The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts: 1. Pulse.

The 25 Best Horror Films of the Aughts

by Slant Staff on October 24, 2011 Jump to Comments (30) or Add Your Own

"The common wisdom, inherited thanks mostly to the 1968-1978 boom of great American horror movies that accompanied some of the nation's most turbulent and hopeless years (at least among those that could be reflected via moving pictures), is that the worse off things are, the more relevant and powerful our cinematic nightmares become. That the halcyon days of horror are directly proportional to the index of actual human suffering. If that's so, the entire world has spent the last decade counting down the few remaining seconds left on the Doomsday Clock. While the few years leading up to Y2K brought with them a set of snarky, masturbatorily meta slasher movies that ensured audiences not only felt superior to the movies they were raised on, but also absolved them of any sense of socio-political obligation, the dozens and dozens of new horror classics that have swarmed out of every corner of the globe since then (not unlike the teeming cockroaches that burst out of E.G. Marshall's chest at the climax of Creepshow) seemed to impress upon us all that the biggest nightmare of all wasn't that the world would end, but that we'd have to continue living on in the colossal mess we've cultivated. Or, worse, that we'd have to continue cultivating a culture of killing. It's both too glib and too jingoistic to suggest that 9/11 perhaps ushered in what has clearly become another golden age of horror, easy though it might be when we're examining a time span during which political speechwriters used the word "terror" with more wanton relish than William Castle, Roger Corman, and the Crypt Keeper combined. Though the instantaneously repulsive spectacle in lower Manhattan and the deadening slow-mo retaliation certainly primed the world to absorb a whole lotta hurt, the new millennial horror paid forth brutalism in a multicultural banquet of carnage, grue, and dread. Some of our great new horror movies look to the past for assistance, others resonate with bleak nihilism for our future. Want stone proof the aughts sucked? Recue the blunt climax to the most diverting movie in our entire list of the 25 scariest post-2000 movies, Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. We're totally ******. Eric Henderson.
The Orphanage

25. The Orphanage. It's difficult to talk about The Orphanage without talking about Guillermo del Toro. As melancholic as it is frightening, the film (which del Toro produced) makes us mournful even as we're dreading whatever lies in wait on the other side of a door or tucked behind a crawlspace. This uncomfortable blend, an unfortunate rarity these days, is something the creature-obsessed del Toro excels at, and it finds a uniquely clear expression under the careful direction of J.A. Bayona. The Spanish director privileges character and quietude over corpses and cheap tricks, lending the film a feeling of transcendence over the genre that its makers understand so well. Michael Nordine"

 

This movie is better than it has any right to be. Bayona's direction, Velázquez's excellent score, Faura's cinematography -- everything here comes together to turn what could have been a by-the-numbers story into a classy, memorable horror film. I'm actually surprised they've found 24 horror films they consider better in the 00s.

 

"24. Drag Me to Hell. Many horror films from the 2000s are so eager to splatter and slice their way into our hearts that they end up covering their canvases in bloody clichés. Not so with Sam Raimi's masterfully paced throwback, which is smart enough to withhold its more disturbing visceral elements until the very last moment. This directorial restraint allows the perfectly calibrated sound design and dread-inducing mise-en-scène to drive the viewer mad with anticipation. Anchored by Allison Lohman's brilliant performance as a loan officer fated for Hades's gallows, Drag Me to Hell is as much about greed as it is culpability, or more specifically our arrogant attempts to cover up sin even when the devil herself is staring us down. Glenn Heath Jr."

 

Meh. I doubt this even belongs in the top 25. Certainly it doesn't belong higher than El Orfanato!

 

DRAG ME TO HELL is a great comedy/horror film; it's classic Sam Raimi, loaded with his trademark
screen-framing, etc. It's also loaded with his relatives, considering he co-wrote the screenplay with
his brother Ivan, his kid brother, Ted, has a small role in it, and his three kids appear as background
talent. I'm also biased towards the film because I've known Bruce Jones (Visual Effects Supr.) since his
ST:TNG days. He's a fine artist and Second Unit director as well.

Of course, Sam's rotting-gypsy-corpse-vomiting-into-your-mouth gross-outs lose me, but, hey... that's Sam.

 

Drag Me To Hell is one of the better horror films since the turn of the century and i think you could argue the Orphanage into the top 5. My personal favorites in the last ten years are Ajas' High Tension and his Hills Have Eyes remake which doubles as one of the best action films ive ever seen. Also the filmMartyrs for where it dares to go as well as being very frightening. Itll be interesting to see if they made the list. I expect to seems The Human Centipede because its a truly horrifying concept but i didn't pwrsonally care for the film in terms of craft or its acting

 

If Human Centipede makes this list, I will laugh right in the list's face (assuming a list could have a face). Human Centipede was a frigging comedy. It wasn't believable for a second, scary for a second, horrifying for a second or even that disgusting.

(Haven't seen II, but I think the same things would apply except for disgusting, which II sounds; way to choose the least important element of a good horror film to correct, buddy)

 

I agree with almost all your saying about Human Centipede but i could totally see it making an all time horror film list. Yes its funny and its also an audacious and gut wrenching concept, and it deconstructs not just horror films but horror film fans and followings. Your right in your critiques of that film Rogue but I think that your criticisms are what the filmmaker was aiming for. Like an fu to the audience.

 

Plus we've already demonstrated that comedies have made it onto the list.

 

but with that said i hope it isnt a list dominated by horror film deconstruction. We got two already and we're only three in lolol.

 

23. Visitor Q. "A formally accomplished director when it suits him, Takashi Miike can be so shocking because he's willing to discard his conventional gifts and dive face first in the muck; he doesn't play the distancing art-house games that characterize the hypocritical Michael Haneke. Miike's most popular contribution to the horror genre is Audition, which acted as a correction to the self-serving immorality of Fatal Attraction and its endless clones. Visitor Q, on the other hand, acts as a correction to the relentless popularity of reality TV, a phenomenon that invites us to vicariously feast on human misery as distraction from our own daily indignities. The story follows a family as they casually film one another indulging in incest and necrophilia as well as a long list of other similarly taboo activities, and Miike stages each escalating atrocity with a flip, tongue-in-cheek, and sometimes nearly slapstick manner that's authentically horrifying. Yet, the filmmaker, as Audition made clear, is a moralist deep down, and the brilliant, surreal Visitor Q?so powerful and disgusting that many will probably find it unwatchable?is the ultimate middle-finger to media sponsored narcissism. Chuck Bowen"

 

Wow, I haven't watched this low-budget snuff flick in what... nine, ten years?

Whores sleeping with their dads, dads raping and mutilating dead bodies, heroin addicts smeared with feces...

Now wait, before anyone rushes to judgement, allow me to put this in some context.

In 2009 I reviewed a film at the Cannes Film Festival called ANTICHRIST, which starred Willem Dafoe and
Charlotte Gainsbourg. The film was an almost unintelligible pastiche of sado-masochism, bestiality, torture,
graphic full-frontal misogynistic sex, etc. Memorable scenes included: deer running around the forest with
still-born fawns hanging from their 'posteriors', talking foxes shouting out apocalyptic phrases while eating
their own intestines, Willem Dafoe being castrated with a millstone and then being forced to perform sexually,
and Charlotte Gainsbourg cuting off her own 'sex' with a pair or scissors.

For their performances in ANTICHRIST, Charlotte Gainsbourg won the 2009 Cannes Film Festival award for
Best Actress, and Willem Dafoe won the 2009 Bodil award for Best Actor.

Go figure.

 

They seem to keep trying to outdo the next guy in being disgusting. Last night, TCM showed the 1942 "Cat People", a film made on a shoestring, no colour, no gore, no real suggestiveness.

I sat there and marveled at the wonderful cinematography, and what talented people can do within the boundaries of severe restrictions. Sometimes they seem to need them, because when they are not there, the result is that the multitude of choices ruin the product (and I do mean product).

"Cat People" has a subtext, of course, which most of these films don't. I admired the ingenuity of that reviewer's gloss on "Visitor Q" which suggests the film means more than what it says. I'm guessing it doesn't, but he has to justify his enjoyment of crud somehow.

 

I hated "Visitior Q" because as much as it tried to shock it was still bound by conventions of Japanese cinema. It'd be like taking offense at the language in a network broadcast of "Goodfellas". Any real chance Miike had to shock or be disturbing he chickens out because he's afraid to offend the male establishment. His film "Audition" is a far better horror movie that works because it goes against the norm of a typical horror film. That film is far more frightening than this one. "Visitor Q" is a lame film that isn't anywhere near as shocking as it wishes it was and is more in bad taste than it is provocative.

 

22. Suicide Club. "Sion Sono kicks things off with one of the great openers in recent horror cinema: Holding hands and chanting "a one and a two," 50 uniformed Japanese high school girls throw themselves under a subway train, drenching bystanders in gouts and gallons of gore. Investigations into the ensuing outbreak of teenage suicide pacts, headed by Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi), leads to a tween-idol girl group disseminating hidden messages that exhort listeners to promptly snuff it, concealed in the media blitzkrieg surrounding their ear-candy megahit "Mail Me." Boasting plenty of splatter for the fanboys (much of it blatantly artificial CGI), Suicide Club at times deepens into an existential inquiry, even if it raises more questions about social media manipulation and interpersonal disconnect than it can hope to answer. An outrageous finale takes its audience behind the music, and through the looking glass, into a harsh realm filled with gerbils, raincoat-clad tykes, and new uses for woodworking tools. Budd Wilkins"

"at times deepens into an existential inquiry", yeah, I bet it does.

 

I wouldn't be surprised. I haven't seen this one yet, but Sono's a poet as well as a filmmaker and while he's most famous, I think, for this horror film, he's been making waves for his very, erm, different recent films like Cold Fish and Love Exposure.

 

Of course.

21. The Human Centipede (First Sequence). "The most remarkable thing about Dutch writer-director Tom Six's now-infamous provocation is that nobody seems to agree as to what it is. Even the critics that saw and despised it, of which there are many, don't all think Six takes the film's eponymous monster seriously. To be clear, he doesn't, and that's the crux of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), an effectively queasy chiller that constantly keeps you off-balance by anti-climactically pulling the rug out from under its viewers in almost every other scene. Dieter Laser's evil Dr. Hieter is a hilariously campy mad scientist, but the threat that he poses to his very scared victims is very serious. Vile though it may be, Six's vision is clever enough and jarring enough to make the story both rather funny and deeply unnerving. Simon Abrams"

 

Why the dismissive attitude about a film you haven't seen from a director whose oeuvre you're probably not familiar with?

 

Correct that to a film I would never see in a million years.

 

That's fine. Don't watch what you don't want to watch. But why roll your eyes at the thought that a film might have some depth beyond shock value? What I've seen of Sono's work is not much to my taste, but one thing that's interesting about him is that he uses his horror to question cultural standards that other J-horror merely accepts. One of the major differences between western, and especially American, horror and Japanese horror is rooted in a deep cultural difference. In America, nonconformity is valued. The people who survive our horror movies are the ones who stand out -- often, in slasher flicks, the virgin who resists having sex even when all her friends and her boyfriend insist that she should. In Japan, conformity is valued. The way to survive a horror flick is not to be noticed by the killer or the curse or whatever. The nail that stands out gets hammered down, not treasured for its individuality. Once the evil has its eye on you, you're doomed. No act of willpower or individuality will save you. And that's been at the root of much of the best J-horror of the last decade, and it's been one of the reasons why the spate of J-horror remakes rarely worked: because in the American version, the hero has to survive, which often goes against the whole point of the threat and the movie. And then here comes Sono, probing at and examining the dangers of the value of conformity and deference. Suicide clubs. People who lack the power to stand up to those who assume authority. His films subvert the culture that underlies so much of J-horror. So while this one may not be to your taste, that doesn't mean that it's without value, as its own film or as part of the genre. I wasn't questioning your taste. I was questioning why you'd start a threat about horror films and then roll your eyes at a claim made about one you haven't seen.

 

I'll be frank; most modern 'horror' films aren't horror films at all. They're updated versions of the old "Mondo Cane" flicks of the 60's, with gore. They're titillation; they're porn. And to a really disturbing degree, they are misanthropic. Not because the makers believe anything besides money; they don't. And this bit about them being misunderstood artists (with some exceptions) is a joke. Because the viewer is well-educated and intelligent doesn't elevate this stuff. It just degrades the viewer.

 

Well, yes and no. The slasher/teen scream subgenre has, for better or worse, blossomed into torture porn and Splat Pack stuff over the last decade or so, which I think has been discussed on this board in the past. With it has come an increase in "extreme" shock value gorehound filmmaking. And it is arguable as to whether this stuff is truly horror, even if it is generally labelled horror. But though that's a visible and profitable percentage of modern horror, it's not all of it, not by a long shot. (How this list will turn out is another question.) And even within those subgenres (which are, admittedly, dominated by crap -- as most genres are!), there do occasionally come filmmakers who take the tasteless subject matter and twist it and actually do say something with it.

 

I have seen Human Centipede I & II and they are basically useless films without an audience there with you. It isn't really all that interesting a concept once you get over the initial "eewww gross" factor. The films aren't horror films really and I don't know if they have a genre. I'd call Tom Six the guy with the top hat a freakshow if I had to appropriately define them. I guess I agree with Rouge with it being a really really black comedy because Dieter Laser is the farthest thing from subtle and scary here. II is a pretty disgusting film and really is meant to get a rise out of an audience. Some pretty horribly sick stuff happens in it but I guess it achieves what it set out to do. It's not a film I'd ever watch without an audience beside me though because it will make you feel dirty watching it by yourself. They work in terms of being grind house throwbacks for people to achieve a weird sense of humorous catharsis together with. I like I a lot better because of Laser though.

 

Your comparison of the films to a freakshow is pretty accurate, I think. Real freakshows are now defunct because of PCness; but the human inclination to gawk is apparently endemic.

I have the next one on my PVR:

20. A History of Violence. "Unconditional love and true evil are both core family values in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a cinematic shotgun blast to the face that splits the classic American dream in half. After effortlessly dispatching two wayward thugs, father, husband, restaurant owner, and gangster-in-hiding Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) finds himself physically and emotionally cornered like a classic western outlaw. As Tom's splintering identity sheds an outer layer of artifice to reveal a snakes skin underneath, brutal physical violence becomes his only communication device. But the real horror resides in the deafening silence of the film's aching final shot: a quiet dinner table standoff foreshadowing years of familial hell to come. GH"