Mama was, by all accounts, supposed to be THE horror movie of 2013. The various trailers with the two little girls and the long stringy hair covering their faces walking up and down walls, sleeping underneath their beds, and possessing the characteristics of a wild animal were sure to get the hairs on the back of your neck up. Attaching Guillermo del Toro’s name to the credits as a producer doesn’t hurt the scare factor either. Mama was another movie that forced me to buy into the hype. It looked like my kind of movie. It starred one of my favorite actresses, Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Help), and it appeared creepy. This movie looked like a winner. It also didn’t hurt when my high school students said, after opening weekend, that it was both “good” and “scary.” Well…the movie wasn’t good, but it did have its share of scary moments. There wasn’t anything unexpected, but there were still moments when you felt like you were sitting on pins and needles. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what the scariest movie of 2013 was, but it certainly was not Mama.
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Category Archives: Horror
Sinister (2012)
Sinister is easily the creepiest movie of 2012, a year that did not feature much in terms of great horror movies. It was a movie that I thought I would easily pass on when I first saw the previews. I knew for sure I would not be seeing it in the theater. Ethan Hawke is a good actor who can sometimes be incredible (Training Day, Before Sunset) but also lay some serious duds (Brooklyn’s Finest, The Getaway). Seeing him in a horror film was a change for him and one I didn’t think he would be good at. I’ll be the first to say that I was wrong. He did well in this movie.
World War Z (2013)
World War Z is, hands down, the best movie for the first half of 2013. For the longest time, the film was being compared to a movie like Waterworld, which had grand ideas but was hampered by extensive reshoots, long delays, and a ballooning budget. Reports have swirled that the movie cost over $170 million to make. If the movie had not been good, it would have been considered a colossal failure by all accounts. But with the film, at last count, grossing over $535 million worldwide, Paramount Pictures is getting the last laugh. I am disappointed that this movie only earned a 67% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I recently watched Aliens, a great movie. But the fact that Aliens gets a 98% positive rating and World War Z gets only a 67% positive rating is a bit of a joke.
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Chernobyl Diaries (2012)
Low-budget fright flicks have become a part of our culture since 1999’s Blair Witch Project. A good number of these the majority of the public has never heard of because the completed product goes straight to video. Another batch makes it to the big screen, some of which we convince ourselves to see (The Fog, Darkness, Feardotcom), and after 20 minutes, we wish it had gone straight to video and never heard of it. Then there is the small group of these movies you cannot just tolerate but come to enjoy for whatever reason. The best example is 2005’s The Descent, which saw a group of six 20-something females trapped in a cavern on a girls’ getaway weekend and hunted by a force that lives in the dark. This movie was an instant classic and still a top-five horror movie. Chernobyl Diaries is nowhere close to The Descent, but it still offers many of the same elements that made this movie successful. It offered a small group of no-name actors. It was set in a location where you could suspend your beliefs and start to believe that anything is possible. There are the slowly developing scenes where you know something bad is about to happen, and you are just sitting there wondering what that will be and when it will occur. Finally, it has a handful of jump-out-your-seat moments. For these reasons, I give Chernobyl Diaries a positive review and would encourage low-budget horror fans to check it out.
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Insidious (2011)
Insidious was one of the few horror movies that lived up to the hype. It seems like any “horror” flick can make a trailer that looks exciting and terrifying. However, a select few can duplicate the rush you feel when you see the preview for the first time. It’s even rarer when a horror flick can come up as an original idea that hasn’t been duplicated dozens of times. I’ve probably seen 50 new horror movies that have since 2000. I felt bored by many of those movies, a feeling of been there/done that, not remotely scared, and sometimes even cheated.