Ángela (Manuela Velasco) is a reporter for the late-night program “While You’re Asleep,” and tonight she and her cameraman Pablo (who is heard but never seen) have been assigned to follow a group of firemen to show what their lives are like. They get a call to go to a local building to check on an old lady stuck in her apartment. When they open the apartment, the lady attacks them, biting a police officer. More attacks and deaths rapidly follow, and Ángela is startled when the entire building is tented and quarantined. A health inspector in a biohazard suit informs them that there’s a virus in the building, and soon everyone in the building except Ángela and Pablo are infected and trying to kill them.
Velasco gives a great performance as Ángela, running the emotional gamut from bored reporter wishing for a better assignment to an angry journalist yelling at authority figures to an utterly terrified person just trying not to die. She also gets an iconic final scene, crawling around in the pitch-black attic, shown through the camera’s green night vision, suddenly grabbed by her feet and dragged screaming into the darkness.
Plaza and Balagueró’s direction is very skilled in making use of found footage tropes, creating a sense of raw immediacy by supposedly having everything filmed live (and even after he’s dead) by the fictional Pablo. Although the first couple of scenes of setup are calm, once things get moving, the pace of the film is furious. It’s the shortest movie on this list, burning through its runtime of one hour and eighteen minutes.
Besides its famous ending scene, REC boasts incredible atmosphere, from the various creepy settings (the supposedly empty penthouse, filled with scientific gear and religious paraphernalia, is especially ominous) to the screams and unearthly growls coming from the upper floors. Many of the set pieces are strong, but the sudden descent of a fireman down the airshaft to crash onto the floor, shocking the gathered apartment residents, is an early sign that anything goes in this movie.
An American remake, Quarantine, followed a year later, and was surprisingly good.
#2 – The Witch (2015)
When The Witch was released a decade ago, it seemed to me to be the most historically detailed horror film ever made, and I don’t think it’s been bettered. It heralded the debuts of Anya Taylor-Joy and writer/director Robert Eggers, both of whom have gone on to impressive careers. It’s also a point of contention between audiences who find it too measured and arty and those of us who love its slow-burn character-based descent into goat-influenced familial destruction.
Teenager Thomasin (Taylor-Joy) and her family have been kicked out of a Puritan plantation in 1630s New England and have to build a remote home next to a dark forest. Her father, William (Ralph Ineson), is attempting to grow corn, but his harvest is rotting. Her mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), has recently given birth to a baby that she dotes on. Her conscientious younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), tries to help his father, and the younger twins run around playing games and singing about how their goat Black Philip talks to them and wears a crown. One day the baby mysteriously goes missing while in Thomasin’s care, and they begin to wonder if a witch in the woods has cursed them all.
Taylor-Joy gives a striking and memorable performance as Thomasin, who chafes under her parents’ claustrophobic religious zealotry but is also constantly blamed for things she hasn’t done. Ineson is fantastic as the wannabe patriarch (his deep resonant voice like a trained preacher) who keeps failing, and Dickie is painfully believable as a woman whose world is shattering bit by bit. Scrimshaw is amazing as Caleb in a serious performance – his character’s death scene is one of the most impressive pieces of acting I’ve ever seen a young person deliver.
Eggers’ directorial debut is masterful, from the incredible performances by his cast to the painterly cinematography and composition (Jarin Blaschke’s work as DP is superb). Some especially memorable sequences include the naked feverish Caleb returning home in the pouring rain after being held captive by a witch to the iconic shot of the witches levitating into the sky at the film’s conclusion. Mark Korven’s music is appropriately unsettling, a cacophony of wailing voices that evokes the approach of something sinister.
Eggers’ screenplay is even better, and if you’re watching at home have the subtitles on to catch all of the references and decipher some of the thick British accents. Eggers has said that much of the dialogue was taken directly from period sources, and one feels the sense of authenticity. One of the nice things about the writing is that, although this is definitely a horror film (a witch makes the baby into paste to be smeared over her body, among other awful occurrences), his character work makes a lot of the story a powerful drama about a family just trying to survive already difficult circumstances.
There are at least a couple ways to interpret the film, depending on one’s religious outlook. Some people might see the story as the triumph of evil over a devout family (after all, all but one of the family dies), but others might see the story as that of a woman from a repressive family finally finding the freedom long denied her, albeit in an unfortunate way. For Thomasin, signing away her soul and joining the witches is a happy ending. The look she has on her face as she ascends naked into the sky is one of delighted joy. It turns out that the title of the picture isn’t referring to the preexisting witch in the woods, but to Thomasin herself becoming the titular entity.
At one point in the film, the voice of the devil asks her, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Turns out, she would.
#1 – Hereditary (2018)
From the moment I thought about putting together this list, there was never any doubt that Hereditary would be number one. It’s a masterpiece of construction and style, dense with clever detail that rewards repeat viewings. The acting is magnificent (Toni Collette should have won an Academy Award for this), the familial drama so potent you could remove the supernatural elements and it would still largely work. It was an audacious debut for writer/director Ari Aster, who continues to display his unique artistic talent in such disparate works as Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid.
Miniatures artist Annie (Collette) has recently lost her secretive mother and is surprised by the large number of “strange, new faces” at the funeral. Unfortunately, her losses are just beginning, as her teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff), inadvertently causes a car accident that decapitates his odd sister, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Peter is stunned with guilt while Annie flies between grief and rage at Peter, as her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries and fails to be a peacemaker. Looking to ease her pain, Annie meets Joan (Ann Dowd), who shows her how to conduct a séance to contact Charlie. She also finds a disturbing letter from her late mother, assuring her that “our sacrifice will pale next to the rewards.” Peter, however, notices something unearthly trying to influence him as Annie continues to become ever more out of control.
Collette was already a respected actress at this point, but the raw emotional power she displayed in this performance was stunning. The sheer ferocity with which Annie angrily tears into Peter in the dinner sequence is jaw-dropping, but her late-night confession to him that she never wanted to be his mother and tried to induce a miscarriage (which seems to shock even Annie in its candidness) is somehow even worse. She fully commits to all of the horror aspects of the role, and one moment in which she changes from terrified into calm and (literally) possessed is an expert display of her skill. Wolff is also amazing in his intense classroom scene, in which he genuinely seems hysterically frightened.
Aster’s mastery of film techniques is apparent even in his first feature. He reminds me here of a less formally rigid Kubrick. His initial zoom shot into one of Annie’s miniature rooms becomes the setting for the characters’ inexorable descent into doom – as one schoolgirl says, “they’re all like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.” Visual highlights include the dimly lit Annie crouching in the corner of the ceiling like a malevolent spider, and the shock cut from Annie discovering Charlie’s headless body in the car to Charlie’s head on the road, covered in ants (which is traumatizing). Pawel Pogorzelski’s exquisite cinematography progresses from warm autumnal tones to cold blues and blacks, and Colin Stetson’s music is suitably ominous.
Aster’s script is beautifully constructed, its plot and themes in complete harmony from the first shot to the last. The story concerns a plan set into motion by Annie’s deceased mother and her satanic cult to find a human host for one of the eight kings of Hell and sacrificing her own family, who never know why they are suffering. This scheme has been going on for a long time, as Annie unknowingly relates when saying her dead brother was schizophrenic, complaining that their mother kept “putting people inside him.” It’s a story about ritual, as is Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar. It’s also full of shockingly gruesome violence, from Charlie’s decapitation to the utterly insane sequence of Annie levitating and sawing her own head off with piano wire.
Hereditary is a serious horror film. It’s not leavened with humor to make it easier to take. It means to disturb on a deep level, and it does that brilliantly. That and its all-around excellence easily make it the greatest horror movie of the past quarter century.
Here’s the entire list of films from top to bottom. Thanks for reading!
1. Hereditary; 2. The Witch; 3. REC; 4. The Descent; 5. The Blackcoat’s Daughter; 6. 28 Days Later; 7. Longlegs; 8. Shaun of the Dead; 9. Get Out; 10. Funny Games; 11. Session 9; 12. The Strangers; 13. Weapons; 14. The Cabin in the Woods; 15. It Follows; 16. The Mist; 17. 30 Days of Night; 18. The Ring; 19. Train to Busan; 20. Paranormal Activity; 21. House of 1000 Corpses; 22. Mandy; 23. Ginger Snaps; 24. Terrifier; 25. Splinter.