age as the characters in Kelly Fremon Craig's follow-up to The Edge of Seventeen until about 14 years after this film was set. But there's something about well-done nostalgia that puts you in a place of immense cinematic comfort, even if it is not exactly your own nostalgia. I felt transported to the 1970 of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., and even to a different gender. Great cinema puts you in the shoes of its characters whether they are shoes that are a close size to your normal shoes or quite different, and in this film, I felt the struggles of young girls wondering when they were going to get their period and what bra size they needed as if they were my own. The film embraces you with its sense of warmth, and rides two wonderful performances: Abby Ryder Fortson in what I hope is a star-making turn as the title character, who wears her emotions on her sleeve despite trying to impress her friends with how grown up she is, and Rachel McAdams as her mother, who has the movie's most heart-breaking arc as a woman who was abandoned by her own parents because she married a Jewish man (Benny Safdie). That the film deals earnestly with spiritual yearnings and reckonings, in a year in which a war is being fought over religious differences, just adds meat to what felt like a dessert from start to finish -- and not just because I watched it on Christmas day. 

1. Skinamarink - If I told you that my #1 movie takes place all inside a single house, exclusively at night, featuring characters whose faces you never see clearly, and dialogue difficult enough to understand that they've provided subtitles, you would have not only thought me a liar, but you would have asked if such a thing could even be properly described as a movie. But here we are. Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink is the king of 2023 based on its absolutely chilling effectiveness plunging you into a nightmare seemingly without end. If you have ever woken up late at night with the TV no longer playing what you were watching, and thought that the quiet and the low light of the canted angles of your living room portended terrifying things from the everyday objects in your view, that is basically this whole movie. It's slow cinema to the extreme, and it played so poorly for some audiences that every screening featured walk-outs. But for those who got on this film's wavelength and could never leave, the experience was an all-encompassing, full-body sense of a nightmare from which there was no escape. In the horror genre, that is incredibly hard to accomplish. Skinamarink ends up here despite the fact that I have never had a horror movie top my year-end rankings, and that I spent the final six months of the year actively rooting for something more conventionally #1-worthy to supersede it. Nothing did, and I watched Skinamarink a second time just to confirm it still gave me that certain buzz that no other 2023 film provided: the feeling that it could be the best of the year. So is Skinamarink a "real" #1, or is it a default choice because I never found anything that seemed more like the right answer? Does it matter? The fact remains that no other 2023 film succeeded more perfectly in doing what it set out to do; no other saw through its unique vision to the very last frame. That's as good a description as any for a #1 movie of the year. 

And now, because you can't have the good without the bad, the five worst movies I saw in 2023:

164. Murder Mystery 2 - Have you forgotten the surprising dose of delight you got from the original Murder Mystery in 2019? If you watched this limp, lifeless, inert and unfunny sequel, that memory is certainly now gone if it wasn't already. Shame shame, Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. 

165. Genie - I had hoped the days of Melissa McCarthy delivering just absolute garbage were over. Nope.

166. Bad Behaviour - The extra U is for ugly, unfunny and uncomfortable. This is probably the lowest I have ever ranked a film I saw at MIFF, and even a star I adore as much as Jennifer Connelly could not correct the course of this misanthropic movie about a former child actor at a wellness retreat. 

167. The Out-Laws - Adam Devine came THIS CLOSE to becoming a two-time loser after Game Over Man! was my lowest ranked of 2018, but this insipid and idiotic movie about a guy whose new in-laws are world-class bank robbers got beaten out in the endgame by another Netflix movie, the fourth of this year's bottom five ...

168. Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire - ... and it only took Zack Snyder left to his worst and most unchecked indulgences to do it. Movies have gotten competent enough, in general, that you never see actual continuity errors or botched editing anymore. This awful Star Wars ripoff is riddled with them, and rounded out with terrible performances and laughable world building. And sci-fi finishes last three years in a row after The Matrix Resurrections and Moonfall. 

And here's the whole list!

1. Skinamarink
2. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
3. All of Us Strangers
4. Monster
5. BlackBerry
6. A Good Person
7. Blood & Gold
8. Asteroid City
9. May December
10. The Holdovers
11. Anatomy of a Fall
12. Poor Things
13. No One Will Save You
14. Dream Scenario
15. Society of the Snow
16. Kill Boksoon
17. Banel & Adama
18. Elemental
19. Air
20. Killers of the Flower Moon
21. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
22. Past Lives

23. Polite Society
24. M3GAN
25. Barbie
26. Oppenheimer
27. Next Goal Wins
28. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah
29. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
30. The Artifice Girl
31. Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose
32. The Blue Caftan
33. Saltburn
34. Reality
35. The Flash
36. Bottoms
37. Peter Pan & Wendy
38. Nimona
39. Swallowed
40. The Magician's Elephant
41. R.M.N.
42. The Old Oak
43. Rye Lane
44. The Face of the Jellyfish
45. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
46. Plane
47. Master Gardener
48. Shotgun Wedding
49. Wham!
50. Still
51. Reptile
52. Nyad
53. Carmen
54. Art Talent Show
55. Longest Third Date
56. Leave the World Behind
57. Wonka
58. Extraction 2
59. American Symphony
60. The Royal Hotel
61. Ferrari
62. Infinity Pool
63. Enys Men
64. Biosphere
65. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
66. Renfield
67. 80 for Brady
68. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
69. Strays
70. The Conference
71. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
72. You Hurt My Feelings
73. Jung_E
74. Creed III

75. Fingernails

76. Good Grief
77. Gran Turismo

78. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

79. The Strays

80. Joy Ride

81. No Hard Feelings

82. Champions

83. A Million Miles Away

84. The Burial

85. Flora and Son

86. Napoleon

87. Sisu

88. Dumb Money

89. Shazam! Fury of the Gods

90. Priscilla

91. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

92. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

93. Anselm

94. Chevalier

95. Sorcery

96. Nowhere

97. The Beanie Bubble

98. Evil Dead Rise

99. Family Switch

100. The Pope's Exorcist

101. Magic Mike's Last Dance

102. Robots

103. Bird Box Barcelona

104. Haunted Mansion

105. Fast X

106. Rustin

107. The Killer

108. Cassandro

109. Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom

110. Fair Play

111. We Have a Ghost

112. You People

113. They Cloned Tyrone

114. A Haunting in Venice

115. Daliland

116. The Boy and the Heron

117. Tetris

118. The Wrath of Becky

119. Knock at the Cabin

120. Boston Strangler

121. 65

122. Mercy Road

123. John Wick: Chapter 4

124. Mister Organ

125. The Iron Claw

126. El Conde

127. Sanctuary

128. Leo

129. The Little Mermaid

130. The Boogeyman

131. Cocaine Bear

132. Maestro

133. The Creator

134. Linoleum

135. Run Rabbit Run

136. Pain Hustlers

137. Alice, Darling

138. It Lives Inside

139. The Mother

140. Somebody I Used to Know

141. Passages

142. Foe

143. Theater Camp

144. Beau is Afraid

145. Showing Up

146. Paint

147. Fool's Paradise

148. Talk to Me

149. Shut Eye

150. Mafia Mamma

151. The Portable Door

152. Ghosted

153. Scream VI

154. White Men Can't Jump

155. Die Hart

156. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

157. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

158. Hypnotic

159. Old Dads

160. The Super Mario Bros. Movie

161. Candy Cane Lane

162. Cat Person

163. Your Place or Mine

164. Murder Mystery 2

165. Genie

166. Bad Behaviour

167. The Out-Laws

168. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

If that's not enough for you, how about ten more movies where I feel like I need to include a quick word of clarification/defense about where I've placed them:

22. Past Lives - I wanted to like it more and was so close to liking it more. This is still a good ranking.

28. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah - For once, Adam Sandler made the right move by casting his family.

65. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - Nothing but love for this franchise, but this was too long and convoluted.

67. 80 for Brady - And this is not just because the New England Patriots are my football team. I thought this was really charming.

90. Priscilla - Sofia, don't worry, I still love you.

107. The Killer - David Fincher has had better days.

116. The Boy and the Heron - Befuddled me, and not in a good way, and the whimper of the very ending is a strange choice on which to end Miyazaki's career. 

131. Cocaine Bear - The best idea of the year without the execution to match.

143. Theater Camp - Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe you're wrong. Unfunny. 

148. Talk to Me - I don't know why everyone thought this was great. 

As always, I welcome comments, but more than anything, thank you for reading. 

Intentionally funny, not bad enough to be funny, intentionally terrifying

As we are winding down to Halloween, I'm hitting the last part of my horror comedy schedule, having now watched more than a dozen movies this month that were either straight-up horror comedies or could be considered a horror comedy if you squinted.

This three-movie weekend horror recap includes one horror comedy that lived up to expectations, one that was pitched as a comedy but didn't work in that regard, and one, just for good measure, that isn't a horror comedy, but scared the shit out of me four months ago when I first watched it, so I thought I would show it to my wife.

You only get posters for the first two, because I've already written about the third movie and three movie posters is just too much.

My Friday night double feature was made possible by two movies under 90 minutes long. Unfortunately, I did get tired enough by the end that I had to watch the last ten minutes of the second one after 2 a.m.

Bride of Chucky was one of the unseen horror comedies I might have been able to produce before this series started without the benefit of consulting any lists. The Next Picture Show podcast mentioned it in relationship to M3GAN when they talked about that movie earlier this year, though I only listened to the podcast relatively recently since it took me until April to see M3GAN. I knew that this was considered to be the film where the Child's Play series took a definitive, intentional turn towards comedy -- so I didn't worry so much that I'd be seeing these movies out of sequence, which I usually considered a no-no. I saw the original movie back at the time -- and didn't like it very much, if my subsequent Letterboxd star ratings and placing on Flickchart are an accurate reflection of my feelings -- but didn't see Child's Play 2 or Child's Play 3, the third coming out a mere eight months after the second in 1991. 

The now poorly received series then went into hibernation for seven years, surely convincing most people they had stopped after a trilogy now that the limited initial love for these movies had dissipated. But someone -- writer Don Mancini, director Ronny Yu -- decided it was time to inject a little life into the series and into that doll that was inhabited by the soul of a serial killer, and they came back with what I can only imagine is the best Chucky movie anyone will ever make. (Though I did quite like the 2019 reboot.)

There isn't a moment of doubt that Bride of Chucky is both self-aware and in on the joke. The evidence locker where this murderous doll has been lying in pieces (presumably his fate at the end of Child's Play 3) also contains Jason Voorhees' hockey mask, Michael Meyers' Shatner mask and Freddy Krueger's knife fingers. The release of Scream two years earlier was probably the dividing line that allowed Mancini and Yu to go there, though there's no Ghostface mask -- too recent.

Jennifer Tilly comes in soon after and vamps gloriously, not because she's overdoing it but because a certain vamping quality is built into her performance style. We learn her character, Tiffany, was the girlfriend of Charles Lee Ray at the time he was killed and sucked into the body of the doll, so she's the one who engineers the theft of the doll from the evidence locker so she can extract his soul back into a body. However, she gets mad at the revived doll when she learns Ray never actually planned to propose to her back at that time, and laughs at the mere suggestion. (The ring she thought was an engagement ring was actually booty from a robbery.) So she locks him in a cage and buys a lookalike female doll in a bridal gown, mostly to taunt him as she figures out how she's going to continue to make his life hell. It actually goes the other way around when a bathtub electrocution consigns her soul to the new doll.

Having not seen enough previous or subsequent Child's Play movies to fully have a basis for comparison, I suspect the main way this registers as a comedy is the dialogue and line deliveries given these two characters, and the way they bicker. In order to preserve what's scary about a doll like the original Chucky, you can't give him too much dialogue, and the dialogue you do give him has to be consistently menacing. By giving these two characters a lot of time on screen just by themselves, you have to delve into purposefully banal exchanges that are just funny because of the disconnect between what they're saying and their little murderous doll faces. Effectively one of these two characters is, or both are, the protagonist of this film, whereas the other films would have been told from the perspective of a human.

Oh there are humans here, too -- Katherine Heigl, surprisingly, and John Ritter, plus some other actors who were new to me. (Though Ritter doesn't last too long and his death involves another humorous allusion to a stalwart horror franchise.) But we are interested most in the doll dynamics and they are consistently played for maximum possible laughs -- though not dumb laughs. (There's a scene where Chucky is using a Speak and Spell in his cage and has to spell "woman." He spells it "B-I-T-C-H," and the Speak and Spell corrects him on the spelling. This is actually a smart undermining of and poking fun at his toxic masculinity, since both Tiffany and the Speak and Spell are thwarting him.) 

In fact, I was surprised at how much intelligence went into making this movie. Yu came out of Hong Kong cinema and has some credibility as a filmmaker, which shows up here on multiple occasions. Can you believe there would be split diopter shot in Bride of Chucky? That's where a split lens is used to allow both the foreground and the background to be in focus simultaneously. Overall I was just surprised at how good this movie looked, especially since I thought Idle Hands (shot a year later) looked so crappy. It turns out it wasn't just that movies made in the late 1990s looked bad. 

I could go on about the joys of Bride of Chucky, but I have two other movies to get to.

It may have been too much to expect a movie made in 1982 also to be self-aware as a horror movie and exist in the realm of comedy, but I was led to believe The Slumber Party Massacre might be that movie. It made it onto at least one of the lists I consulted, and it was a title I was aware of just because of its B-movie pulpiness. 

As I began watching, though, I quickly concluded that if it was included on lists of horror comedies, that was because someone found its technique worth of ridicule. Alas, The Slumber Party Massacre had to be a lot worse than it was to fall into the category of "so bad it's good."

This is a classic example of the horror movie's sale of female flesh to its prospective audiences. That poster is a rather brazen admission of that agenda. At a slumber party, of course teenage girls get semi-naked (or fully naked) and have pillow fights, right?

In fact, the gratuitous nudity in some of the earlier scenes that take place in a high school locker room shower are exactly the types of things no filmmaker could get away with today. The camera goes up and down the naked bodies of the showering girls, with no other purpose than to reveal their flesh to the audiences. Imagine my surprise that the film was directed by a woman, Amy Jones -- likely with explicit instructions from a lot of men who knew what this movie had to contain for audiences to buy tickets.

The killer is an escaped convict who gets his hands on a drill. I did find there to be something sort of funny about how the film doesn't do anything to shroud his identity in the sort of mystery that is necessary to add extra menace to his character. No, when we see him, it's just some ordinary, perhaps slightly mean-looking guy without a mask or anything other means of preventing people from seeing his face and identifying him in a police lineup later on. (The mask has a practical purpose in addition to making the killer more terrifying.)

A number of characters gets sliced up by the drill in ways that are rarely imaginative enough to remember, but never incompetent enough or with poor enough effects to cause laughter. If you were expecting poor acting to push this into the realm of comedy, you'll be disappointed there too, as these are competent enough professional actors. The writing is a bit of a disappointment, too, in that it is perfectly passable. 

I felt like a movie like this would get either a Bride of Chucky-esque four stars on Letterboxd, or one star because it would be so terrible. The two stars I gave it were an indication of it disappointing in either direction and just being a bland, mediocre horror movie rather than a delight -- for either of the possible reasons it could have been a delight.

The last movie I am talking about today is Skinamarink, which I watched back in April and then tried to watch again Saturday night with my wife.

I say "tried" because she didn't last the whole movie. She did last long enough that I thought she would have overcome the initial barrier to entry, which would mean she'd be on board for the whole thing. Alas, she expired after 52 minutes, acknowledging that it was a good movie but that it was more creepy than scary, and that its slow pace meant she'd be asleep after watching ten more minutes -- so that would mean she wouldn't see it anyway.

I applaud her on the effort. She doesn't watch a lot of movies these days, and Skinamarink demands a lot of its viewers. There is almost no plot. We experience a haunting in a house seen almost exclusively from weird, canted angles, lit by sickly lamp light or the light of a television, where it is always night and where the images are captured through the fuzzy and grainy technology of a 1995 camcorder. Only once do you see the face of any of the four characters, only two of whom make any significant appearance. The creepy things that happen -- and there are plenty, eventually -- don't really start to gain in intensity until the second half of the movie, before which you are left entirely to imagine that something might be about to scare the crap out of you, some not-quite-seen thing moving in the grainy black. In fact, my wife was less than five minutes away from something that might have kept her involved until the end, but really, she probably just wanted to get to her own Saturday night viewing, and I can't blame her. She did try, and knowing the type of movie it was, I had given her permission to bail before we even started. I thought making that explicit was the least I could do, given her willingness to trust me on a movie she hadn't heard of and knew nothing about.

The anticipation of horrors to come certainly sustained me, even on a second viewing, as this environment tingled my spine throughout, even though I knew the approximate intervals at which the conventionally scary things would happen. Even those conventionally scary things are minimalist in nature, which I think only makes them more effective than some banal jump scare. The fact that I am getting chills even as a write about Skinamarink is a good indication of the sort of headspace this movie creates. I continue to find it a singular accomplishment in horror. Though now that I've watched it twice in just more than four months, I'll probably wait a couple years before a third viewing ... time enough to forget some of the things I know about it and again find myself in a constant state of anticipation and terror.

It's possible I will watch one more horror comedy on either Sunday or Monday night, but if not, it's certainly been a good theme this month. On Halloween itself, my wife and I plan to watch this year's horror movie Talk to Me, which neither of us has seen -- and which she should watch in its entirety, since it has her full buy-in. 

How to haunt a house (and how not to)

Between Thursday and Friday nights, I saw one of the best horror movies I've ever seen, and one of the worst.

That second assessment may be an exaggeration. The first is not.

I might have gotten to Skinamarink sooner except that Josh Larsen on Filmspotting brought it into my awareness half-apologetically. I can see why he did, but he should have sold it harder that first time. (And made up for it by naming it his #2 movie of 2023 so far, on a mid-year podcast I just listened to.) 

Josh's hesitation was a result of the acknowledgement that this film would not work for everybody. It is the horror movie version of slow cinema, but it's even more inaccessible than that to a certain crowd. None of the four characters in the film are ever seen clearly, nor heard in any traditional exchange of dialogue. The images and sounds that do make up the film's 100 minutes are strange canted angles of a house in 1995, lit primarily by old cartoons on TV (in the public domain, as told to us by the film's opening credits, which are all the credits), and strange guttural sounds, possibly voices, that we can rarely make out without the assistance of subtitles. And it goes on this way for the entirety of the running time.

And my skin is crawling just remembering it.

I don't want to spoil the experience of discovery that is Skinamarink by telling you too much more about it. All I really want to say is that while Kyle Edward Ball's film is in conversation with familiar horror tropes, not a one of them is presented in a way you can predict or in a way you've seen a hundred times before. The grainy imagery triples the level of dread as you're watching shapes move (or possibly not move; are your eyes playing tricks on you?) and sounds burrow themselves into the core of your deepest fears. This is a movie you need to watch with all the lights out, with no other distractions, and with as few pauses as you can manage. If you think it sounds like a chore, you won't have to wait long to be completely in its spell and frightened like you haven't been in years.

It was still in a state of post-viewing joy, 24 hours later, than I chose the remake of The Amityville Horror as my Friday night viewing. I'd seen, and quite liked, the original for the first time as recently as Halloween 2017.

I had no illusions that this was going to take me to the same place as Skinamarink. However, the reason I landed on it was that one of my podcasters -- on a podcast that doesn't ordinarily focus on movies -- had recently listed it as a film that contained an image she couldn't get out of her mind. I couldn't remember what that image was, but these sorts of testimonials are the foundation for potentially unexpectedly good horror, and at only 90 minutes, Andrew Douglas' film seemed well worth taking the plunge.

It was not.

This is a pretty terrible haunted house movie. It throws at us your standard series of haunted house images -- your dead girl here, your wall unexpectedly full of maggots there -- and even if the original movie should be justly credited with introducing some of these tropes to us, the remake does nothing with them and is just incredibly boring. I received exactly one chill in this movie, and it was also with an obvious effect that just happened to be reasonably well done so it got me.

The most interesting thing about the movie was seeing Ryan Reynolds at the very beginnings of a career that would dominate the box office for the next decade-and-a-half, not to mention Chloe Grace Moretz in what must have been her first role, seeing as how the credits "introduced" her to us. Anything related to horror or hauntings or trying to maintain the good name of a beloved horror classic? Utterly worthless. The house, renowned for how its front windows look sort of like eyes, doesn't have a personality in the slightest. 

I will say, however, that it was astonishing how ripped Reynolds was then:

Yowza.

Oh, and the image that had bothered this podcaster so much? A dead girl takes someone's finger and sticks it into the bullet hole in her head. It didn't bother me at all, even if I'd never seen it before.

It isn't easy to scare somebody, so the viewing of Amityville Horror increased my appreciation of the sort of feat Skinamarink had pulled off. I may just have to revisit it as a Halloween viewing this year, maybe share it with my wife, if she'd be patient enough to stick with it.