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Horror movies, bleh edition
Aug. 8th, 2026 07:52 amI've had a run of bad luck with my movie choices lately. There's been nothing since my last horror post that I've really enjoyed, and a few attempts so brief and unimpressive that I won't even count them as DNFs. Here are three I did at least get through:
The Conspiracy (2012): This mockumentary follows two journalists who are investigating the phenomenon of conspiracy theories from a skeptical viewpoint when they unfortunately discover that there really is an evil cabal running the world. Most of this was so well done that it had me feeling momentary genuine sympathy for conspiracy nuts - they made it all sound SO compelling in the collected footage! But the final act was just plain stupid. I'm sorry. There's no other word for it. And it wasn't even particularly scary in the end, because the cabal stuff and the "twist" re: how the documentary supposedly got itself released were so unconvincing that they completely broke my suspension of disbelief.
Evil Dead (2013): Struggling addict Mia gathers two close childhood friends, her brother and her brother's new girlfriend all together at the old family cabin to support her as she gets clean. They arrive to find the cabin broken into, a bunch of dead cats strung up in the basement, and an ominous leatherbound book that has been fastened closed with thick barbed wire. One bright spark from among the group deems it good to break the book out of its restraints, browse through its pages and pages of dire red-inked warnings and gruesome illustrations, then recite aloud an incantation in a mysterious language that some previous user of the book has tried very, very hard to scratch out. You guys aren't going to believe this but it turns out the book is an evil book that summons the devil! Mia promptly becomes possessed, by way of an evil thorn bush that traps her with her legs spread so that an evil vine can crawl up her vagina. Carnage ensues.
This was, as I suspected, too gory for me - but only just! The unpleasant kind of too gory, not the traumatic kind of too gory. I'm slightly annoyed by how little I liked it, because scary occult books and libraries have been a favourite trope of mine since primary school. If they'd spent more time chewing on the lore I'd have probably enjoyed it enough to make up for the violence, which was so gross, brutal and implausably ~creative that it almost tipped over into unintentional comedy. I understand this is a reboot of the 80s trilogy which is actually comedic on purpose, so maybe I'll like that better? But this one was a wash and I honestly only finished it because I'd already DNF'd a couple of movies and I wanted to finish SOMETHING.
Blair Witch (2016): The brother of a woman who went missing along with her documentary-making team while camping in Black Hills Forest takes his own documentary-making team to go camping in Black Hills Forest in the hopes of finding out what happened to her. And, well, he absolutely does find out! This is a direct sequel to (and beat-for-beat rehash of) The Blair Witch Project, and I watched it against my better judgement because a horror youtuber was gushing about how underrated it is. I'm afraid I'll have to side with the majority on this one. The basic premise seems to be that if you take all the ambiguous terror of the original and make it more direct and concrete - "dial it up", or whatever - then you'll get something even scarier. So instead of the victims being bewilderingly lost, unable to keep track of time or distance, we're explicitly told that time and distance are being manipulated by magic. Instead of the Blair Witch being a lurking unseen horror, she appears on screen this time as a fairly bog-standard cryptid. Instead of a short, sharp final foray into the old Rustin Parr house and the descent into insane wall-staring behaviour, we get long chase sequences down indistinguishable corridors and an explanation that the Blair Witch can only get you if you look at her, therefore wall-staring is an entirely rational safety measure. I assume it's clear from the tone of my recap that I did not, in fact, find any of these revisions scarier than the original at all. It was an absolute nothingburger of a film and I don't think my pulse spiked even once.
The worst immersion-breaker, though, was how they did the found footage this time. Again, they seem to have been working from the guiding principle that more is more: instead of the highly realistic, easily tracked camera use of the first film, they now had headcams on every character and a drone overhead that supposedly justified near comprehensive coverage of every scene, with perfectly framed close-ups and well timed zoom-ins and a whole bunch of scenes where I honestly couldn't tell whose camera was supposed to be filming it or how it got into that position. I'm not exactly a cinematographer or a keen observer of technical details, so I feel like if I'm watching your film going "these camera movements just don't make sense", you have probably screwed up something fairly major.
And a couple of notable DNFs: Insidious (I tried really hard to keep going because I've heard such good things, but the stressed-out SAHM and her poor crying baby got under my skin in a way that wasn't fun), Triangle (sad little kid in the very first scene, never a good sign!) and Unsane (I am down for "am I actually crazy" angst under many circumstances, but an upsettingly grounded involuntary psych hold while on the run from a stalker is apparently not one of them). All three seemed like pretty good films so to be fair this is more about my personal squicks than a quality-based rejection, but yeah.
Maybe to break this streak I should go back and rewatch some of the small handful of horror flicks I managed to watch in my whole life prior to this year's sudden hyperfixation. I know for a fact that Psycho is not going to disappoint me, for instance! I remember The Exorcism of Emily Rose being quite good, as well. And I've never seen a Dracula adaptation I didn't like. Or maybe I need a break and to watch some non-horror for a while. IDEK. Maybe I should rewatch some Star Wars! Star Wars never lets me down!
The Conspiracy (2012): This mockumentary follows two journalists who are investigating the phenomenon of conspiracy theories from a skeptical viewpoint when they unfortunately discover that there really is an evil cabal running the world. Most of this was so well done that it had me feeling momentary genuine sympathy for conspiracy nuts - they made it all sound SO compelling in the collected footage! But the final act was just plain stupid. I'm sorry. There's no other word for it. And it wasn't even particularly scary in the end, because the cabal stuff and the "twist" re: how the documentary supposedly got itself released were so unconvincing that they completely broke my suspension of disbelief.
Evil Dead (2013): Struggling addict Mia gathers two close childhood friends, her brother and her brother's new girlfriend all together at the old family cabin to support her as she gets clean. They arrive to find the cabin broken into, a bunch of dead cats strung up in the basement, and an ominous leatherbound book that has been fastened closed with thick barbed wire. One bright spark from among the group deems it good to break the book out of its restraints, browse through its pages and pages of dire red-inked warnings and gruesome illustrations, then recite aloud an incantation in a mysterious language that some previous user of the book has tried very, very hard to scratch out. You guys aren't going to believe this but it turns out the book is an evil book that summons the devil! Mia promptly becomes possessed, by way of an evil thorn bush that traps her with her legs spread so that an evil vine can crawl up her vagina. Carnage ensues.
This was, as I suspected, too gory for me - but only just! The unpleasant kind of too gory, not the traumatic kind of too gory. I'm slightly annoyed by how little I liked it, because scary occult books and libraries have been a favourite trope of mine since primary school. If they'd spent more time chewing on the lore I'd have probably enjoyed it enough to make up for the violence, which was so gross, brutal and implausably ~creative that it almost tipped over into unintentional comedy. I understand this is a reboot of the 80s trilogy which is actually comedic on purpose, so maybe I'll like that better? But this one was a wash and I honestly only finished it because I'd already DNF'd a couple of movies and I wanted to finish SOMETHING.
Blair Witch (2016): The brother of a woman who went missing along with her documentary-making team while camping in Black Hills Forest takes his own documentary-making team to go camping in Black Hills Forest in the hopes of finding out what happened to her. And, well, he absolutely does find out! This is a direct sequel to (and beat-for-beat rehash of) The Blair Witch Project, and I watched it against my better judgement because a horror youtuber was gushing about how underrated it is. I'm afraid I'll have to side with the majority on this one. The basic premise seems to be that if you take all the ambiguous terror of the original and make it more direct and concrete - "dial it up", or whatever - then you'll get something even scarier. So instead of the victims being bewilderingly lost, unable to keep track of time or distance, we're explicitly told that time and distance are being manipulated by magic. Instead of the Blair Witch being a lurking unseen horror, she appears on screen this time as a fairly bog-standard cryptid. Instead of a short, sharp final foray into the old Rustin Parr house and the descent into insane wall-staring behaviour, we get long chase sequences down indistinguishable corridors and an explanation that the Blair Witch can only get you if you look at her, therefore wall-staring is an entirely rational safety measure. I assume it's clear from the tone of my recap that I did not, in fact, find any of these revisions scarier than the original at all. It was an absolute nothingburger of a film and I don't think my pulse spiked even once.
The worst immersion-breaker, though, was how they did the found footage this time. Again, they seem to have been working from the guiding principle that more is more: instead of the highly realistic, easily tracked camera use of the first film, they now had headcams on every character and a drone overhead that supposedly justified near comprehensive coverage of every scene, with perfectly framed close-ups and well timed zoom-ins and a whole bunch of scenes where I honestly couldn't tell whose camera was supposed to be filming it or how it got into that position. I'm not exactly a cinematographer or a keen observer of technical details, so I feel like if I'm watching your film going "these camera movements just don't make sense", you have probably screwed up something fairly major.
And a couple of notable DNFs: Insidious (I tried really hard to keep going because I've heard such good things, but the stressed-out SAHM and her poor crying baby got under my skin in a way that wasn't fun), Triangle (sad little kid in the very first scene, never a good sign!) and Unsane (I am down for "am I actually crazy" angst under many circumstances, but an upsettingly grounded involuntary psych hold while on the run from a stalker is apparently not one of them). All three seemed like pretty good films so to be fair this is more about my personal squicks than a quality-based rejection, but yeah.
Maybe to break this streak I should go back and rewatch some of the small handful of horror flicks I managed to watch in my whole life prior to this year's sudden hyperfixation. I know for a fact that Psycho is not going to disappoint me, for instance! I remember The Exorcism of Emily Rose being quite good, as well. And I've never seen a Dracula adaptation I didn't like. Or maybe I need a break and to watch some non-horror for a while. IDEK. Maybe I should rewatch some Star Wars! Star Wars never lets me down!
