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sunflowerseedsandscience · 4 years

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Part Five! I’m leaning towards the supremely corny title of “If It Returns,” taken from that old “If you love something, let it go” adage. Part One is here, Part Two is here, Part Three is here, and Part Four is here.

There’ll be a bit of a break before the next part, while I finalize the outline, celebrate New Year’s, and recover from New Year’s. Thanks for reading and thanks for all the love!

Mulder stares at the photo, unable to speak or even form a coherent thought, aware Dana’s watching him anxiously. It only makes it more difficult to think clearly and he focuses harder on the image in his hands.

Wide, sparkling blue eyes. Red-blond hair, long and silky, flowing down in waves around a fair face. An aquiline nose sprinkled lightly with freckles and a bright smile that’s somehow simultaneously charming and precocious.

It’s like looking at a miniature Dana Scully.

Mulder looks up at the full-grown version sitting across from him and the fear in her face nearly breaks his heart. She’s probably run through a hundred possibilities of how he might react since Melissa gave her his phone number... not to mention who knows how many thousands more in the years since her last letter. He smiles warmly at her, hoping to put her at ease.

“She’s beautiful,” he tells her, and Dana immediately relaxes-- somewhat, at any rate. “How old is she?”

“She’ll be ten in January.” Mulder does the math in his head, and yes, it checks out. She must have sent him that two-line letter right after finding out. But even though the timeline makes sense, her reasoning still confuses him.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” he asks. “Dana... did you think I’d be angry with you?”

She raises her eyebrows at him. “Wouldn’t you have been?” He opens his mouth to say no, of course not, they were both allowed to see other people so he wouldn’t have had the right to be angry.

But then he stops to think. Would he have been angry? They hadn’t been a couple anymore. He’d had his fair share of dates, a handful of one-night stands, even a couple of relationships. Theoretically, what had happened to her could just as easily have happened to him-- or, at any rate, to any girl he’d been with, which in his book would have put him in almost the same position.

Still....

Right now, he’s looking at it through the lens of maturity, with the experience of a thirty-two-year-old doctor of psychology. And even now, seeing this little girl’s face, concrete proof Dana had been with another man, he feels a twinge of hurt. It’s irrational, but still, he feels it.

When he’d gotten Dana’s last letter, he’d rushed to the phone to call her, desperate to know what was going on, to talk her out of whatever madness had led her to tell him they could never speak again. The number had already been disconnected, but what if it hadn’t been? In that state of mind, how would his college-age self have responded if Dana had told him she was carrying another man’s child?

“I think at first, I might have been,” he admits. “But I would’ve realized eventually that I didn’t have the right to be angry. And then I would have wanted to know what I could’ve done to help.” He narrows his eyes at her as another thought strikes him. “And you probably would have known that’s how I’d react, too. So that can’t be the only reason you didn’t tell me.”

Scully looks down. “No, it wasn’t,” she agrees. She twists her hands together around her teacup, and he reaches out and takes one, relieved when she curls her fingers around his and doesn’t pull away.

“Tell me what happened,” Mulder urges gently. Scully raises her eyes to meet his, takes a deep breath, and begins.

“Emily’s father is a man named Ethan. He was a friend of mine at Stanford, senior year. He wasn’t my boyfriend, exactly-- senior year was way too hectic to carry on a relationship-- but we went out every now and then.” She bites her lip and blushes. “And sometimes... you know, to let off steam....”

Mulder grins. “Dana Scully, are you telling me you had a friend with benefits?”

Dana scowls at him. “Yes. Now shut up.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway... we were both insanely busy with school and part-time jobs, so neither of us were seeing anyone else at the time. And because of that, and because I was on the pill, once I’d seen his bloodwork, we’d stopped using condoms. But....” She sighs. “Someone has to be that one out of a thousand who still gets pregnant. And in April, that someone was me.”

“And you decided to keep it.”

Dana nods “Not because of the reasons you think, Mulder. Eighteen years of Sunday School weren’t enough to convince me I had no choice. And I knew it would wreak havoc on my plans for med school, but....” She smiles softly at the picture of Emily lying on the table between them. “I already felt attached to her, Mulder. I knew right away I was going to keep her.

“Ethan, meanwhile, chose that moment to tell me he loved me, he’d been in love with me for ages, and that he’d marry me in a heartbeat if that was what I wanted.”

“Quite the romantic,” Mulder observes.

“I told him I appreciated his offer, but that I didn’t think we should rush into anything. I decided to to delay med school for a few years, work full-time, and save up the money I’d need to go back to school later, when Emily was older. Ethan already had a job lined up after graduation and he was going to share custody and pay child support. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was the best we could come up with.

“And then we broke the news to my father.”

Mulder winces. Captain Scully had always been quite the traditionalist... and Dana had been the apple of his eye.

“Well... as you can probably imagine, Ahab lost his mind. I knew it was going to be bad, but....” She shudders at the memory, and he squeezes her hand. “I never dreamed he’d say the things he said, or make the demands he made. He insisted Ethan and I had to get married, and when I told him I didn’t want that, he told me I had no choice, that he wouldn’t stand for me shaming the family like that.”

Mulder’s jaw drops. Ahab had always been strict and demanding, yes, but Mulder couldn’t imagine him ever accusing Dana of making him ashamed.

“So... I stormed out. But later that night, my mother called and said she and my father had come up with a compromise. If Ethan and I married, they would pay my med school tuition, let us live with them, and my mom would watch the baby while Ethan was working and I was at class-- and later, during my residency.”

Mulder whistled. “He really didn’t want you having that baby without getting married, huh?”

“No. He didn’t.” Dana tries to pull her hand away, and Mulder reluctantly relinquishes it. She rubs her upper arms as though chilled. Mulder waits for her to continue but she remains silent. She won’t meet his eyes. He suddenly understands: whatever she has to tell him, she’s afraid of what he’ll think of her when he hears it.

“Dana,” he says. “Look at me.” She purses her lips and keeps her eyes lowered. “Please, Dana.” Slowly, she looks up, and tears sparkle in her eyes. “Nothing you tell me is going to make me think any less of you. Understand?” She chuffs out skeptical laugh. “I promise.” He reaches across the table again and his heart leaps when she lets him take her hand. Holding it in both of hers, she continues.

“I know what I should have done right then,” she says. “I should have called you at Oxford, woken you up in the middle of the night, and told you everything. I should have asked what you thought I should do... and I’m willing to bet you would have convinced me not to take the easy way out.” She sighs. “Which is what I ended up doing.”

Mulder’s stomach clenches at what he knows is coming. She’s not wearing a ring, he reminds himself. Anything could’ve happened since then. Calm down and let her finish.

“Ethan and I got married a week later at City Hall. The last thing I did in my old apartment, before moving into my parents’ house, was to write you that letter.”

As much as Mulder’s been trying to stay quiet, here, he can’t help interrupting. “But why, Dana? Just because you thought I wouldn’t agree with you?”

“Because I thought you’d be disappointed in me,” Dana says. “And angry, at least at first. But honestly, I trusted you would get past all that eventually, Mulder." She sighs. “It was me I didn’t trust.”

Mulder frowns. “How do you mean?”

“I mean....” She looks down again, a blush spreading across her cheeks. “My most cherished wish all through college was that our paths would come together again one day. Right up until the moment I said I do, I fantasized about you somehow finding out what had happened and storming into the wedding to object.

“But even more than that, Mulder, I was scared that eventually, writing letters wouldn’t be enough for me, and I’d find some way to be where you were no matter what the distance.” Her blush deepens with her admission, and Mulder’s heart swells. Even after four years apart at college, she’d still loved him just as much as he loved her.

Does she still? He’ll have to wait and see.

“I felt like I had to do it for both of us,” Dana says. “As long as we were still in each other’s lives, I’d never be able to let you go. You deserved so much better than that. And Ethan deserved better, too. I loved him as a friend, and I convinced myself that I could learn to love him as more... but I was wrong.”

“Where’s Ethan now?” Mulder asks... and then, as much as he’s not sure he wants to know: “Are you still married?”

“What? Oh, God, no,” Dana laughs. “No, by the time I’d finished med school, even my dad was willing to admit how wrong he’d been in forcing us to marry. After four years of listening to us arguing over every little thing, my parents were almost celebrating when we announced our divorce. Which, as religious as my parents are, is really saying something. But they saw how miserable I was in my marriage and they didn’t want that for me.”

“He wasn’t cruel to you, was he?” asks Mulder.

“Ethan? No, not at all, Mulder. He’s a great guy, a wonderful father to Emily. He and I are still good friends.” She chuckles. “Actually, I called him this morning to tell him I was meeting you for lunch.”

“Really?” Mulder’s not sure how he feels about that. A friendly ex-husband isn’t something he has any experience dealing with. Most of the women he’s dated have, at best, been lukewarm on the subject of their exes. “What did he say?”

“He wished me luck,”she says. Mulder laughs.

“So, that’s it,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “The big, bad secret.”

“Yup,” says Dana. “Now you know all of it.” She pauses, tension settled deep in the lines on her forehead. “So... can you forgive me?”

“Dana... there’s nothing to forgive,” says Mulder. “You were in an impossible situation. Would I have tried to talk you out of it if you’d called me? Hell, yes. But ultimately it was still your decision, and you did what you thought was best for everyone at the time.”

Dana seems to deflate with relief. She pulls his hand to her lips and kisses his fingertips, and he could swear electricity crackles between them.

“But,” Mulder continues, “I do have one request.”

“Oh?”

“Have dinner with me,” he says. “This Saturday night.”

Her face lights up, but then falls slightly. “I can’t this weekend,” she says. “It’s my weekend to take Emily. Ethan had her for Christmas this year but she’ll be home in the evening on New Year’s Day. And I’d invite you to do something with both of us, but... well....”

“But studies have shown that introducing potential romantic partners to the children of single parents can lead to confusion and a heightened sense of instability when the short-term relationship ends,” says Mulder, fully aware he sounds like a psychology textbook, and Dana laughs.

“Right, I forgot,” she says. “You’re a shrink now. I’ll have to watch what I say or you’ll start psychoanalyzing me.”

“Who says I haven’t started already?” Mulder asks, and Scully glowers playfully at him. “Okay, so, this weekend is out. Maybe--”

“This might seem a little presumptuous,” Dana interrupts, “but do you already have plans for New Year’s Eve?”

Does he? Yes, he does. He’s supposed to attend a party thrown by one of his colleagues from his former practice. He’s already RSVP’d and promised to bring a cheese plate. And knows full well that the hostess is hoping he won’t be going home that night.

Will he be attending the party? No, he will not.

“Nope, nothing solid,” he lies, and Dana’s face lights up.

“Would you like to come over?” she asks. “I mean, my parents will be there, and Melissa too, at least for part of the night, so it’s not exactly going to be a romantic evening, so--”

“I’d love to,” he says, and Dana’s smile is blinding.

Over Dana’s shoulder, Mulder catches sight of the clock hanging on the back wall.

“I can’t tell you how much I hate to leave right now,” he tells Dana, “but I have to get back to the office. My next appointment starts in fifteen minutes.”

“I should really be getting back, too,” Dana says, gathering up her purse and shrugging on her coat. They walk out of the tea room together and stand on the sidewalk in the December chill, neither anxious to leave.

“So... what time should I be there?” Mulder asks.

“Is eight okay?”

“Eight is perfect. I’ll see you then.” He steps forward to embrace her, half-worried she’ll step back, but she doesn’t. She meets him with her arms around his neck, her face curled into his chest, and he buries his face in her hair.

She still smells the same. How can she still smell the same after fourteen years? He inhales deeply, trying to take at least some part of her along with him to tide him over until New Year’s. He releases her reluctantly, and she smiles at him, then turns and heads off down the sidewalk. When she reaches the corner, he calls after her.

“Hey, Dana?” She turns, eyebrow raised. “Just so you know... I absolutely would have showed up at your wedding to object. The moment I knew about it, I would’ve been on the first plane out of England.”

#Sorry this one took longer #I kept getting mixed up #I'm editing my ice dance novel #which also involves a couple reuniting after years apart

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thechaoticwonderland · 6 years

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I finally have time to write, damn it! I have been MIA for the longest time (and Twitter has been basically my place for word vomit) but I swear I have been trying to write something here -- as proven by my numerous drafted posts. LOL. 😓

If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Instagram, I TURNED TWENTY FOUR a few months back. Yup, I have officially changed my profile every where to 24. I still can’t believe I am THAT old but meh.

I celebrated my birthday walking dogs and getting drunk around Sheung Wan and Central Hongkong with my boyfriend -- super low key but probably one of the best birthday celebrations ever! 💜 But I’d probably save a different post for that -- WHEN I FIND THE TIME AND ENERGY TO DO SO. (Possibly never, but let’s see lol)

And since I am T W E N T Y F O U R (ack!), I have decided to come up with a blog post on 24 life realizations I have at 24 - some are realizations I’ve had leading up to my 24th but you get my point. 😂

1. Love comes when you least expect it - cliché, I know. But I met my boyfriend at this random birthday party I gate-crashed AKA his 30th birthday. 😁 Long story short, we’ve been going out for over a year now. We both weren’t looking for anything then since he just got out of a toxic relationship, and I was casually going out with random people. But here we are. 😜

2. No need to rush things, do things at your own pace - I started my Masters over 2 years ago, and you’ve guessed it, most of my batch mates have their Masters degree already. 🙆🏾 At some point, I wanted to study full-time cos I’ve gotten envious of my friends. But since my parents are still (yep, I know. Shame on me) paying for my tuition fee, I don’t want to burden them with allowance expenses + my living expenses (If you’re new here, I actually live alone lol) so I need to keep my job. Now I’m 1 subject away from defending my paper! I’m almost there! And it’s actually not bad. 🤗

3. Don’t live beyond your means - Ahh, my dad’s favorite life lesson. I never thought about it then since I was living under my parents’ support, but now that I live alone I have to make ends meet month on month. In layman’s terms IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD IT, JUST DON’T.

4. Don’t put your eggs in one basket - I know I am not the best person to be all preachy about money (cos I am bad at handling my own finances, but I try) but I have 3 savings accounts in different banks. It comes in handy when one bank fucks shit up (like goes on a nationwide shut down *cough BPI*, or one that just eats up your card and your money from time to time *cough BDO*).

5. Your past doesn’t define you or how you’d succeed in the future - Another cliché saying, but I swear you get to realize why people say it often. I’ve done so much shit when I was younger but believe me when I say such experiences will help you realize stuff later on. After all, we learn from our mistakes and such mistakes will push us to be better people tomorrow.

6. Your choices in life are your own, don’t let people tell you otherwise - You will never share the exact same beliefs with everyone, I’m sure about that. Just do you and brush off other opinions, they don’t matter - believe me.

7. Keep your circle close and small - Your real friends genuinely care, the others are just curious. Be cautious.

8. Always be kind - And this applies to everyone: guards, maids, janitors, etc. Believe me, if you’re nice to everyone, it’s easier to ask for favors. 😜

9. Travel alone - You should try this at least once in your life, me thinks. It gave me a sense of liberty and independence! I did this when I was trying to mend my cracked heart - and I came back to Manila feeling all refreshed and happy. I guess I learned that I don’t need a man to survive! HAHA! 😂

10. Don’t complain, do something about it - Ranting is fine, human nature. But if you will just sit down and whine when something could actually be done, then maybe you should rethink your life choices honey. Instead of wasting your time and energy complaining, why don’t you stop and think? Things and answers won’t always be served to you on a silver platter, FIND WAYS. 😊

11. Don’t forget to remove your make up at the end of the day - PLEASE. Do yourself a favor and let your face breathe! 😛

12. ALWAYS MOISTURIZE AND PUT SPF - *i-capslock mo para intense!!!* I couldn’t stress this enough. I actually keep various moisturizers depending on the weather, I have intensive moisturizers for when I travel and light ones for the Philippine heat. Just please, never skip it!

13. One at a time - My boyfriend would always tell me this when I’m stressing over work, school, among other things. It helps, actually. Stop, arrange your thoughts, and do things one at a time.

12. Treat yourself - Now before you go crazy and tell me that this is a bad thing, I didn’t say you have to buy that expensive bag you’ve been eyeing on for so long because “I DESERVE IT”. Going back to point number 3, if you can’t afford it - IT’S A NO. It can be as simple as “I did a great job today, I deserve good coffee - not my usual pantry coffee”, which is my usual way of treating myself. If you can afford to buy that expensive bag to treat yourself, BY ALL MEANS DO IT. But always remember POINT NUMBER 3!

13. Family will always come first - Ah, this is one of the many things I realized growing up. Of course I was super excited to grow up so I can go out with my friends whenever I wanted to before. But when I moved out, I always look forward to weekends so I can come home to my family. What a baby, I know right?

14. Let go and let God - I am not the most religious person in the world, heck I barely even hear mass (I’m busy, but that’s not an excuse I’m sorry). But I really believe in greater power from above. I always find myself in hopeless situations, where I find my shitty ass crying myself to bed on most nights (add that I also live alone so imagine how bad it must be lol). But I usually find myself just getting through the worst days with little miracles. And I always thank God for that.

15. If you feel so happy with the wrong person, image how happy you’d be with the right one? - Eep, another cliché saying c/o me lol. But seriously, I thought I couldn’t be happy anymore when I once got my heart broken HAHAHA. Cut to mid-last year, I’m extremely happy -- waaay happier than before. Not saying I’m already with the person for me, though I really do hope so (HAHAHA yuck cheese) but I’m happier than before and I’m sure the person I’m with is a better person amongst all the guys I went out with before.

16. Take long walks. - I enjoy this so much especially abroad. I went on a birthday trip in Hong Kong and I spent 70% of the time walking - thinking and reflecting. 😅 I think long peaceful walks are good for everyone’s sanity.

17. Cut off toxic people. - Not everyone you lose is a loss. If they aren’t doing you good, what’s the use of keeping them?

18. Life is what you make it. - If you want something to happen, the first step starts with you. 😅 If you don’t take the first step, nothing will happen. SERIOUSLY. Everything doesn’t happen by chance!!!!!

19. You don’t have to have a reaction on everything. - I believe there are things better left unsaid. I know a lot of people would disagree. But I still think the saying “If you have nothing nice to say, just zip it” is still superior. Lol.

20. Work isn’t everything. - I recently had to stop working for a week and a half due to some health concerns. It sucked balls. But I came to realize work isn’t everything -- YOUR HEALTH (mental health included) IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT.

21. Quite connected to the bullet prior, Work can wait. - I have learned to keep work within working hours. Remember, work will always come and it will never be done. Know what’s most important and prioritize! That’s the key. Whatever’s left can be done tomorrow. You don’t have to spend 12 hours in the office all day and stress out on work, tbh.

22. Choose your battles. - Not everything is worth stressing over. (remember point 19!) 😋

23. Respect begets respect. - Respect opinions, respect people - young and old alike. Sometimes we just have to learn to agree to disagree.

24. Live life to the fullest. - Another cliché saying, but honestly you’ll never be as young as you are today. Make mistakes so you will never make the same ones in the future, learn the ropes of life through the decisions you make everyday. Not everything will go our way, that’s for sure, but life is only what we make of it.

I hope you got to pick something up from my blabbing. To be honest, it took me months to finish this list since I barely have time in my hands. Lol. 😬

I missed you, Tumblr! ✨

#Filipina Blogger #Filipino Blogger #Adulting #Growing Up #Thoughts #Life Lessons #Work #lovely #Self-love

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Best Modern Horror Movies

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Every once in a while, someone likes to declare that the horror genre is dead, and so far, every one of those predictions has been wrong.

Horror movies have been around almost as long as filmmaking itself, and while the genre has always been cyclical in nature –dipping, sometimes drastically, in both quality and quantity from time to time — all it usually takes is a well-timed box office hit, a fresh new angle or a hot young filmmaker to reanimate it again.

The 21st century has been, overall, an extremely healthy one for horror. There’s been the usual amount of dross, of course, but the genre has branched out in a number of interesting new directions as well. We had absolutely no problem tallying the initial batch of movies for this article, and have just continued to update it ever since, starting with the newest and going back in time from there.

So here are over 50 terrifying favorites that you can use for your own personal Halloween film festival — and we promise that this lineup delivers. Brace yourselves for a look at the best horror movies of the 21st century.

These are the very best modern horror movies…

Saint Maud (2020)

As our own Rosie Fletcher said in her review, Saint Maud is “a strange, gorgeous, and deeply disturbing chiller which mixes psychological, religious, and body horror to form something that feels utterly original.” She added that the film “messes with your perceptions of what’s real and what isn’t and comes with an ending that’s so simultaneously euphoric and horrific it feels like a punch in the heart.”

She’s right on the money. Morfydd Clark is outstanding in the title role, a private nurse who believes she can speak directly with God and decides it’s her mission to save the soul of the dying, debauched professional dancer (Jennifer Ehle) she is caring for. Maud lives right on the knife’s edge between spiritual ecstasy and mental illness, and director Rose Glass’ debut feature captures the surreal, horrific netherworld that is this tormented young woman’s life.

Saint Maud is out in theaters in the UK now.

Relic (2020)

The horror film at its best allows us to experience our deepest real-life fears in metaphorical terms, which is what the excellent Relic does with specificity, empathy, and atmosphere to spare. Emily Mortimer plays Kay, a workaholic single mom who gets a call from the police that her elderly mother Edna is missing from her home in the Australian countryside. When Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) drive out from Melbourne to the house, Edna (Robyn Nevin) reappears after two days–but cannot recall where she’s been.

Edna’s house–untidy, dark, and littered with odd notes and markings–and behavior lead Kay and a local doctor to surmise that the headstrong Edna is slowly sinking into the grip of dementia. But something else is at hand — an unseen presence that can seemingly bend reality — and the feature debut of director Natalie Erika James works so well because of its complete cohesion between characters, theme and imagery. Grief and loss ooze from every frame of the film, along with an impending sense of dread and claustrophobia.

Watch Relic on Amazon

SpectreVision

Color Out of Space (2020)

Color Out of Space adapts what legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered his personal favorite short story, “The Colour Out of Space.” Although the film is set in the present, it is faithful to the original 1927 narrative, in which a family is both driven to madness and altered physically by the presence of an alien entity that has landed on their farm in a meteorite.

Starring a typically unpredictable Nicolas Cage, Color Out of Space is flawed in many ways, but is distinguished by three things: the return of director Richard Stanley (Hardware) after too many years away from features, a plethora of eerie and downright disturbing imagery, and an overall atmosphere that comes damn close to that of Lovecraft himself.

Watch Color Out of Space on Amazon

Neon

The Lodge (2020)

The Lodge stars an excellent Riley Keough as Grace, a troubled young woman in love with Richard (Richard Madden) a journalist who wrote a book about the suicide cult she is the only survivor of. Their relationship triggers Richard’s estranged wife (Alicia Silverstone) to commit suicide, leaving the former couple’s two children devastated.

Six months later, Richard, Grace and the children head up to Richard’s remote winter lodge in an effort for all of them to heal. But a series of unexplained events occur that may be tied to Grace’s past or the death of the children’s mother — or both. Directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (the harrowing Goodnight Mommy), The Lodge reeks with dread and leads to a thoroughly unsettling finish.

Watch The Lodge on Amazon

Wounds (2019)

This Hulu original stars Armie Hammer as Will, a New Orleans bartender whose discovery of an abandoned mobile phone in his place of business portends the arrival of an unspeakable evil, a malevolence that infects him, his girlfriend (Dakota Johnson) and almost everything in his life.

British-Iranian director Babek Anvari (2016’s supremely eerie Under the Shadow), creates an atmosphere of extreme dread and rot here, from the cockroaches Will is constantly killing behind the bar to the frightening images and sounds that keep appearing on that damn phone. Based on a novella called The Visible Filth by acclaimed horror writer Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds leaves much unexplained but that’s kind of the point: horror is often most effective when it can’t be rationalized.

Watch Wounds on Hulu

Tigers Are Not Afraid (2019)

There’s a reason why no less a maestro than Guillermo Del Toro is a fan of this deeply felt and moving film: it covers much of the same territory that he has explored in some of his greatest works like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth — the place where imagination, childhood innocence and real world corruption intersect in a surreal, dangerous yet fantastical landscape.

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Best Horror Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

By Alec Bojalad and 3 others

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Best Horror Movies on Hulu

By Alec Bojalad and 1 other

After her mother goes missing in the latest cartel rampage through an unnamed and anarchy-plagued Mexican city, a young girl (Paola Lara) finds herself living on rooftops with a small band of little boys and haunted by an apparition that may or may not be her mother. Director and writer Issa Lopez wrings emotion, humor and even minor triumphs out of this dark scenario, while not shying away from its more disturbing implications.

Watch Tigers Are Not Afraid on Amazon

Ready or Not (2019)

Darkly funny and subversive, Ready or Not is an out-of-nowhere surprise that deftly weds (pun intended) an acidic black comedy about income inequality and the politics of marriage to a more gruesome thriller about being chased around an old, dark house by a deranged family of Satanists. If that doesn’t pull you in, nothing will.

Samara Weaving is an appealing lead as the young woman who marries into a clan of vast wealth and privilege, only to find out where they came from and what the family must do to maintain them. Weaving is excellent at both the comedy and horror, while Andie MacDowell and Henry Czerny lead a sparkling supporting cast of cracked characters. It may not be especially scary, but ready or not, this one’s a real crowd-pleaser.

Watch Ready or Not on Amazon

Annabelle Comes Home (2019)

Who would have thunk that the third time would be the charm for this popular Conjuring spin-off series? First-time director Gary Dauberman — who wrote all three entries in the sub-franchise — rises to the challenge and brings a wonderful sense of atmospherics and dread to the proceedings that was lacking in the earlier films. Anyone who channels the lighting schemes of horror legends like Mario Bava is all right in our book.

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The Conjuring Timeline Explained: From The Nun to Annabelle Comes Home

By Daniel Kurland

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Annabelle: Real-Life Haunted Dolls to Disturb Your Dreams

By Aaron Sagers

Annabelle Comes Home also proves to be the sharpest-written of the bunch, as four girls — one of them the daughter of Conjuring ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who cameo here) — try to fight off the evil title doll as she unleashes hell on them over the course of one night. The cast is given depth and agency, which makes us care all the more when Dauberman turns the movie into a full-on monster mash. This one’s old school fun.

Watch Annabelle Comes Home on Amazon

Midsommar (2019)

Ari Aster blew everyone away in 2018 with his writing and directing debut, Hereditary (see below), a frightening tale of family dysfunction, grief, memory and naked witches summoning an ancient demon (Was that a spoiler? Sorry). His follow-up, Midsommar, wears its direct influences on its sleeve and tries a little too hard to signal its own importance, but it’s supremely eerie in its own way and quite nasty in what it shows and what it hints at.

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Four college friends — including disintegrating couple Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) — are invited by an exchange student to Sweden, where they’ll visit the reclusive commune in which he was raised. Fans of films like The Wicker Man will have a pretty good sense of what’s coming, even if Aster doesn’t quite answer all the questions he raises. What he does do, however, is chill the blood with both the way the travelers turn on each other and how the Harga find spirituality and transcendence in their deeply disturbing rituals.

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Us (2019)

The second feature from Get Out writer/director Jordan Peele still cleverly uses the horror genre for social commentary, but the focus is less directly on race this time and more on class and privilege. Lupita Nyong’o is outstanding as Adelaide, whose well-off family is terrorized by savage doppelgangers intent on murdering them. Who those duplicates are, and what they mean, provides for a biting commentary on the haves and the have-nots.

Some of the story logic is fuzzier this time around, but Peele is still adept at creating a genuine atmosphere of dread while deploying well-worn horror tricks in unique new ways. He also gets tremendous performances out of his cast, including Black Panther’s Winston Duke and The Handmaid Tale’s Elisabeth Moss, in what is ultimately a solid sophomore outing for the director.

Watch Us on Amazon

Halloween (2018)

After years of mostly lackluster sequels and reboots, director David Gordon Green (and his co-writer Danny McBride) take this horror icon both back to the roots and into the future. The result is a direct sequel to the original that ignores all the other films and concentrates, with stark precision, on two ideas: the concept of Michael Myers as a primal force of evil and the theme of PTSD as exemplified by Jamie Lee Curtis’ powerful performance as a permanently damaged Laurie Strode.

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Both a thrilling rollercoaster ride and a chilling exploration of an unknowable psyche, the new Halloween is also relevant to what’s happening in 2018 — making The Shape a valid and still scary vessel for whatever metaphor you want him to represent.

Mandy (2018)

Dream-like, surreal and hypnotic — when it’s not screaming with rage — Mandy may be more interested in atmosphere and imagery than story (the plot is admittedly far too simple for the movie’s two-hour length) but is an unnerving experience nonetheless.

At the center of this boldly experimental assault from director Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) is a primal performance from Nicolas Cage, whose reputation for gonzo performances does a disservice to the raw emotion he can still deliver as a lumberjack out for vengeance against a frightening cult. Mandy might try your patience, but its visual poetry and uncaged (ha ha) star are never dull.

Watch Mandy on Amazon

Hereditary (2018)

It’s still hard to believe that this is the first feature ever from writer/director Ari Aster, who brings a literal parade of horrors to his terrifying exploration of a family’s complete breakdown from forces within and without.

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Toni Collette is off-the-charts stunning as the mother who tries to hold her clan together even in the face of unspeakable tragedy and the knowledge that her own family history is working against them. Harrowing and thoroughly unsettling, Hereditary is perhaps the best example yet of a new wave of genre films that are about something while still scaring the living shit out of you.

Watch Hereditary on Amazon

The Endless (2018)

Two brothers (played by Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead, who also directed, produced, edited and wrote the film) return to the cult they once belonged to as youths, each carrying different memories of their time there and different expectations of what they’ll find in the present. But neither sibling is prepared for the inexplicable events that occur once they arrive.

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Following their features Resolution and Spring, the Benson/Morehead team once again prove themselves adept at creating believable, atmospheric, dread-infused horror with limited resources. These guys clearly know what they’re doing, and the eerie The Endless is a strong next step for them.

Watch The Endless on Amazon

A Quiet Place (2018)

Who knew that mild Jim Halpert from The Office would end up directing one of the most acclaimed and outright scary movies of the past few years? In his third outing behind the camera (which he also co-wrote and stars in), John Krasinski uses silence — which can be deployed to great effect in horror movies — in the most ingenious manner possible. He, Emily Blunt and their three children live in a near-future world overrun by hideous, blind creatures that use their superior hearing to track prey by sound, thus necessitating that the human survivors remain as quiet as possible.

The result is a thriller in which literally every footstep is suffused with dread and a rusty nail becomes an object of extreme terror. While the script creaks a bit and could have used some better development, there’s no doubt that Krasinski directs this for maximum tension while getting terrific work out of himself, his wife and the kids. A Quiet Place is not just compelling horror, but a loud announcement of an outstanding new directorial talent.

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It (2017)

It’s been a long time since a Stephen King screen adaptation really got the author’s work and intent right, but It does so and then some. Full of heart and warmth for its seven young main characters — all of whom are perfectly cast — It sets them against an insidious evil in the shape of Bill Skarsgard’s unforgettable Pennywise the Clown.

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Director Andy Muschietti’s take on King’s masterpiece is humane, moving and even funny — a coming-of-age story that also happens to be an engrossing and unsettling monster tale. It’s very rare that a truly “epic” horror movie is released, but It can stand proudly in that rarefied category.

Watch It on Amazon

It Comes at Night (2017)

Was this movie mismarketed? Or did audiences just reject its overwhelming, unrelenting bleakness? Either way it’s one of the overlooked horror gems of the past few years. Writer/director Trey Edward Shults is not interested in the whys or hows of his post-apocalyptic setting — he just puts regular, fearful human beings into the aftermath and lets us watch them as any chance for survival slowly unravels.

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Understated, incredibly claustrophobic (the house is a character itself) and stocked with great performances from Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, and the rest of the cast, It Comes at Night is as naturalistic as a horror movie gets — and is all the more terrifying for it.

Watch It Comes at Night on Amazon Prime

Split (2017)

This was the film we had the toughest time deciding whether or not to include on this list. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan gives it the structure, atmosphere and tone of a horror movie, yet it’s clear now that it’s also an origin story for a comic book-style supervillain and a de facto sequel to his Unbreakable.

But for most of its running time, Split is a harrowing, darkly humorous psychological thriller anchored by an incredible performance from James McAvoy as a man with 24 different personalities in his brain — as well as a monstrous 25th that is about to emerge.

Watch Split on Amazon

The Girl with All the Gifts (2017)

Not just one of the best horror movies of 2017, The Girl with All the Gifts was one of the best movies of that year. Moving and compassionate while at the same time frightening and dread-inducing, the movie puts a fresh spin on the zombie genre and creates memorable, empathetic characters who grapple with questions of not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be alive.

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Stars Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine and Glenn Close give top-shelf performances, but the movie belongs to young Sennia Nanua as the flesh-eating yet fully sentient Melanie, who may be a forerunner of a new, unexpected step in the evolution of whatever the human race ends up becoming. Gripping from start to finish.

Watch The Girl with All the Gifts on Amazon

Raw (2017)

Deeply graphic and disturbing, yet also rich with symbolism and subtext, Raw is both as grisly and sophisticated as horror movies come. The movie also touches on gender politics and family dynamics in its tale of two sisters at a French veterinary school who awaken to the power of their own bodies as well as primal, vicious hungers neither one of them thought possible. Director/writer Julia Ducournau stages the film in gritty, intimate style, making the gnawing on human flesh all the more horrific to watch. Raw is a movie that lives up to its name.

Watch Raw on Amazon

Get Out (2017)

The directorial debut of comedy writer/actor Jordan Peele is a sharp, funny and creepy horror satire on race relations, white liberal hubris and socal justice. It’s also a genuinely suspenseful thriller, albeit with nods to earlier movies like The Stepford Wives, and proves that horror continues to be an effective genre through which to tell culturally and socially relevant stories.

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Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a young African-American photographer who heads to the country with his white girlfriend (Alison Williams) to meet her parents for the first time. The meeting does not go well as Chris realizes that the seemingly nice yet awkward Armitages (led by an excellent Catherine Keener) are not what they appear to be at all. Get Out is thrilling, refreshing and a nice change of pace for the genre.

Watch Get Out on Amazon

Under the Shadow (2016)

International cinema has been exploring genre with great success in recent years, and this intimate yet mournful thriller, set in 1980s Tehran during the ongoing and brutal war between Iran and Iraq, is one of the more thoughtful and unique horror movies to emerge from that creative wellspring.

Iranian politics and social mores are woven carefully into the plot, which follows a woman and her daughter who are haunted by a djinn (an evil spirit) that may have been unleashed when their apartment building is shelled. The metaphor of the evil set free by war is fairly on the nose, but director Babak Anvari still constructs an atmosphere of slowly ascending terror and macabre imagery.

Watch Under the Shadow on Amazon

Train to Busan (2016)

Just when you thought the zombie genre had been utterly exhausted, someone comes along and reinvigorates it. Director Yeon Sang-ho’s South Korean production brought something back to the genre that had been gradually draining out of it: humanity.

Sure there’s a bit of sentimentality too in this story of a father trying desperately to get his daughter to her mom by train as a zombie plague breaks out, but the movie’s well-drawn characters, subtle social commentary (some on the train feel they are more worthy of survival than others) and frightening action sequences add up to a thrilling and emotionally powerful ride.

Watch Train to Busan on Amazon

The Wailing (2016)

South Korea struck again with this epic-length (156 minutes!) story of possession and exorcism in a small village from director Na Hong-jin. Once again a father must fight to save his daughter’s life: in this case he is a cop (Kwak Dowon) investigating a series of mysterious and violent deaths, only to discover that they have a supernatural cause that soon infects his family.

Despite odd moments of humor here and there, The Wailing is almost unremittingly bleak and its imagery is thoroughly unsettling. Deliberately paced and building an atmosphere of unspeakable dread, The Wailing is a standout of Asian horror.

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The Invitation (2016)

This intense little psychological thriller from director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body) starts off as a weirdly off-kilter domestic melodrama and shifts disquietingly into outright paranoia as it explores the dynamics of grief, modern relationships and how well we really know our friends and neighbors.

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Kusama’s deft handling of the material and setting (an angular and eventually sinister L.A. house), as well as a superb cast (led by Logan Marshall-Green and Tammy Blanchard, with support from the always creepy John Carroll Lynch) elevate the standard dinner party thriller into something a bit more special. And the final scene is a knockout.

Watch The Invitation on Amazon

The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuring 2 is a rare example of a horror sequel equaling or even surpassing the original. This time the focus is more directly on paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) as their skills, courage and faith are tested by England’s famous Enfield Poltergeist.

Director James Wan once again proves himself a master at using negative space, sound (or lack thereof) and period detail to wring goosebumps out of even the most jaded viewer, and the deeper characterizations make the stakes that much higher as well. There are few horror “epics,” but The Conjuring 2 comes close to being one.

Watch The Conjuring 2 on Amazon

The Witch (2016)

A stunning feature film debut from director Robert Eggers, The Witch tells the story of a 17th century Puritan family who are excommunicated from their village and build their own farm on the edge of a vast forest — only to be preyed upon by an ancient, malevolent witch who lives deep in the woods. Touching on themes of religious persecution and mania, sexual awakening and humanity vs. nature, The Witch is a fully immersive and wholly terrifying experience.

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Director Robert Eggers maintains astonishing control of mood and texture throughout, and the entire cast — including newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy as the family’s teen daughter — seems eerily snatched out of the past. The Witch is classic supernatural horror.

Watch The Witch on Amazon Prime

The Visit (2015)

M. Night Shyamalan began a welcome and long-overdue comeback with this quirky and creepy little found-footage experiment, which focuses on a teen brother and sister who make an unforgettable and eventually terrifying trip to visit the grandparents they’ve never met.

Shyamalan seems comfortable working within the lower-budget confines of the Blumhouse scream factory, and he manages to inject both a nice streak of morbid humor and enough of his trademark character touches to keep us off-balance. The movie has an unsettling tone throughout and, for the first time in a long time, the “twist” is well-earned and shocking.

Watch The Visit on Amazon

It Follows (2014)

One of the best horror films of the past couple of years is, like all the genre’s standout entries, rich in metaphor and subtext – is the curse passed through sex among the movie’s characters a stand-in for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, or is the sex act itself a way to affirm life or at least postpone the inevitable onset of death? Writer/director David Robert Mitchell keeps it ambiguous – much to some viewers’ chagrin – and instead focuses on the movie’s overall atmosphere and tone, which is dream-like and full of dread.

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Lead actress Maika Monroe is a star in the making, but the most unforgettable thing about It Follows is its implacable walking phantoms, who cause your flesh to crawl every time they enter the frame.

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The Babadook (2014)

An instant classic upon its release, this Australian shocker is, astoundingly, the debut film from writer/director Jennifer Kent, who retains the kind of complete and unwavering grip on her story, themes and tone that you would expect from a much more seasoned filmmaker. Essie Davis is outstanding as Amelia, a widowed mother still reeling from the loss of her husband Oskar as she does her exhausted best to raise their troubled six-year-old son Sam (Noah Wiseman), who was born the night that Oskar died.

Enter the Babadook, the subject of a frightening storybook that Sam finds and an entity that is soon terrorizing mother and child. Thoroughly frightening and unnerving, The Babadook is also quite profound as it touches on the nature of grief and parenthood, hinting that both can drive a person to the edge of madness — or into the clutches of the Babadook.

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Oculus (2014)

Following his ultra-low-budget indie debut Absentia, writer/director Mike Flanagan expanded his short student film into this striking tale of supernatural and psychological terror. Karen Gillan (Doctor Who) stars as a woman who believes that an antique mirror has been responsible for the tragic history of her family, and sets out to destroy it by any means she can. The mirror, however, has other plans.

Set in two parallel timelines that eventually intersect, Oculus is original, creepy and filled with mounting tension; the film is steeped not just in the atmosphere of ‘70s horror cinema but also modern supernatural literature. With more features to his name since (including Ouija: Origin of Evil, his adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, and Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House) Flanagan is a talent to watch.

Watch Oculus on Amazon Prime

You’re Next (2013)

Home invasion movies can kind of be formulaic after a while, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett (The Guest) find a way to freshen it up by turning You’re Next into a macabre soap opera as well. In the meantime, however, there’s a ton of suspense and bloody mayhem to satiate fans of visceral horror, and the family dynamics at work make for a nice counterpoint to the terror.

The cast is terrific, a mix of horror vets (Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden) and mumblecore regulars, and Sharni Vinson is outstanding as the dinner guest with a secret of her own.

Watch You’re Next on Amazon

The Conjuring (2013)

A film about real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren had been in development for nearly 20 years — outlasting Ed himself — before finally coming to fruition in 2013 as The Conjuring. Based on a case the Warrens investigated concerning the haunting of a family farm by a witch, the film afforded director James Wan the change to take the horror skills he had honed on his previous project, Insidious, and apply them to a larger scale Hollywood production.

The result was a genuinely scary experience with plenty of atmosphere and just enough empathy for the family and the Warrens to elevate the movie about the usual shock tactics. It was also a major box office hit, making it that rare genre entry that was enjoyed by both critics and audiences.

Watch The Conjuring on Amazon

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Both a deconstruction of the genre and one of the 21st century’s best horror movies in its own right, The Cabin in the Woods could only be the work of Joss Whedon (co-writer) and Drew Goddard (co-writer and director), whose love and understanding of both the genre and the wider pop culture context around it make this one of the smartest satires in recent memory. Proposing that the standard template for a horror film is what keeps the real horrors at bay, the movie turns that formula on its head yet works it to maximum effect.

Goddard is assured in his directorial debut, the cast (including a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth and a brilliant Richard Jenkins as one of the weary “technicians” pulling the strings) is game, and the movie nails its meta premise perfectly.

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We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel and directed by Lynne Ramsay, We Need to Talk About Kevin is the perennial “evil child” story disguised as an arthouse film. But the combination works, thanks to Ramsay’s striking direction and imagery and two knockout performances by Tilda Swinton as the mother and a frightening Ezra Miller as Kevin. Swinton’s anguished portrayal deepens the film’s themes and offers a searing and complex picture of a parent’s occasional ambivalence toward their own child.

Yet the movie doesn’t skimp on its horrors either, both psychological and physical, and stretches the boundaries of what can be considered a horror movie.

Watch We Need to Talk About Kevin on Amazon

Kill List (2011)

With just one feature to his credit before this (Down Terrace), director and co-writer Ben Wheatley hits his second film clear out of the park, fashioning it into a mash-up of gritty crime thriller and chilling Lovecraftian horror tale. The result is a unique movie that’s not quite like anything else on this list and will you leave you shaken to the core. Two former British soldiers turned hit men (Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley) take a job in which they must kill three people — a priest, a video archivist, and a member of Parliament — but soon find out that they have gotten involved with something far beyond their experience and understanding.

The somber mood, ambiguous plot (Wheatley deliberately and correctly leaves much unexplained) and almost unwatchable bursts of violence come to a boil in the truly horrifying and enigmatic climax.

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Insidious (2011)

After one hit (Saw) and a couple of misses (Dead Silence and Death Sentence), writer/director James Wan and his writing partner Leigh Whannell scored with this tiny ($1 million budget) indie that became a huge hit (and sadly spawned two lousy follow-ups). But Insidious deserved its success: it’s a genuinely scary film, with Wan displaying a tremendous talent for utilizing the camera frame, darkness and silence to create an oppressive atmosphere of dread only enhanced by some truly bizarre manifestations.

In pulling tricks from all eras of horror, Wan came up with something original, terrifying and entertaining – a horror ride that all fans could enjoy.

Watch Insidious on Amazon

I Saw the Devil (2010)

Director Kim Ji-Woon (A Tale of Two Sisters) sends an intelligence agent (Lee Byung-hun) on a mission of vengeance against a sadistic serial killer (Choi Min-sik) in this shocking and stunningly depraved cat and mouse thriller in which all notions of morality go out the window along with numerous bloody body parts. Yet Kim keeps you invested in the characters as well, and this Korean epic has an undertone of sadness that’s hard to shake. Kim holds it all together masterfully, creating a horrifying experience like nothing else we saw the year it came out.

Watch I Saw The Devil on Amazon

The House of the Devil (2009)

Indie auteur Ti West’s homage to the horror movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s is replete with stylistic touches from both decades, ranging from the old-school opening credits to the use of zoom lenses to the 16mm film stock meant to look retro. But this isn’t just a pastiche: while The House of the Devil is the definition of a “slow burn” film — which may leave some viewers impatient — the payoff is worth it as babysitter Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is subjected to a night of Satanic horrors that will leave you shaken.

West is an expert at leading us along and then tightening the screws hard, and if you told me that The House of the Devil had actually come out around 1981 or so, I just might have believed you.

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Paranormal Activity (2009)

For better or worse, Oren Peli’s homemade, shoestring thriller kicked off a tidal wave of films using the “found footage” or “faux doc” style of moviemaking, an esthetic that has proven increasingly confining and exhausted. But there’s no denying the strength of a few early contenders, starting with this. Peli shows us almost nothing in terms of visual effects, which only heightens the experience: you can’t help but feel a powerful sense of dread every time his camera sits and stares into the shadowy abyss of the couple’s bedroom while they sleep.

Tons of sequels, rehashes and rip-offs later, Paranormal Activity remains authentically frightening and deserves its berth on a list of the century’s best horror movies.

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Let the Right One In / Let Me In (2008/2010)

In an era of endless bloodsucking YA hotties, leave it to an 11-year-old girl to create the best and eeriest vampire seen on the screen in years. Based on a novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist and directed by fellow Swede Tomas Alfredson, this is the story of the friendship that grows between lonely, bullied 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and the little girl who lives in the apartment next door, Eli (Lina Leandersson) — an ancient vampire inside the body of a child. Let the Right One In is scary, funny, romantic and also quite mournful, tackling themes of youth, sexuality, loyalty, loss of innocence and love within a terrific and haunting vampire tale.

The two child actors are outstanding, with Leandersson projecting an otherworldliness and weariness far beyond her years. Credit is also due to the English-language remake by director Matt Reeves, who stayed largely faithful to the original while tweaking its meaning slightly (his actors, Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee, are fine if not quite as good as the Swedish cast).

Watch Let the Right One In here and Let Me In here!

Martyrs (2008)

Brutal and almost unwatchable, Martyrs represented perhaps the apex of the French extreme horror movement. A young woman (Morjana Alaoui) finds herself the subject of vicious “tests” by a secret society, aimed at creating a “martyr” whose suffering can give them a transcendental glimpse into the afterlife. The ordeal she goes through is just the grand finale of a nihilistic exercise in depravity. Director Pascal Laugier’s plunge into unrelieved sadism is given context by its powerful, eerie climax — if you can make it to the end.

Watch Martyrs on Amazon Prime

The Strangers (2008)

Writer and director Bryan Bertino made quite a splash with his debut feature, which relied more on a mounting sense of dread and escalating suspense than violence and gore. The story is a simple, straightforward home invasion narrative, but Bertino keeps it creepy and unsettling throughout thanks to some eerie imagery and his three terrifying antagonists. Bertino has directed some features since – the direct-to-video found footage thriller Mockingbird and The Monster – but The Strangers remains an impressively chilling calling card.

Watch The Strangers on Amazon

Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

Michael Dougherty’s Halloween-themed anthology sat on the shelf for nearly two years until finally (and criminally) getting just a direct-to-home-video release, but the wait was worth it. Dougherty wrote and directed a loving homage not just to the year’s most haunted holiday, but to horror movies and ghost stories in general, delivering four interconnected tales that each serve as a nasty, creepy and thoroughly entertaining exercise in traditional horror, with just the right amounts of atmosphere, scares and gore.

A lot of the best horror movies of this century aim to get under your skin in an unpleasant way, whereas Trick ‘R Treat just wants to have fun – and does.

Watch Trick ‘r Treat on Amazon

[REC] (2007)

This nasty shock to the system from Spanish horror specialist Jaume Balaguero uses the “found footage” style in logical fashion, as it’s told from the point of view of a news team that accompanies a fire brigade to a call at an apartment building. Things quickly take a turn not just for the bad but for the unspeakable as our heroes confront a zombie plague of a horrific nature, and [REC] rubs your nose in every nightmarish moment. The building itself is a spectacular, claustrophobic setting, and what [REC] lacks in meaningful character development it makes up in relentless terror and dread.

Take a good, stiff drink before watching.

Watch [REC] on Amazon

The Mist (2007)

A faithful and pretty great Stephen King adaptation, The Mist is terrifying not just for the macabre monsters that come streaming out of the title cloud to lay siege on a small group of people trapped in a supermarket, but for the way those people turn so quickly on each other as well.

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Writer/director Frank Darabont, nailing his third King-based adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, innately understands that King’s stories are often so disquieting because of the human monsters in them as well as the slimy, tentacled ones. In this case the threat is Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a religious fanatic who quickly does her best to divide the supermarket into two hostile camps — I’ll let you work out the metaphors.

Beyond that, however, The Mist is a genuinely scary monsterpalooza, with one of the bleakest endings ever. When you go even darker than the King original, that’s saying something.

Watch The Mist on Amazon Prime

The Orphanage (2006)

The debut feature from Spanish director J.A. Bayona (The Impossible) was produced by his friend Guillermo Del Toro, and frankly feels like it. It certainly has many of the hallmarks of Del Toro’s own Spanish-language horror films, with its focus on children, its marvelously atmospheric setting, its short bursts of shocking violence and its ghostly apparitions.

Either way, it’s a rich, beautifully crafted film that becomes unexpectedly and powerfully emotional at the finish. Belen Rueda is sensational as Laura, who returns to her childhood home — an old orphanage — with her husband and adopted son, only to find that it is not exactly empty. An English-language remake was planned for a long time, but perhaps fortunately, it has not happened.

Watch The Orphanage on Amazon

The Descent (2005)

Six women go exploring an unmapped cave system, with tragic and terrifying consequences, in writer/director Neil Marshall’s (Dog Soldiers) riveting horror hit. Marshall subverts the genre with his strong all-female cast (not a male hero in sight), refusing to dumb them down, but then puts the screws to them by introducing the blind humanoid inhabitants of the caves, surely one of the most horrific monster creations of the decade.

The movie is unstoppably scary, showing no mercy to the characters or the audience (one shock early in the film makes this writer jump to this day), but also examines how far people will go to survive in seemingly impossible circumstances. The Descent is a harrowing, suffocating masterpiece.

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Shaun of the Dead (2004)

This loving homage to the films of George A. Romero — the father of the modern zombie movie — and to the horror genre in general launched the careers of director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost outside of the U.K. And deservedly so: Shaun is a near-perfect blend of horror and comedy, energized by Wright’s visceral style of directing and flavored with clever pop culture and genre references that are even more delicious if you’re a fan.

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Pegg and Frost are perfect as two slackers who must contend with a zombie apocalypse — two of the least likely but most endearingly goofy heroes you’ll ever meet.

Watch Shaun of the Dead on Amazon

Saw (2004)

Saw is now so closely associated with the torture porn genre that its numerous sequels almost singlehandedly gave birth to that people often don’t remember that the original is more of a suspenseful police procedural and genuinely gripping puzzlebox than an outright exercise in sadism. Not that Saw is a sitting-room drama either: there are plenty of visceral moments in the film, and even in his feature debut, director James Wan (The Conjuring) displays a surprising amount of control and confidence in his handling of the horrors.

Saw may or may not be a truly great film, but its influence is enormous and it still packs one of the best endings the genre has ever seen.

Watch Saw on Amazon

28 Days Later (2002)

Looking at Danny Boyle’s revisionist zombie film now, its grimy handheld video esthetic is getting perhaps just a wee bit dated — but even that fails to dilute the sheer aggressive energy of Boyle’s take on the horror genre.

The movie, like its spiritual forefather Night of the Living Dead, is also rich in political and social subtext, while balancing moments of outright terror with passages of almost poetic reflection. Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland expertly reinvigorated a subgenre that had been nearly moribund, paving the way for both the superb (The Walking Dead) and the silly (the film version of World War Z).

Watch 28 Days Later on Amazon

The Ring (2002)

It was a foregone conclusion that the Japanese horror smash Ringu (1998), after becoming an underground sensation internationally, would be the subject of a big-budget Hollywood remake. But who imagined it would be this good? Director Gore Verbinski and writers Scott Frank and Ehren Kruger retain the original’s focus on atmosphere and creepy imagery over cheap scares, while Naomi Watts — fresh off her sensational turn in Mulholland Drive — is excellent as the reporter and mother who discovers the haunted videotape that causes viewers to die in seven days.

The American version fleshes out a few more narrative points that the Japanese film left ambiguous, but never wavers from its tone of quietly mounting terror. There have been plenty of J-horror remakes in the wake of The Ring, but it remains the first and the best.

Watch The Ring on Amazon

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Debate rages (even now, between this writer and his editor) over whether Mulholland Drive is actually a horror movie, but the simple truth is that filmmaking legend David Lynch has incorporated elements of horror into many of his films. No one comes as close to capturing the essence of a nightmare on screen, and Mulholland Drive contains two of the century’s most skin-freezing scenes: the infamous diner sequence and the discovery of a decomposing corpse in a darkened apartment.

Even if the plot didn’t invoke the genre in other ways — including a supernatural force at work in Hollywood and the Repulsion-like disintegration of a young woman’s mind — those two scenes would be enough to earn a spot on this list.

Watch Mulholland Drive on Amazon

The Others (2001)

Alejandro Amenabar (Open Your Eyes) wrote and directed this elegant ghost story. Nicole Kidman is superb as Grace, who relocates herself and her two small children to a remote country estate in the aftermath of World War II. Their highly structured life — the children are sensitive to sunlight and must stay in darkened rooms — is shattered by mysterious presences in the house. Amenabar relies on mood, atmosphere and a few well-placed scares to make this an excellent modern-day companion to classics like The Haunting and The Innocents.

Watch The Others on Amazon Prime

Session 9 (2001)

“Location, location, location” is what makes this tiny independent chiller from writer/director Brad Anderson (The Machinist) work so well and keeps its reputation intact. A five-man asbestos abatement team is hired to clean out the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, but the crew, led by the stressed-out Gordon (Peter Mullan), soon finds itself at the mercy of both personal tensions and an unseen force inside the facility.

Anderson shot the movie at the real Danvers, and the empty treatment rooms and labyrinthine underground tunnels create an undeniable atmosphere of disquiet and uncertainty. The nearly gore-free movie is a model of how a fantastic setting, a solid cast and an almost complete lack of jump scares can make for a thoroughly haunting viewing experience.

Watch Session 9 on Amazon

The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

Guillermo Del Toro has made several great movies in his career so far, but for our money this remains his best, scariest and most profoundly affecting work (Pan’s Labyrinth is a close, close second). The Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story set during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, at an orphanage for boys where an unexploded bomb is embedded in the courtyard and a spirit is wandering the halls at night.

The movie is drenched in both a heavy atmosphere of dread and a blanket of sadness; its mournful elegance counterbalances some of its more chilling scenes of terror. This is dark supernatural storytelling at its finest and a marvelous example of just how high the horror genre — so often maligned by critics — can reach.

Watch The Devil’s Backbone on Amazon

Kairo (2001)

Films like Ringu and Juon were the cornerstones of the Japanese horror explosion of the late ‘90s, but for my money, Kairo is the pinnacle of that era. Director/writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film is one of the most unnerving exercises in surreal horror ever made, with one frightening image after another washing onto the screen. Although the movie’s central idea – -that the realm of the dead is infiltrating our world through the internet – is original and compelling, its presentation is somewhat murky. But Kurosawa doesn’t necessarily feel the need to spell things out: he wants to instead lure you into a living nightmare – which Kairo accomplishes over and over again.

Watch Kairo on Amazon

That’s our list — did we miss any of your favorites that you’d like to add? Let us know below!

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apatheticmaplesyrup · 7 years

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1-100

Thank you :D

This is gonna be a long post so continue at your own peril.

Is a kiss considered cheating?If it’s a proper snog, yeah.

Have you ever faked orgasm?Yeah.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be?Probably.

Do you think you are going to be rich in 7-8-9 years?I don’t know if I’ll be rich, but hopefully rich enough to live comfortably.

Tell us some funny drunk story.I don’t think I really have any funny ones :’)

Why are you no longer together with your ex?I don’t know that there was a particular reason, it just didn’t work out.

If you had to choose one way to die, what would it be? Natural causes.

What are your current goals?To get through uni and get a 2:1/1st, and try to lower my body fat (mainly for health right now).

Do you like someone?I don’t know, I think I might but I’m not sure.

Who was the last person to disappoint you?Myself for not going to the gym when I’ve got a membership and keep saying I will.

Do you like your body?I don’t like how it looks overall, but there are good parts to me. It’s worked relatively fine so far, so I’m happy with that.

Can you keep a diet?Not unless I can get past the first month of it.

If the whole world listened to you right now, what would you say?Did Barry the Bee really have sexual relations with Vanessa, and did Ken ever get to have yoghurt night?

Do you work?No.

If you could choose only one food to eat to the rest of your life, what would it be?Chicken wraps probably.

Would you get a tattoo?Yeah, I want one but I’m just not sure what to start with.

Something you don’t mind spending all your money on?Food.

Can you drive?Yes.

When was the last time someone told you you were beautiful?Idk man it’s been a while. *tiny violin plays in the distance*

What was the last thing you cried for?I think I was just really sad and really tired, there was no real trigger.

Do you keep a journal?Nope.

Is life fun?It can be sometimes. It can also be a lot of effort.

Is farting in front of people irrelevant?I don’t know what this means by irrelevant but I don’t think it matters much unless it’s a crowded area.

What’s your dream car?This changes, but I do really want a Dodge Charger (either a 1970s one or the 2014 model)

Are grades in school important?Yes, because it can affect what direction you take for your career (i.e. choosing if/where to go to university), but it’s not the most important thing. You can get bad grades and still be successful and happy in life.

Describe your crush.Really chilled out, similar sense of humour to me and just quite easy to be around.

What was the last book/movie that really impressed you?I’m listening to the audiobook “How to Build a Universe: An Infinite Monkey Cage Adventure” by Brian Cox, Robin Ince and Alexandra Feachem. It’s impressive how they can talk about and explain these theories about space and time in a way that is accessible and often comedic.

What was your last lie?Probably something like “I can’t come out, I have a lot of work to do”.

Dumbest lie you ever told? When I was a kid, my mum caught me playing my Gameboy when I wasn’t supposed to, and I tried to lie and say I didn’t even though I clearly was.

Is crying in front of people embarrassing?I don’t feel comfortable doing it because a lot of people do judge others when they cry in public, but if it’s people I know then I don’t really feel it should be embarrassing.

Something you did and you are proud of?Cleaned and decorated my room in my new house.

What’s your favourite cocktail?I’d probably still go with long islands, purely because I haven’t found another one that I love yet.

Something you are good at?Complaining.

Do you like small kids?I don’t mind them, I’m just terrible at dealing with them.

How are you feeling right now?Like I should be writing my essay rather than procrastinating :’)

What would you name your daughter/son?I don’t have a clue.

What do you need to be happy?Financial and emotional stability and a healthy relationship.

Is there some you want to punch in the face right now?Not right now, I’m feeling pretty chill.

What was the last gift you received?GTA 5 from my friends for my birthday

What was the last gift you gave?It was just a £20 playstation store card and we made him cocktails as well.

What was the last concert you went to?The Community Festival in Finsbury Park

Favourite place to shop at?Blue Inc.

Who inspires you?My parents, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

How old were you when you first got drunk?18.

How old were you when you first got high?Still haven’t.

How old were you when you first had sex?16.

When was your first kiss?When I was 14 or 15.

Something you want to do until the end of this year?Come up with ideas for music videos and sketches.

Is there something in the past you wish you hadn’t done?Yes.

Post a selfie.Really not feeling it today, sorry.

Who are you most comfortable around?@robbiesheehanigan, @lucashaggettphotography, @i-dw and @th4t-f33ling

Name one thing that terrifies you.Heights.

What kind of books do you read?I usually read fantasy books, but books about space are also great.

What would you tell your 12 year old self?Get into a sport, it’ll help you in the future.

What is your favourite flower?Chrysanthemums.

Any bad habits you have?Oh yes. Definitely.

What kind of people are you attracted to?People who are kind, I’m comfortable being around, have a similar sense of humour, and I don’t really know apart from there being ‘something’ that makes them attractive to me.

Is there something you don’t eat? Some food that truly disgust you?Other than cod, I don’t really like seafood. I also really don’t like olives.

Are you in love?No.

Something you find romantic?Sitting in front of a fire together somewhere scenic and toasting marshmallows. Also stargazing.

How long was your longest relationship? About 4 years.

What are 3 things that irritate you about the same sex?What are 3 things that irritate you about the opposite sex? I’m just going to say three things in general.1 - When people are unnecessarily rude to waiting/bar staff.2 - When people only want to do things their way or no way, with no contingency plan or even listening to what other people have to say, even if it’s valid.3 - People who say they’ll do something, and constantly don’t.

What are you saving money for?A car or a new camera.

How would you describe your bad side?Rude, nasty to people, and short-tempered.

Are you actually a good person? Why?I hope so, but I don’t know how to judge that. I think I’m probably just a neutral person.

What are you living for?To see what happens next.

Have you ever done anything illegal?Aha, nice try cops

Have you ever made someone feel bad about themselves intentionally?I probably have and can’t remember, so I’m sorry to anyone who I may have done that to.

Ever sent nudes?Nah I’m not that confident :’)

Have you ever cheated on someone?No.

Favourite candy?I could always go for a bounty or kit-kat.

Is there a blog you visit every day, or almost every day? Tag it!Not really, I mostly just look at my timeline.

Do you play any computer games? What is your favourite game?I do, I started playing Dark Souls 3 recently and it’s really fun but I’m not particularly good at it. My favourite game changes but I think the one I’ve always liked is Tom Clancy’s Hawx.

Favourite TV series?I still really like Community, though Tokyo Ghoul and Stranger Things are also amazing.

Are you religious? Does God exist?I used to be but now I’m not so much. I think there might be some type of higher power, but I don’t definitively believe that there is or isn’t.

What was the last book you read? Did it impress you and why?I answered this with the one about a book that’s impressed me :)

What do you think about vegetarianism/veganism?I think vegetarianism is admirable, probably more ethically correct and environmentally friendly. I don’t really know enough about veganism to make an informed comment, but it’d probably be a similar opinion.

How long have you been on Tumblr?Probably like 5 years or so. I think I had it before then but never used it.

Do you like Chinese food?Yes.

McDonalds or Subway?McDonalds

Vodka or whiskey?Straight whiskey, vodka if it’s with a mixer

Alcohol or drugs?Alcohol

Ever been out of your province/state/country?Yes

Meaning behind your blog name?I watched Stranger Things 2 and Steve as the babysitter is my favourite thing. Also the last scene where he’s giving Dustin a pep talk is brilliant.

What are you scared of?Heights. A lot of other things too, but let’s just go with heights.

Last time you were insulted?Probably earlier today (part of banter with my friends)

Most traumatic experience ?I have no idea, probably the many times I ran into the door frame when I was younger.

Perfect date idea?Dinner and a movie (even if it’s at home) is a great idea. Stargazing and a campfire (and obviously food) would also be amazing, but I feel like that’d be once I know them a little better.

Favourite app on your phone?The Clock app, I would probably not wake up on time without it.

What colour are the walls in your room?White

Do you watch Youtube? Who is your favourite youtuber?I watch YouTube, I’ve always loved Markiplier because he’s a lovely person (though I haven’t really watched his videos recently). I really like Shane and Ryan in Buzzfeed Supernatural.

Share your favourite quote.L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle

What is the meaning of life?I feel like that’s a question for Google.

Do you like horror movies?Not really, I can watch them and I think some of them are great, but I get scared by them really easily.

Have you ever made your mum cry? What happened?Yeah, I think the most recent time was when I turned 21 and/or came back to uni.

Do you feel lucky or special in a way?Yeah, I’ve lived quite a good life. I have an amazing family who have always looked after me and shown me love, and I think I’m lucky to have that.

Can you keep a secret?Probably, depends on the secret. You got a confession to make?

Thank you for asking :) Also @robbiesheehanigan someone else also did the 1 to 100 thing so here you go xo

#this is a long post #soz #ask #answer

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