Genuinely scary, heartbreaking, underappreciated pick: Lake Mungo (2009)

Trashy fun, and also underappreciated pick: The Blob (1989)

You will develop arrhythmia watching this pick: Host (2020)

• Constantine (2005). So bad it’s good.
• Deep Rising (1998). This might be my favorite “so bad it’s good” movie. It’s over-the-top nonsense and it’s great.
• The Ritual (2017). It’s one of the creepiest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s only rated 6.3 at Imdb. I guess people wanted far more gore or something and less nightmarish stuff.

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There’s a lot of stuff I really like about Constantine but my favorite thing is the archangel. The actor nails their role. I’m being vague because it’s best not to know ahead of time who the actor is or what the details are. Also - the costume, makeup, etc is a perfect match. It’s always great when something is unexpected and feels right.

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For such a ridiculous movie Deep Rising has a surprisingly strong cast down to even the minor characters.

Deep Rising (1998)

A group of heavily armed hijackers board a luxury ocean liner in the South Pacific Ocean to loot it, only to do battle with a series of large-sized, tentacled, man-eating sea creatures who had already invaded the ship.

The Ritual (2017)

A group of old college friends reunite for a trip to Sweden, encountering a menacing presence there stalking them.

I edited the summary a bit because it made it sound like the movie might be a horror-comedy “…a trip to a most dangerous country in Europe - Sweden”.

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I really like

• Ginger Snaps, a movie about werewolves except it’s actually about existing as a teenage girl and tackles subjects like menstraution, sexual harassment, and friendship

• Silent Hill, a very rare horror movie with a nearly all women cast where the characters are competent and behave appropriately for their situation. I like horror when the characters are overwhelmed despite being competent

• Alien, a classic and masterwork in the genre

• American Werewolf in London, a dark comedy horror movie with amazing in-camera special effects and fun, grim humor

Most of these need CW tags, so I leave the googling of them as an exercise for the reader.

From Beyond. From the same people who made Re-animator. Less well known but the better of the two movies in my opinion. Most of the same cast too, including main stars Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs who both knock it out of the park. Combs’ character is an assistant to a scientist doing literally Lovecraftian things (the opening scene is based on a Lovecraft story). Things go badly, Combs’ lab assistant character ends up in police custody, the police have no idea what to do, and Crampton’s character is the highly driven psychiatrist who takes custody of him, partly to figure out the situation and mostly to use him as a lab rat who can’t say no due to the criminal charges against him. Things get weird.

Rubber’s Lover. Japanese splatter-horror cyberpunk. It’s in black and white which somehow makes all the gory stuff completely cartoony and surreal. Some extremely unethical scientists work for a shadowy organization to develop psychic powers in people in a makeshift underground warehouse facility, using unwilling test subjects. One of the test subjects is a former colleague who went a little nuts when he saw one of his test subjects explode. The organization pulls the plug on funding and send a secretary to take custody of documentation to keep it secret. The scientists decide to simply use her as another test subject. Things get weird.

Beyond the Black Rainbow. A slow burn. An unstable middle-aged scientist has a young woman with mental powers held captive her whole life in what’s left of a 1960s/1970s hippy techno-utopian psychic research facility. It’s now the 1980s, and the place is down to three staff members: the elderly founding scientist, the aforementioned middle-aged scientist, and a Nurse Ratched type of assistant. The founding scientist spends his days drugged up in his dark office/bedroom rewatching old promo videos of the facility over and over again. The captive young woman was the daughter of another scientist at the facility and has never known life outside it. Things get weird.

Transylvainia Twist. A genuinely funny parody of all those classic Hammer Film Productions horror movies, especially the first Christopher Lee Dracula movie. This is the movie that Dracula Dead and Loving It wishes it were.

I’ll start: Cure (1997) is probably my favorite horror that I’ve seen. it’s wonderfully shot and weird in a really compelling way. probably gonna grab Pulse for this month cause I haven’t seen it yet.