- 5 weeks ago
Some horror movies just don't hit the same on a small screen. From the claustrophobic tunnels of 'As Above, So Below' to the detailed grotesquerie of 'Mad God,' discover ten terrifying films whose full, immersive impact can only be truly felt in the cinema.
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00:00There is no other genre that does as well at the box office as horror,
00:04and that's because they just keep them coming all year round and people flock to see them.
00:09It doesn't matter whether these films have a big budget or major stars attached,
00:13people just love a good scare.
00:15Netflix and other streamers have capitalised on this in recent years,
00:19keeping a steady flow of horror content coming directly to their platforms
00:23to entice viewers to stay home and tune in.
00:26And yet there are plenty of horror films out there that beg to be seen at the cinema,
00:31deserving of something better than the cheapest thrills of the TV, the laptop,
00:35or, shudder to mention it, the mobile phone screen.
00:38So with that in mind, I'm Ellie for WhatCulture,
00:41and these are all horror movies you must watch on the big screen.
00:46Starting with As Above, So Below.
00:49The Paris Catacombs are so much more than the health and safety compliance section
00:54designed for tour groups and holidaymakers.
00:57In fact, there is a far larger network of tunnels under the city,
01:00many of which are dangerous, inaccessible, and home to who only knows what.
01:05And these catacombs are where we find archaeologist Scarlett Marlow in As Above, So Below,
01:11on her hunt for the, well, the Philosopher's Stone.
01:15Far more than just a Harry Potter title,
01:17the stone is a legendary substance that has entranced a certain subsection of explorers
01:22in a similar way to the Holy Grail.
01:24But rather than a National Treasure-esque romp,
01:27Scarlett and her companions find themselves descending through something akin
01:31to Dante's nine circles of hell.
01:33While found footage in general seems a TV-native format,
01:37this one is a little different.
01:39The documentarian style adds to the scope of what the film can do on the big screen,
01:45generating a claustrophobic feeling that captures what it's like to really be in the catacombs,
01:50not to mention hell.
01:51Add to this sound that largely eschews music,
01:54focusing not on soundtrack but the minutiae of the sound design,
01:58and you've got a picture made for a great big auditorium with total audiovisual clarity.
02:05My Bloody Valentine 3D
02:073D has long drawn the ire of the cinephile, and it's not difficult to see why.
02:12It rarely adds anything meaningful to the viewing experience or to the film itself,
02:16and sometimes, particularly when it is retrofitted to movies,
02:20can actually harm the viewing experience.
02:23However, if the stakes are low to begin with, say with a bloody slasher romp,
02:27and the approach to the 3D is intentionally silly,
02:31the results can surprise.
02:33Such is the case with My Bloody Valentine 3D,
02:36the Jensen Ackles-led flick about a Valentine's Day killer in mining gear.
02:41Is it gimmicky?
02:41Of course, but given that this isn't exactly Shakespeare,
02:46it's half of the fun to see a pickaxe come swinging out of the screen at you.
02:49And it was the first horror film to utilise the Real-D technology,
02:53banishing the red and blue glasses to the recycling bin.
02:57The only hitch?
02:58The 3D doesn't translate well to home viewing.
03:01To get the full force of this camp, gory splatterfest in all its glory,
03:05you have to see it on a big screen.
03:07The Lighthouse.
03:08Robert Eggers went all out on his follow-up to 2015's The Witch,
03:13digging deeper into the unspeakable horrors and darkness
03:16that have come to define his filmmaking.
03:18In The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson
03:21star as lighthouse keepers who unite on a remote New England island
03:25for weeks on end,
03:26succumbing to cabin fever, alcoholism and the lure of The Lighthouse's lens.
03:31The Lighthouse is purposefully designed,
03:33more than any other of Eggers' films,
03:35to batter the audience into submission.
03:37The intention is very much to drop us into the wiki life,
03:41with accents, dialogue and method acting from both leads
03:44designed to provide optimal verisimilitude with the subject matter.
03:48The movie harks back to classic black and white horrors,
03:51using similar framing and technology.
03:53But rather than take these elements and make something traditional,
03:57Eggers uses the limitations to the advantage of his horrors.
04:00The aspect ratio and tight framing provide a visual claustrophobia
04:04that the sound design then uses to trap and fixate us.
04:07And the sound itself is frequently deafening and brutal,
04:10with foghorn drones, screaming wikis and catawalling seagulls,
04:14all contending for the limited space in a mono mix.
04:17In all, The Lighthouse is an atmospheric journey that begs for the bombast of the cinema.
04:23Mad God
04:24Any horror fan worth their salt would give an arm, two legs and their firstborn child
04:29to catch Phil Tippett's stop-motion masterpiece Mad God on the big screen,
04:33sinking into the gore while being able to appreciate every minute detail of the tireless labor of love.
04:39The film's journey south takes an unnamed and mute assassin through hellscape after hellscape,
04:45finding his way to the bloody heart of a ghastly war-torn world
04:49where he seeks to deposit a bomb and bring it all crumbling down.
04:53And it took Tippett and a large team of volunteers some 30 years to make.
04:58Mad God is obscene in the scale and grim details of its multitudinous horrors,
05:04never settling for sanitary when there is the opportunity
05:07to wring some blood and misery out of a minor feature.
05:10Everything that can have texture does.
05:12Every surface awash with bolts and grates,
05:15every creature, a mass of flesh, hair and bloodshot, everything.
05:18No details spare to the Tippett treatment.
05:21But unless you're packing a 90-inch OLED at home,
05:24much of this meticulous craft will be sadly lost
05:26to the murky corners and crevices of your screen.
05:30Mother
05:30Darren Aronofsky's court stealing surprised everyone this year
05:35when it threw us into a Soderbergh-esque romp.
05:38No mania, no hysteria, no drugs and prostitution,
05:41no floor vagina and snapped baby.
05:43He has, after all, spent the bulk of his career
05:46making deeply uncomfortable films,
05:48and no film is as uncomfortable as Mother.
05:51Jennifer Lawrence is the film's matriarch,
05:54trying to survive in a beautiful home
05:55beset by hordes of unwelcome guests
05:57whom her poet-husband adores but cannot control.
06:00Yes, it is a fairly overt metaphor for Mother Nature,
06:04humanity and God,
06:06and no, that doesn't diminish his craft.
06:08Like many of his pictures,
06:10Aronofsky designed Mother as a rising panic.
06:12Unlike many of his other films,
06:14it uses silence and deafening noise
06:17as two of its primary storytelling and genre elements,
06:20and seeing it at home surrounded by minor distractions
06:23just isn't the same.
06:24This movie demands from you
06:26the ability to experience the absolute sound of silence
06:30and the explosions of violence, chaos, and, well, literal bombs.
06:35Nothing less than full immersion in this troubling world
06:38can provide the intended stress,
06:40nor a full appreciation of the work.
06:43Psycho
06:43A dastardly experiment by Gus Van Sant,
06:47the Vince Vaughn-starring remake of Psycho,
06:49had a rocky reception on release.
06:51Vaughn is an unlikely leading monster as Norman Bates,
06:54and yet there really is something unsettling to his performance
06:57when his leering close-ups are projected 30 feet high.
07:01But so few have had the chance to see Psycho 98 on the big screen,
07:05especially compared against the swathes of audiences
07:08who have seen and continue to see
07:10Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 original regularly.
07:14This is precisely where it comes into its own.
07:16No matter how good Hitchcock's Psycho is,
07:19it is somewhat limited by the technology of the time.
07:22It is presented in black and white in 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio,
07:27or reworked into 1 to 84 in some cases.
07:30And it features a mono soundtrack
07:32that again has been digitally altered for multi-channel presentation.
07:37Black and white is by no means worse than colour,
07:40but it is the possibilities of Van Sant's colour palette here
07:42that really come to life in the cinema.
07:46Suspiria
07:46Either of the Suspirias would fit perfectly into this slot,
07:50but we look here to the remake,
07:52as Dario Argento's 1977 original is widely screened,
07:56whereas Luca Guadagnino's effort only received a limited run.
08:00Guadagnino's Suspiria follows Susie Banyan,
08:03a young ex-Mennonite dancer,
08:05to a dance academy in Berlin that harbours some dark secrets,
08:09namely that it's run by a coven of witches.
08:11From the outset, the film is pure spectacle,
08:14wrangling stunning interpretive dance
08:16into the same picture as grotesque acts of violence.
08:20Made for the cinema,
08:21every other scene is dripping with blood and other fluids,
08:24and the movie neatly juxtaposes in its palette
08:26a pulsing, vibrant red,
08:28which goes gloriously OTT in the third act
08:31against the drab interiors and exteriors of 1970s West Berlin.
08:35And the dance practices and sequences themselves,
08:38which make up the core of the film,
08:40are the intensely choreographed sequences
08:43of the kind we would pay good money to see live on stage.
08:46Suspiria is a night at the theatre,
08:49the cinema and the slaughterhouse all rolled into one,
08:52so why would anyone settle for living room viewing?
08:56Weapons
08:57Barbarian left most of us looking for more
08:59from director Zack Kreger,
09:01and Weapons has given us precisely what we wanted
09:03while upping the ante considerably.
09:05From the get-go,
09:06the film about a town suffering
09:08from the sudden and mysterious disappearance
09:10of an entire classroom of their children
09:12is nail-bitingly tense and often super quiet to boot.
09:16Kreger makes great use of distance,
09:18staging his scenes so that horrors often come from afar
09:20and end up uncomfortably close,
09:22and nowhere is this more apparent than in the cinema.
09:25This is something backed up to the hilt by the sound design,
09:29with eerie space created and then closed,
09:31and small seemingly innocuous details
09:33proving to be gasp-inducing at this scale,
09:36something more easily missed when watching at home.
09:38The smattering of shocks, jump scares,
09:41and horrifying visuals,
09:42especially where witchy sleeper antagonist Gladys is concerned,
09:46truly are all the more effective when you can't escape them,
09:49and this is one horror sure to become a stalwart
09:51of horror movie nights at theatres in the years to come.
09:55Climax
09:56Gaspar Noé's Climax takes us back to the 90s,
09:59joining a dance troupe as they hole up out of the snow
10:01in a disused school,
10:03rehearsing for an upcoming performance.
10:05But when someone spikes the punch with acid,
10:07things take a turn for the miserable.
10:09Much like Suspiria,
10:10Climax is a fusion of disturbing horror elements
10:13with rich colour motifs and painstaking choreography.
10:16The difference here,
10:17which elevates Noé's film above Guadagnino's,
10:20is that most of Climax is shot with long takes,
10:23including the dance numbers.
10:24The tension built by the revolving long takes
10:26is almost unbearable,
10:28no matter where you watch it,
10:29as Noé has his dancers tear each other apart
10:32under vomit-inducing red and low lighting.
10:34But being trapped in a large dark hall with Climax
10:37is the way to get the full effect of it,
10:39not just watching,
10:40but really experiencing the claustrophobia and stress up close,
10:44feeling trapped in there with the dancers.
10:47And finally,
10:48the neon demon.
10:50Nicholas Winding Refn builds his pictures around the visuals,
10:53creating fluid and malleable scenes
10:55that satisfy what he wants to see first and foremost,
10:59and allowing story to present itself through these.
11:02While not for everyone,
11:03arthouse extravaganza The Neon Demon
11:05is a true representation of this filmmaking ethos,
11:08perfectly married with its subject matter,
11:11L.A.'s fashion world.
11:12The film whisks L. Fanning's Jessie off to the city of angels,
11:16where she meets catty models,
11:18sinister agency figures,
11:19and every kind of seedy and lecherous pedestrian
11:22the city can hawk her way.
11:24Despite the torrent of questionable characters in her way,
11:27she gets her foot on the ladder and starts climbing,
11:30rapidly becoming subsumed by the lack of culture.
11:33As with most Refn films,
11:35we are treated to lush, rich visuals
11:37with every frame,
11:38a dead ringer for a fashion shoot,
11:40a mega-budget advert,
11:41or an installation.
11:43The aesthetics and cinematography are bold,
11:45bright,
11:46and, you guessed it,
11:46drenched in neon.
11:48And whether the plot satisfies the average viewer,
11:50or the kills and cannibalism make us blow chunks,
11:53this is a movie for the cinema screen.
11:56It is no less than an arresting piece of visual art,
11:59and ought to be consumed as such,
12:01out in the world in its most authentic form.
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