Who doesn’t love a good scare? If you enjoy wetting your pants in the cinema, then horror movies are an excellent choice. 2015 didn’t see all that many horror movies, but we did get some clever twists on the horror genre. So here’s a look at the 6 movies that didn’t let you sleep after watching them.
The year began with a fright from home in the form of Singapore horror flick “Bring Back the Dead.” Asian horror is always good at making you feel uncomfortable in the very places that you’re supposed to feel safe and secure, and this was no different in instilling dread in the most familiar of places.
But it was the motivations behind the haunting that were both touching and horrific. The love of a mother, taken to its darkest extreme, was what summoned the evil that resided within the house — and it took another mother’s love to quell this monstrosity.
An entire horror film that takes place on a Mac screen? That’s what “Unfriended” managed to accomplish, although it did have the whole cast video chatting at the same time, so it wasn’t entirely just clicks and websites. The mundane computer errors that we take for granted everyday took on a whole new level of terror as it turned out to be the work of the antagonist in the film.
What made it worse was the brutal murders of each character, seen only through the fuzzy, jerky web camera screens of each person’s laptop. It left much up to the imagination, which only got worse whenever a video would lag.
“Out of the Dark” was nothing fancy, but it still managed to scare us silly. It used traditional scare tactics to make us increasingly nervous at all the quiet, empty places that the protagonists headed into. Although it had dated special effects, it didn’t quite dampen the overall scare factor of the film.
And it also gave us an insight into the “Seventh Month” style celebrations of other cultures. Seeing the family immersed in a world of the unknown just heightened the horror, since the unfamiliarity of their surroundings added to the general creepiness of the location.
“Ju-On 4: The Final Curse” might not have been as good as the other “Ju-On” films, but it’s still a scary film in its own right. The pale white visage of young Toshio, coupled with his intense stare, will forever be an iconic horror image. And what the film did to capitalise on this was to give us an elevator full of Toshios screaming back at the protagonist.
It did give us some ludicrous moments though, such as ghosts appearing in the weirdest of places, like a bowl of soup. Ultimately it was the more classic scares that, while not so imaginative, worked the best.
It’s rare to see a film, especially horror, that relies more on practical effects than digital effects. But that’s what “Harbinger Down” did with its alien monster. The claustrophobic ship, which somehow always seemed to be in the dark, also added to the fear of the unknown.
And when the monster rose, it didn’t seem as flawless as the usual ghosts are these days. Thanks to the costumes and props, and also the fact that we never really got quite a clear look at it, the alien turned out to be more realistic than anything a computer could have cooked up.
And finally, we have “Bone Tomahawk.” It didn’t start off as a horror film — in fact, it’s billed as a Western, and there’s hardly a tinge of the supernatural or science fiction in the film. This made it all the more terrifying when we saw just how savage the cannibals could be.
They tore their victims apart in the most painful of ways, literally ripping the skin and hair off their victims. The fact that there was no way to communicate with the cannibals just compounded the horror. They looked human, but were monstrously inhuman in the way they ate their prey.
So what were your scariest horror films of 2015?
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