Hidden Gems of Horror (Part Three)

by ELINOR EPPERSON
Contributor

A weekly list of horror movie recommendations to celebrate Halloween.

Found Footage

“Found footage” horror has taken off as a subgenre since “The Blair Witch Project” debuted in 1999. Viewers these days know the “found” footage is all staged, but directors have still found a way to make them tense and compelling. Here are five found footage horror films that use the medium to their advantage. 

Cloverfield

2008 | PG-13

J.J. Abrams’s New York Godzilla project gets a bad rap as a dumb monster movie. The main characters are pretty forgettable and they follow old-school slasher dogma by making a series of nonsensical decisions. But no other movie captures the first-person dread and horror of a real-time monster attack like Cloverfield.

Content warnings: Violence, blood, brief gore, brief body horror (to be honest I’m not sure how this is PG-13 instead of R), the most boring protagonists ever

The Taking of Deborah Logan

2014 | R

This film takes the form of a documentary dissertation.To study the effect of Alzheimer’s on both patients and their primary caregivers, protagonist Mia Hu (Michelle Ang) and her team board with patient Deborah and her daughter Sarah. As they conduct interviews and catch b-roll for Mia’s film, the crew quickly finds that Deborah may be suffering from more than typical degeneration of her frontal lobe.

Content warnings: Blood, violence, self-harm, brief nudity

The Last Exorcism

2010 | PG-13

A Pentecostal preacher builds his life’s work on performing exorcisms, then decides to record his last one to reveal himself (and the practices he has espoused) as a fraud. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this possession might be real.

Content warnings: Blood, violence, animal death

[REC]

2007 | R

The original Spanish film that “Quarantine” recreated (almost shot for shot) tells the story of a television host and her cameraman who find themselves on the wrong side of a quarantined apartment building. Trapped with the residents and some first responders, the TV host records the night as nerves disintegrate and the mysterious illness spreads.

Content warnings: Blood, violence, brief nudity, a zombie child, the scariest ending scene ever

As Above So Below

2014 | R

If you’re claustrophobic, the idea of going into an underground maze filled with bones is already pretty scary. The shaky camera footage, hallucinations, and what appears to be a cult don’t help.

These don’t daunt the film’s main character, Scarlett, an adventurous archeologist hunting for Nicholas Flamel and his philosopher’s stone in the Paris Catacombs. Her urban spelunking trip goes downhill quickly, as she and her companions find themselves going in circles and encountering unhinged residents of the famous ossuary. Knowledge of “Dante’s Inferno” is recommended but not required for better understanding this movie’s plot. 

Content warnings: Blood, violence, suicide, a dead body, a scary chair

See “hidden gems:”

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 4

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