There was a bumper crop of horror films this 2016, and news of a person dying of a heart attack during a horror film (probably a marketing gimmick though) contribute to the fact that it was literally a horrific 2016, even if you didn’t count all the disastrous events that happened during the year.
But let’s just focus on horror. The best horror films are those that linger in your subconscious for months, popping out only at the most inopportune moments, like when you’re walking down a dark alley at night. Which ones still give your the shivers even though 2017 is coming? Here they are.
This psychological horror film turned out to be an actual supernatural horror film just when you least expected it, and that was the beauty of it all. After being cooped up in the house with Michelle and Howard, you slowly believe that this is all just a ploy to mess with your mind. Then “10 Cloverfield Lane” springs its final surprise on you and woah!
It makes you doubt the conclusions and beliefs that you have established, which heightens the fear – if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?
It’s a very simple concept – a creature that only has power in the dark. It uses visuals that are eerily similar to what we see in the dark. Was that some movement we saw, or was it just our eyes adjusting to the light? Is that a person in the darkness, or is it just the combination of furniture that makes it seem that way?
“Lights Out” left me a little nervous every time I switched off the lights to go to sleep, and a hurried reminder to my brain to become unconscious lest I see what lurks in the dark.
The monster came a little bit out of nowhere, story-wise, but during the preview, I saw several people leave the cinema halfway. I also didn’t mean to finish my popcorn as fast as I did, but I polished it off pretty quickly. I think that speaks volumes of the tension that the film built up in you, rather than the lingering horror in other films.
It also had frightful surprises in spades. Another friend can never forget the face of the ghost. And when you have ushers dressing up as that ghost and helping you in the dark (as they did at the preview), yeesh. “The Conjuring 2” sure kept up the scary standards.
You were always ready to catch some sign of movement in “The Boy”, even if that never explicitly happened on screen. The big twist of the film was also the most frightening one, and having to deal with what has happening on screen and revising your interpretation of earlier events was mentally taxing, contributing to the fear factor in the film.
It’s such a simple, innocuous title. But this was probably the cleverest horror film of the year.
“The Blair Witch Project” kept me up when I watched it so many years ago, and “Blair Witch” jangled my nerves after I watched it. I was on edge for at least a week after watching the film, and it was in broad daylight some more. The found footage style lent itself well to cameras focusing wildly in the dark, as you prepared yourself for anything that might attack though the darkness.
And those tents suddenly exploding upwards into the air and vanishing. It’s unexplained events like these that made “Blair Witch” the most scary film of the year.
So what about you? What scared your socks off? Leave a comment about your most feared film!
Marcus Goh is a Singapore television scriptwriter. He’s also a Transformers enthusiast and avid pop culture scholar. He Tweets/Instagrams at Optimarcus and writes at marcusgohmarcusgoh.com. The views expressed are his own.
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I peed my pants while watching conjuring 2 but none of the other ones.
That must have made a mess.
when i watched the conjuring i really peed my pants