There’s a popular belief that 2016 was a bad year for movies. Not so much. True, the summer was a grim season packed to the brim with unwelcome reboots and sequels, but overall, if you branched out from the Top 10 box office contenders, there has been plenty to love. Nowhere is that truer than in the horror genre, which utterly thrived in 2016 with a year-long calendar packed with one surprising, thrilling release after the next. Historically speaking, horror has always thrived in times of hardship, perhaps that’s why in a year when everything seemed to go wrong, the horror line-up went so right.
Overseas and stateside alike, horror filmmakers brought their A-game, toying with tropes and conventions to deliver innovative spins on well-worn genre staples like zombies, witches, and home invasion. At the same time, horror is a genre that has always offered tremendous opportunity for original, adult storytelling beyond the shackles of mass appeal and the 2016 lineup was no slouch in that regard with a string of terrifying takes on grief, mortality, and religion. It was also an exceptional year for women in horror, both behind the camera and in front, proving we’ve largely left behind the days of shrieking bottle-blondes with big boobs in favor of something much richer, and ultimately, much scarier. It was also an exceptional year for movie titles starting with “The”, but that’s neither here nor there.
With so much greatness on the table, Chris Cabin and I teamed up to look back at our favorites from the year. And only favorites had room to make the cut, meaning plenty of entertaining fare likeThe Conjuring 2, Lights Out, Hush,The Autopsy of Jane DoeandSouthbound, to name a few, didn’t make the cut even though they likely would have ranked in any other year. But without further ado, here are our picks for the best horror movies of 2016.
Ouija: Origins of Evil
The originalOuijawas about as thrilling as an extended marathon of pencil sharpening, largely due to a deeply formulaic, fright-free screenplay and a severe lack of vision. It wasn’t exactly the Platinum Dunes School of Grim, Safe Horseshit, but it wasn’t much better.Ouija: Origin of Evil, however, not only brandishes a far more honed script fromJeff Howard, but also has style to spare thanks to co-writer and directorMike Flanagan, the man behindHushandOculus; Howard also wrote the latter. Flanagan uses a scrappy, convincing production design – kudos toPatricio M. Farrell– period wardrobe, and his performers, includingElizabeth ReaserandAnnalise Basso, to evoke the time and its social constraints. Basso’s teen is attempting to find herself and starting to get, er, intimate with a cute boy when her sister is possessed, while Reaser’s single mother of two is just barely making ends meet as a spiritualist-schemer. The evil force that begins to press down on them is certainly something outside the routine, but having to struggle against an unending, unreasonable situation must be awfully familiar. –Chris Cabin
The Shallows
BlessJaume Collet-Serraand his respect for a good B-Movie. TheOrphanandHouse of Waxdirector brings his cheeky sensibilities to the terrors of mother nature withThe Shallows, a simple, direct, and incredibly effective thriller that lands just about square in the middle betweenJawsandSharknadoon the sharksploitation scale. The film followsBlake Livelyas Nancy, a young med school dropout mourning the death of her mother by way of surfing pilgrimage to her mom’s favorite secret beach. There, she meets two fellow surfing enthusiasts, a seagull, and a giant fucking shark. And that’s pretty much the movie. The other surfers are obviously shark food (the trailer doesn’t even try to hide this) and the rest of the movie follows Nancy through her various attempts to make it off the isolated rock that’s keeping her safe before the high tide leaves her completely defenseless. That lean narrative is part of what makes the film so effective – it’s laser-focused on making you squirm in your seat – andAnthony Jawinski’s tight scripting is complemented by playful camerawork from Collet-Serra, who is always half in the water, half below, demanding you keep vigilant watch until the moment the great white finally attacks, blood is drawn, and everything just gets downright crazy. –Haleigh Foutch
The Purge: Election Year
Okay, so it’s not exactly as efficient asThe Purge: Anarchywas, as both a horror movie and an action flick. Still,Election Yearconfidently expanded on the world ofAnarchyand was rife with ugly, enraged images of a blood-lusting nation that so perfectly reflects Donald Trump’s America. (Quiet down, you comment trolls: I know it came out before he was elected.)Frank Grilloreestablished his bonafides as a convincing, engaging leading-man type as his Leo protectsElizabeth Mitchell’s Senator Roan against a hoard of angry Christian conservatives and general homicidal lunatics on the revered, revolting Purge Night. The costumes and various implements of death are a rousing, terrifying cornucopia of pop-culture refractions, but the movie never seems indulgent in its depictions of pain, torture, and death. More importantly, the movie’s narrative feels ripe for a continued expansion, making the franchise something like kinfolk toGeorge Romero’s unimpeachableDeadseries. –Chris Cabin
The Invitation
Greif is a bitch. The loss of a loved one, especially those most tragic, will leave you coiled in the icy hot grip of despair and if you’re not careful you can drag the people you love down with you into the bitter cold.The Invitationis horror by way of grief, a real-life ghost story about how we are haunted not by specters and ghouls, but by the places we’ve been, the moments we’ve shared, and the incapacitating guilt of what we might have done differently. In directorKaryn Kusama’s hands, it’s also a needling exploration of social anxieties and the quotidian horrors of polite society dinner parties. Working from a script byPhil HayandMatt Manfredi, Kusama combines the two into a fever-pitch paranoia whenLogan Marshall-Green’s Will andTammy Blanchard’s Eden are reunited for the first time in years after the death of their young son on the night of a fateful dinner party. Neither of them is dealing with their grief well, but the film makes it clear that one of them is crazy and Kusama has fun stringing you along, leaving either option open until the film’s brutal end. To top it all off,The Invitationboasts a delightfully cheeky stinger that feels likeTwilight Zoneby way of Beverly Hills. –Haleigh Foutch
The Monster
Bryan Bertinohad a pretty impossible task in front of him when he turned toThe Monster: follow up the new cult classic that isThe Strangers. Instead of going bigger with his long-delayed second feature, he enriched the simple story of a mother, her daughter, and a strange, savage beast with a familiar, if still affective portrait of addiction. Bertino’s pacing is a showcase virtue of his craft, butThe Monsterowes most of its success toZoe KazanandElla Ballentine, as the ever-inebriated mother and resilient daughter who must survive a few hours in a broken-down car. The fight to not be consumed whole by the murky, ferocious beast is a peer inside one woman’s will to survive in the face of motherhood and emotional ruin. The end result is not particularly hopeful, but Bertino and his two actresses summon a primal understanding of instinctual protection and how maternity is guided as much by impulse as societal dictations. –Chris Cabin
Possession becomes a link to historical reckoning inMarcin Wrona’s unnerving take on the Jewish myth of the dybbuk, a restless, chaotic spirit who takes hold of a living person. Here, the unsteady binds that tie Poland to Europe in the wake of the Holocaust, are reflected in the wedding between a Polish woman and her Londoner groom, which is uprooted when a member of the wedding party begins to lash out in unusual ways, speaking about age-old happenings. Like with the best horror, there is plenty of humor, and the sting of modern capitalistic ruthlessness and the selfishness that often comes with unrequited love are constantly invoked. They feed into the feeling of a powerful but not necessarily malevolent force whose outrage and confusion can turn a gorgeous catered affair into flaming wreckage forged by human frailty and the unvanquishable, blood-drenched crimes that have shaped history. –Chris Cabin
Don’t Breathe
Fede Alvarezshowed some major chutzpah when he made his English-language feature debut by tackling the impossible – a remake of the venerated classicEvil Dead. This year he raised the stakes even higher with a hard-R original tale of home invasion gone horribly awry in his staggering box office hit,Don’t Breathe. Reuniting with hisEvil Deadfinal girlJane Levy, Alavarez put her through a new box of horrors this time around, pitting her againstStephen Lang’s ferocious, sinewy Blind Man.Don’t Breathe’s scripting is subpar and logically baffling, and the story is a relentlessly nasty and bleak showing for humanity’s dim morality, but Alvarez directs the hell out of it with clear action, cleverly constructed visual gags, and quite possibly the best use the killer dog trope in recent memory.
The Alchemist Cookbook
Fans ofThe Evil Deadmay feel some quick kinship to this exhilarating oddity fromJoel Potrykus, in which a young, isolated, and heavily medicated man named Sean loses his pills and seemingly encounters the legions of hell in the process. Credit newcomerTy Hicksonfor fearlessly bringing the self-inflicted damage, confusion, and never-ending anxiety of mental health out so convincingly, with just the right dollop of pulp embellishment. His interactions with his cousin, played by a scene-stealingAmari Cheatom, are uproarious but also increasingly upsetting, as the would-be alchemist slides into a state of constant paranoia and distrust of his own body. This leads to some pretty harrowing scenes of self-mutilation and unchecked, uncontainable rage butThe Alchemist Cookbookis not out to gross anyone out necessarily. The director wants to seek empathy and understanding of even the most misbegotten souls, those who speak with the devil and prove inevitably incapable of controlling it. –Chris Cabin
Train to Busan
Boy howdy has it been a long time since I got excited about a zombie movie, but writer-directorSang-Ho Yeontakes a concept as reductive as “zombies on a train” and turns it into a propulsive, action-packed, and surprisingly touching spin on the burnt out genre. The story centers around a selfish businessman and his neglected daughter when she begs him to take her home to her mother for her birthday. They board the train just as the world is falling to the zombie apocalypse, and Yeon always makes it feel like there’s never a second to spare. One wrong step, one missed opportunity, and our characters become raging, contorting flesh-eaters. These zombies aren’t just fast, they’re rabid and remarkably infectious (and surprisingly, they pull off that zombie wave thing that was so ridiculous inWorld War Z). Along the way, they team up with a fantastic cast of secondary characters that you actually give a flying hoot about, especiallyDong-seok Ma’s Sang Hwa, a buff badass and father to be who’ll do whatever it takes to protect what he loves. The film gets a little heavy-handed with the “selfishness is bad” motif at points, but it’s never enough to drag down the breathless action or commanding characters. –Haleigh Foutch
I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the Housedoesn’t have much in the way of story, but what it lacks in narrative, it makes up in atmospheric chills and slow-burn dread. That said, if you like your horror with propulsive action, move right along to the next entry because this one’s definitely not for everyone. It is, however, one of the closest experiences you can have to watching a nightmare’s played out on screen. Writer-directorOz Perkinsnever gets flashy or too-clever with his tale. Instead, he sets a simple table well and with elegance. Told in dulcet, almost whispered voiceovers byRuth Wilson’s hospice nurse, Lily, the film makes two things clear from the start — ghosts are real, and Lily is about to become one. What follows is the slow unraveling of how that came to pass when she takes a job caring for an elderly author who specializes in ghost stories, and her life is becoming intertwined with one of the author’s most famous tales. As always, Wilson is enchanting on screen and her terror is always convincing. But it’s the droning dread that takes centers stage as a fluid, oppressive fear born from the innate terror of dying. See, the movie is more about mortality than ghosts (though it’s got one or two chilling visual gags up its sleeve), and the unavoidable fact that death waits, unrelenting, for us all. –Haleigh Foutch
