Any good current horror movies or books/comic? It seems horror has been infected with wokeness. I saw an article about Jordan Peele doing Candyman. Sad thing is he could probably write a good story but he is obsessed with race. The fawning articles about him and Ava Duvernay are absurd
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Yeah I don’t know what it is but Horror seems uniquely open to being infected with wokeness for some reason, you have all of Jordan Peele’s overrated race-baiting bullshit, stuff like Lovecraft Country, IDK.
As far as recommendations the newest horror movie I can really remember enjoying was probably Hereditary or maybe Mandy if you count that as horror. And apparently they’re making an Evil Dead 4, hopefully they don’t fuck that up, I think Bruce Campbell going woke would pretty much end me.
If it’s horror comics you’re interested in I read one a few months ago that was pretty good, it was an anthology collection of some Richard Matheson stories. The art style was really good and they made the main character in I Am Legend look like Charleston Heston. I also read another decent one called Growth, it was a pretty cool lovecraftian apocalypse sort of story, but way more fun and not too nihilistic and depressing.
I don’t know if you’re interested in manga but I’ll always recommend Berserk and Goblin Slayer, some real good dark fantasy horror there. As for books I really loved Larry Correa’s Monster Hunter series, very cool and modern take on classic horror monsters and tropes.
Seconding Junji Ito. Uzumaki and The Enigma of Amigara Fault are highly regarded, and probably his most well-known stories. Amigara is nice and short for a quick taste of his style.
drr drr drr.
(spoilers)
I watched the first season of the Evil Dead series. It was like it was written by someone who hated the Ash character.
He never does anything useful. Ever. He gets tossed around like a ragdoll and has his ass kicked by the Diverse Cop Chick. He has no redemption scenes. He has no scenes where he is rewarded for anything he does.
Near the end of the series, I knew that the Ash that the Diverse Cop Chick was showing affection for was the fake Ash. How did I know this? Were there story cues or foreshadowing or anything to indicate this? Nope. I just knew that the writers hated Ash and that he'd never get anything. To their credit, I was a bit surprised when they killed off the Diverse Cop Chick, because I didn't think they'd actually kill off one of their Diverse characters.
I can't remember a single one-liner that he delivered. Evil Dead 2 was full of them and for most of the movie he didn't even have any other characters to talk with!
I honestly wasn't interested in episode 2. Even the pilot was awful. We leave from the canon ending of Army of Darkness with Ash returning to his correct time, kicking some more deadite ass, and then getting a girl. We pick up the pilot with Ash being a pathetic loser who doesn't even have a friend to hang out with on his birthday. Well that's quite a transition. Maybe even an interesting one. What happened in between these events? Why is our hero now a failure? Maybe this could be explored by a competent writer ... but nah. He's just a big loser.
Every white male character was some combination of stupid, incompetent, or evil. Ash. The book guy. The militia guys. The hiker guy with the chicks at the end.
Every competent character is a woman or ethnic minority. The cute waitress chick that Ash hits on a bit? The one who tells us she has a boyfriend? Oh yeah, they show him to us and he's black. So our hero doesn't get the girl because some black guy already has her.
Maybe I'm just paranoid from seeing all this crap so frequently in nearly every bit of media I've seen in the last decade, but god it was awful.
Oh, and the best part? Bruce thinks it's the best portrayal of Ash ever.
I have zero hopes for seeing another movie with Ash that's worth watching. At this point I just assume that Bruce Campbell is another preachy Hollywood regressive.
That’s pretty much how I felt about it, it seems like somewhere along the line Ash got this reputation as a dumbass who occasionally does the right thing that was never there in the movies. He’s very competent in Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. I think that scene where he fucks up getting the Necronomicon in AoD really negatively effected the perception of him, and the video games/comics kind of ram with it.
Ehhhh. Evil Dead 2 was played straight but his character was essentially spooky Mr. Bean. Army of Darkness was a comedy all the way down though. You’re forgetting the like 3-stooges bit with the miniature guys or
Thanks! I need to get into manga. I love old horror anthologies and loved Tales from the Darkside back in the day but I’m sure it would offend someone.
I’ll check out Mathewson. I recently got a collection of his works because I love Steven King and he said Mathewson was his favorite author.
(spoilers)
I watched the first season of the Evil Dead series. It was like it was written by someone who hated the Ash character.
He never does anything useful. Ever. He gets tossed around like a ragdoll and has his ass kicked by the Diverse Cop Chick. He has no redemption scenes. He has no scenes where he is rewarded for anything he does.
Near the end of the series, I knew that the Ash that the Diverse Cop Chick was showing affection for was the fake Ash. How did I know this? Were there story cues or foreshadowing or anything to indicate this? Nope. I just knew that the writers hated Ash and that he'd never get anything. To their credit, I was a bit surprised when they killed off the Diverse Cop Chick, because I didn't think they'd actually kill off one of their Diverse characters.
I can't remember a single one-liner that he delivered. Evil Dead 2 was full of them and for most of the movie he didn't even have any other characters to talk with!
I honestly wasn't interested in episode 2. Even the pilot was awful. We leave from the canon ending of Army of Darkness with Ash returning to his correct time, kicking some more deadite ass, and then getting a girl. We pick up the pilot with Ash being a pathetic loser who doesn't even have a friend to hang out with on his birthday. Well that's quite a transition. Maybe even an interesting one. What happened in between these events? Why is our hero now a failure? Maybe this could be explored by a competent writer ... but nah. He's just a big loser.
Every white male character was some combination of stupid, incompetent, or evil. Ash. The book guy. The militia guys. The hiker guy with the chicks at the end.
Every competent character is a woman or ethnic minority. The cute waitress chick that Ash hits on a bit? The one who tells us she has a boyfriend? Oh yeah, they show him to us and he's black. So our hero doesn't get the girl because some black guy already has her.
Maybe I'm just paranoid from seeing all this crap so frequently in nearly every bit of media I've seen in the last decade, but god it was awful.
Oh, and the best part? Bruce thinks it's the best portrayal of Ash ever.
I have zero hopes for seeing another movie with Ash that's worth watching. At this point I just assume that Bruce Campbell is another preachy Hollywood regressive.
I'm working on a theory for this, but I'll express some highlights. Basically, comedy and horror cannot be produced without certain insights into the human psyche.
Comedy's a bit easier to explain. It often revolves around absurdity and satire. The secret sauce is timing, which most directors fail to understand. A great script/routine is trash without the timing to sell jokes/gags. I don't think I'm the only person that's thought "That would've been way funnier if they had held back the punchline just a little longer".
Horror has some distinct subgenres, but I'm only going to refer more directly to fear. I have an interest in fear, so I love a good horror film. The foundation of fear is something like "This is wrong", then either followed by "I know why it's wrong" or "I don't know why it's wrong, but I am not eager to learn". There's a big difference between real life scares like almost dropping your keys down a sewer and outlandish scares like being confronted by a monster. I think part of the difference may be imagination/creativity; getting mugged can be pretty bad, but a creative person can imagine a mugging much much worse than the average guy's experience with it.
Some ideological soapboxing is practically a trope in the genre, but it's always able to be overlooked for the sake of the thrill. I'd be perfectly content to watch a horror film about how evil drumpf gassed mexican babies and bullied china pooh, IF the horror elements are spot on - but I'm suggesting that's impossible because our modern breed of ideologue is too caught up in their dogma to consider the feelings of other people.
So, simple explanation: horror is not being handled by people with imagination.
Edit, alternative angle: a lot of people are being emotionally repressed to the point that they lose understanding of humor and horror, among other things. Such a person would be unable to differentiate between their various emotions, effectively becoming emotional beasts that can only consider "is thing good? if no, then bad" with a side of wondering what daddy told them to feel.
Comedy also has to have some truth to it. It can exaggerate, but outright lies tend to fall flat.
Horror is best used to explore the darker side of the human psyche, what people are really afraid of.
As for your Trump movie example ... I can't express in words what I want to convey, so I'll just ask you to watch Genesis' Land of Confusion video, and tell me if it's humour, horror, or both. It's basically the 80s/reagan era version of your Trump story idea (keeping in mind that the media of the time loved to remind us every day how The Button was being safeguarded by a senile old man.)
I never really paid attention to Genesis outside the Peter Gabriel era, so this was my first time seeing this video. The pop references haven't aged well, but it looks like some Henson puppetry, so it was very obvious they wanted a satirical tone since it got the viewer prepped for seeing ugliness and helped stage up bits of humor. I wasn't cognizant back then, so I do wonder if Reagan had to deal with some of the shit Trump did.
I could put such satire in its own category, but now that I think about it, it's pretty close to the rare horror+comedy (dark humor). Though normal dark humor tries to get a laugh where a person is held in a serious outlook ("I shouldn't laugh, that man is dying"), a satire goes a bit in the opposite direction by trying to get the viewer to take a comical scene seriously (the scene in the video with the man preparing to eat his own tongue is farcical, but he basically just committed suicide on camera). So I'd say that that video is technically both humor and horror, even though most viewers probably don't get much of a reaction watching it.
What do you think of slapstick humor? I think there could be a connection with jumpscare-type horror. They're both things that can occur through one's normal day, and each forces a feeling to emerge briefly. I was reluctant to state the bit about comedy needing truth because I think slapstick may be an exception.
That's not Henson, actually, that's the puppets from a British show called Spitting Image.
Reagan did so have to endure what Trump did; his age, the jokes about him being an actor (see: Back to the Future), especially about being the opposite lead to a chimpanzee (the Bonzo movies, I think there were only two of them. Hell, Francis the Talking Mule had more than that.) Implications that he was senile (as is shown in the video), that he was a cowboy who'd be more than happy to send nukes up Brezhnev's ass, that he was prone to confusing movies with real life, AND accusations of being too friendly with the religious right and being quoted as saying he hoped we'd be the generation to see Armageddon ....
My grade 7 teacher apologized on behalf of his generation the day after the election and we're Canadian. Sound like the "pozzed" shit that just happened? And this was a guy who had his own paddle, and made everyone he used it on sign it.
Slapstick? Well, it's humourous when it's not you, and if the person isn't really hurt. Yeah, it can be funny to see someone fall on their butt, as long as all that happens is a sore-ish butt. It's a simple form of humour that can be understood without language, so you have prank shows like Just Kidding (from the Netherlands) and _Just for Laughs: Gags (from Montreal), not to mention Mr Bean. Hell, even other species seem to find jump-scares and slapstick amusing, when they do it to you. The Three Stooges were something of their own time, because movie effects and tricks were kind of new, and their slapstick utilized all of it.
Hm, I didn't think anyone else was putting effort into puppets back then. I'll see if I can find some of that Spitting Image show. I'll also look for those other shows you mentioned, as I get little exposure to foreign comedy.
Would you say the Reagan criticisms and mockeries were warranted? That'd be my next guess to differentiate between him and Trump.
This is an interesting point to me. I recently was introduced to the idea that humans are distinguishable from animals in our ability to have complex and intentional reactions to fear. An animal is practically limited to adrenal responses (fight, flight, freeze), but a human can break away from the responses a bit more cerebrally to engage in an informed strategy. You could then say that jump-scares are a bestial fear (and also that there are more ways to make humans feel fear than animals). Perhaps there's a similar explanation for slapstick and humor?
Well, the humour of Spitting Image would be really aged, since it's political humour in and of itself (and specifically British politics, at that). It does seem to be around, though. As for puppets in the 70s and 80s, puppets were mostly confined to kids' shows, Hot Fudge (feat, Arte Johnson) and Kookla, Fran and Ollie, as well as the Saturday morning Krofft crap. The Muppet Show brought puppet shows back to being respectable for adults to watch. The early-20th century music and themes brought in the very old in and of itself.
Did Reagan deserve the rap he got at the time? Well, considering most of the Reagan-fear was over being nuked, and ... we're still here ... then, I guess not. BUT in an echo of today, they had us kids/teenagers pretty much convinced we wouldn't live to see 1990, because Reagan and Breshznev (oh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Two Tribes.) A lot of cold war stuff was blazed at us before Gorbachev came along and things seemed to .. .calm down (and we started getting crap like Enemy Mine and all kinds of "Russians are just like us" stuff in the media.) And one of the tenser times came when Leonid died and was replaced by two or three geezery old hard-liners, but none of them lived very long. But yeah, we had to watch If you Love This Planet in school, and do a report on The Day After, of all things. Does any of this nonsense echo? Only it's cold war/nukes, not "muh slavery" or whatever shit this is supposed to be about this time.
I don't think there are "limitations" at all with non-humans beyond the limitation of not being able to query them directly about things. I have had to deal with humans were who intelligent (ie, not mentally damaged or really seriously lacking in IQ) who had no language/fucked up language/didn't speak my only language. I can make dumb assumptions about what I see, too, and remember, people who do things to other species in labs are fucking psychopaths, adn Descartes was excusing psychopaths who wanted him to defend nailing dogs to tables in the middle of the street while cutting them open, alive, so they could show how "smart" they were. And the same dumb assumptions have always been made about those who look different, or can't speak proper. Humans in my observations do not react any more "intelligently" in an emergency situations than anything else does, and in fact, sometimes when they DO start to think, they do the exact wrong thing. So put your human conceit aside before asking me shit like this. They're different, but they're not retards. And dogs are more like children, than Downies, and they're not lacking shit any more than humans who have no mind's eye and no internal dialogue ....... and who can't think, so it's pretty arrogant to hold on to old assumptions when we know not all HUMANS have verbal thoughts. Impulse control? A well-trained dog has that, unlike the retards that used to attack kids on our way to school .... and they would get excused when we tried to report them.
Basically, it's just funny as shit to see someone jump out of their skin when you leap out of the bushes at them. And playing, pranks and gametime is always a form of life practice, for predator and prey alike.
Yeah, it occurred to me while trying Spitting Image that I may as well go back and give the Muppet Show another chance. Satire isn't a great starting point for me to learn about british politics. But I enjoyed the puppets just for the craftsmanship. The aging wasn't all that bad - it's sort of insightful to another era and it's always interesting to see comedy from other cultures.
Your description sounds unfortunate enough. It's interesting to hear about such experiences, but I think I'd be foolish to feel any ease about modern affairs in response.
I think you've made some assumptions about me and my point. I was trying to address a psychological process with some notes of evolutionary theory. If you don't care to engage that kind of topic, that's fine, but I wanted to try to clear up that misunderstanding first.
Supposedly it's only social animals that engage in these, but I never really hear about the flipside for how animals outside that group engage in practice.
Didn't mean to sound so aggresssive, apologies.
Well, social animals are the ones that are studied the most, and solitary beasts like bears and raccoons just don't act "normally" in a lab, I would imagine. But litters of baby cats will play, and cats play all the time (I would imagine even the solitary big ones mess around like our housecats sometimes do). And only what happens in a lab under "controlled conditions" during a formal test counts according to the eggheads, at least traditionally (with wildlife cams, "spontaneous behaviour" is being dismissed less and less as "anecdotal"/one-off oddness. Because, see, it was all too easy to throw off "intelligent" behaviour as aberration or human imagination. (Now imagine raising human babies in a lab, and formally teaching them only one word at a time, and any utterance they make outside of tests doesn't count. They're all normal, but would come out looking like utter retards, I bet. This is what the ASL apes had to put up with.)
Anyway, baby bears play, everything plays. And sociality seems to be a trend in and of itself, look at how European mama bears are keeping their offspring around longer, and how utterly different the urban raccoon is from the rural breed.
As for the Reagan-era thing, well, remember that this whole "politically correct" movement seemed to start under his watch (round about 1984, actually, with comedians coming out of nowhere complaining about how "they" want the names of manhole covers and things changed. I have no idea who "they" were, and it almost seems like the jokes themselves triggered calls to get rid of the -ess suffix for certain jobs (stewardess, waitress). And now here we are. So under Trump we had the same kind of hand-wringing "he's gonna enslave us" crying, coupled with all this tranny and other nonsense bullshit ... I don't see any of this going anywhere good. Or rather, this time around I'm wondering if it isn't all smoke and mirrors, a magician's distraction from something actually important.
I highly recommend Underwater. I watched it after the EFAP guys were talking about it and I really liked it. It pays homage to other horror movies like Alien without being blatant about it and has some cool Lovecraftian elements. The characters were probably my favorite part of it. They were very likable and made smart choices which doesn't typically happen in horror movies.
Check out Gideon Falls. It's a comic that recently finished it's arc. Fun story and amazing visuals. I don't think the characters are much to think about, but the story itself is a lot of fun. I've heard it may be a TV series, but it's unknown if it will happen.
It is a strange thing. Wandavision was horror in one story, and marvel capes in another. They couldn't figure out an answer without turning to capes.
Why would one need horror in fiction, when there's plenty horror in our modern reality.
Honestly i've been using foundflix to find horror movies lately, if it looks good i stop the video before any spoilers and go grab it
Was using deadmeatjames but that guy's a cigarette and did some garbage trans rights/fentanyl floyd videos, dropped his ass in an instant.
And off the top of my head, gun to my head, Terrified was fantastic, have to watch it with subtitles though, its from some south american country, fantastic movie with a pretty unique idea for monsters and a protag that isn't completely retarded.
Mortuary tales wasn't bad either, first story wasn't memorable but the rest were decent.
Countdown wasn't bad either, absolutely retarded idea but they made it work and it was kind of tongue in cheek which i think helped it.
Belko experiment was pretty good too if you want to see john c mcginley being a sadistic fuck.
Final prayer was kind of slow but had a pretty creatively fucked up scene near the end.
Not really horror but Lake mungo's really good, more of a mystery with one really good, really fucked up jump scare.
Hell house 1/3 are good, 2's not terrible, not great either.
Exorcism of deborah logan was good, feel like its kind of hyped up but its not bad.
The hatchet movies are really good mindless slashers if you just want to watch a monster fucking people up, the fourth movie you can tell all of the budget went towards the gore, it works though.
Bone tomahawk is a good western with horror elements, its incredibly slow though, but by the time the action kicks in the last like... half hour it doesn't let up.
And digging a bit further back, rob zombie's horror movies are pretty good, house of 1000 corpses/the devil's rejects/and to a lesser extent, 3 from hell are fantastic, sid haig died at some point in the filming for 3 from hell so he had to rewrite it pretty heavily. And 31/lords of salem are only really good if you're a huge fan of his stuff, 31 you can tell was rushed, but it starts out good, i like them better than his halloween reboots, his stuff's kind of weird though, he goes for a certain really specific vibe with house of 1000 corpses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82hFRJcrj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg95nS9poCw
God bless sid haig though wherever he is, dude was a fucking legend, he's the clown in the linked clips
Hereditary and the VVitch were outstanding, though I've known people to feel they were pretentious. Really depends on your tastes, of course. It Follows was a blast. There's a remake of Suspiria out there that's kind of a head scratcher but it has some great body horror.
I don't really follow horror books or comics, but Clive Barker's older stuff is phenomenal. He's got some of the best prose in horror fiction since Arthur Machen.
You really should read the Exorcist. I think it's every bit as good as the movie. And Exorcist III is a criminally underrated movie, if you haven't seen it.
Angel Heart is one of my favorite movies, and it's a weird hybrid of detective noir, period piece, and horror. Great performances all around. The book it's based on, Falling Angel, diverges from the movie quite a bit and is extremely enjoyable.
Oh and go check out Christopher Odd's channel. He does some great let's plays of horror games like Alien Isolation and Resi 7.