Top 5 Horror Movies of the 21st Century [Archive]

Film Spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code FILMSPOT26 to receive 15% off. Hey, Film Spotter, it's time for an archive drop. And if you look at the release schedule, there's a fair amount of horror coming out these days. You've got Faces of Death in wide release, Hunting Matthew Nichols, Exit 8, and producer Sam did a little bit of homework. Turns out that 10 years ago this week, guest Michael Phillips and I reviewed David Robert Mitchell's It Follows. Also on that show, we shared our top five 21st century horror movies. Now, if I'm not mistaken, It Follows is also going to be getting a sequel that plans to begin filming in summer 2026. If you haven't heard about this already, you didn't know that it was coming out. It was going to be in production this summer. Maybe you could guess the sequel's name. Yeah, they follow with all of that in mind. We thought why not share that top five 21st century horror movies list. And it seems like one we might just have to revisit someday with Josh here on the show for now. The April 2015 version will have to suffice. Here it is. Clip there from 2013's The Conjuring, the director James Wan. We just saw earlier this evening. I think my first James Wan joint was Furious 7. We'll talk about that next week on the show. I have not seen The Conjuring, despite the fact that I wanted to catch up with it, Michael, because we are doing our top five 21st century horror movies this week, the best scary movies of the past 15 years or so. I was all set to lead into this top five with that movie before I had any idea where you were going just because I heard director Joe Swanberg, Chicago's own, on the WTF podcast with Mark Marin, and he was asked about the type of movies that he doesn't really make, but he really respects and admires. And the go-to movie for him was this movie, The Conjuring. He adores it, thinks it's basically a masterpiece. And I can't weigh in there, but I understand you might be able to. Well, that's a rare point of agreement in terms of myself and Mr. Swanberg in terms of our aesthetics, I think. But yeah, you know, I love it. I love the film. It's my number five. Is it really? Yes, it is. It's a film that I was so pleased found a big, broad horror audience of various ages because I thought for a while, I thought, wow, this will appeal to people like myself who like a more kind of indirect, less gore-based kind of horror. It's very consciously a throwback and tied into films like The Amityville Horror. And it's a haunted house film that, you know, as John Wick goes back to things like The Old Dark House and I mean, movies that go back to practically the beginning of movies. And I just, I'm really fond of it. Farmiga and Patrick Wilson play these demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren and the real-life ghost hunters and they're investigating the strange goings-on in this riverside farmhouse owned by a family of seven, headed by Ron Livingston and Lily Taylor. And right there, you're talking about actors, Adam, that I think know how to just sort of slip very kind of, you know, quietly but confidently into a situation that you can take seriously so that the scares when they do come, when you get little details like the clock where every night it stops at 3.07 a.m. and unexplained bruises are showing up on the mother's body. And I mean, these details, we've all seen them before. We know what a haunted house movie generally looks like and how it behaves. And this film does too, but there's something about the way one shoots it and directs it. It's all very, very stealthy in terms of the camera work and the way, again, I've evoked Robert Albin before, but it's got a very 70s kind of Albin-esque, slip-slidey visual attack where you just don't quite know where the next scare is going to come from. And you're always aware of kind of this bustling activity in the house. It's got a claustrophobic setting, but it really doesn't feel claustrophobic. It feels like the camera's always just slightly on the move, but also slightly uneasy in a way that makes you uneasy. I'm really fond of this film. And I thought, well, the kids won't like it. The kids, the kids, you know, anybody under 25 may not find an access point because they're just simply into other things. But, you know, damned if that film didn't really just play really well for a few weeks and make a ton of money. I was very pleased. I hope I'm pleased too when I finally get a chance to see it. And one of the things I hope will maybe come out as we go through this top five list, Michael, is what really does scare you. If you are someone who still ever gets scared at the movies or by anything, going back to our conversation with Mark Harris, he listed off some of those things that frighten him. And as I told him, I thought they were all creepy and kind of disturbing, but don't necessarily really scare me. They don't send actual shivers of my spine. They don't pop into my head, those images, when I'm in my basement all alone at night and it forces me to run up my stairs like I'm being chased by Leatherface. And yes, I'm a grown man who still has these moments. Is it well lighted? Do you have lights down there? Can you turn them on? That's it. That's it. You got to be answered all my problems. 60 watt bulbs will take care of your thing. Where were you, Michael? Speaking of Leatherface, back in 2012 around Halloween, you were on the show with Josh and myself. We shared our top five terrifying characters. So I know a little bit what scares you. And Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was my number four. That was a top five list. But for me, it's not about, of course, being startled or being disturbed necessarily, but it is about being frozen with terror. Your heart starts pounding. The blood is racing. And I've talked about this a little bit over the years on the show. The things that have always gotten to me going back to when I was a very young kid, eyes scare me. Scary eyes, creepy eyes. Creepy. Just images of faces. That's why the exorcist had such an effect on me as a young kid and still does. In terms of purely visceral reactions to movie moments, though, maybe the moment that got my heart pounding the most recently was the imitation game. There's a flashback scene in the imitation game. Not a horror movie, though. Sometimes the screenplay is scary. Yeah. Where you see a young Alan Turing at boarding school, and he's being tormented by the bullies there at school, and they actually have him trapped under the floorboards. And for someone who is extremely claustrophobic, that was hard to watch. I was watching it on a screener, and I actually just paused it and said, I don't know how much of this I can watch, because that really did bother me so much. And I alluded to it earlier in the show when we talked about It Follows. The scariest moment in that movie for me is right after the whole intro with the girl who is running away from something invisible. She gets in her car, and her dad is asking her what's wrong, and she won't answer him and won't really come clean, because what is she supposed to say to him? And then she goes off and she gets a phone call. We don't really know what's going on, but she basically says her goodbye to her father. Right. And that really did creep me out, only because it put me in the position of being a father and thinking about a moment of terror like that, where something really crazy is happening to one of my children. They seem like they need to be protected, and I can't do anything for them. Right. And something dire seems like it's about to happen. That really under... Now, that explanation is the perfect cogent example of... For all those millions of people who simply don't understand why people like horror films, because why would you want to access that sort of... I mean, you know what I mean? And I have no problem with it if it's done well. Exactly. But my wife, for example, would be like, why would we conceivably spend the money in some way? I think my wife would be with her. That brings us finally to my number five, and I did go with movies for the most part on this list. After all that setup, I did want to focus on movies that scared me, really did scare me still, and movies that are usually defined as horror movies. I didn't try to really stretch the definition too far here. Maybe we'll get into some of that. So keeping the scare factor in mind, my number five is The Ring from Gore Verbinski 2002 remake of... Remake. The remake is good enough for your list. I haven't seen the original, so I'm going with the remake. Okay. Okay. Yeah, and I don't know, based on how much it scared me, I want to see the original. Naomi Watts, one of my favorite actresses in this film, she plays a journalist who investigates what happened to her niece, who it seems, and we see most of this unfold at the beginning of the film, watched a tape and the story says, you die seven days later if you watch it, and she does die. The mystery that Watts discovers involves a young adopted girl named Samara, who we see at one point coming out of the screen, coming out of that videotape, if you will, and that single image is enough to just freak me out. It's great. It's really beautifully handled too, and in a way that owes an awful lot to the original, but that idea that found footage is not a new trope, it's an old trope, and this is essentially a found footage moment within the horror film, but my God, that's an effective couple minutes. It is, and speaking of effective, our friend Keith Phipps, formerly of the AV Club, wrote this great opening line, there is a videotape that once watched causes its viewers to die seven days later, no, it's not Bruce Willis is the kid. Zing. And he does say at the end, the ring features a heroine several cuts above the average screen queen, Watts whose worldly facade is chipped away as the film progresses, revealing an expression of ashen dread, and I look over my list as we're going to get to some of these pics, actually that applies to most of my list in terms of interesting female characters at the core of a lot of these films. For better or for worse, this was a movie that spawned a bunch of remakes of Japanese horror films because it was such a hit, but almost every scene involving Samara, especially as I said creepily crawling towards me, that did scare me, and the dread at its core where you do something harmless that irrevocably ruins your life, and may even, and your television, I think it messes up your, and in this case, what it does is it sets a timeline on your life that fear that what if you knew you only had so much time, that is a real and universal fear, I think, and if that all sounds a little bit familiar, going back to the start of the show, it should, it follows actually really ties it nicely with the ring in terms of the final reveal of the ring, and the final reveal, I think of it follows, there's a definite connection between those films, so the ring is my number five. That's great, I really don't know anybody, anybody who's into horror, even casually, and who doesn't think that that key scene in the ring isn't just hugely effective, and haunting, it's beautifully rendered. My number four does stretch the definition of horror, Adam, and I'm proud of it, you know, I'm not ashamed of it. We got to have someone here who's willing to be an iconic class. I'm going to go with director Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, which came out just last year, and this is the one with Scarlett Johansson as an alien who, none of this is laid out clearly in any kind of linear way. She's an alien from some other place, and she's recently assumed human form, and in the novel Under the Skin is based on, you know why she's picking up men and basically harvesting them for material to send back to the home planet, but all that, all the explanation and context was daringly just tossed out by Glazer and everybody else who collaborated on this really extraordinarily and unique picture. It's simply the images it gets, and the little mini worlds it creates in terms of where this alien really is doing her business, and how her interactions with human beings who really don't know what's hitting them as these pickups are sort of being conducted, you know, all that's handled with hidden cameras and real life citizens who had to sign, you know, agreements to appear in this film. So in a way it was like the sort of science fiction thriller version of Borat, you know, and it's unbelievably effective. It is. Also, I guess the reason this is on my list, Adam, is that what happens to this character who's really two characters played by Johansson is really kind of profoundly sad and difficult to watch in a lot of ways, and it's not in any kind of conventional female and torment cliche, which is not just a cliche, but sort of a dangerous stereotype, I think, and really kind of a drag on the culture at this point. But the film is a much more adventurous and is frankly sadder experience than that. But it's also why I think it's legitimately so, and it doesn't, the film doesn't really necessarily succeed or fail based on the quality of the performance, which is good. I just think it's imagistically, it's really off on its own terrain. It doesn't really remind you of too much else. The guy's glazed, he's worked an awful lot in commercials, and miraculously he hasn't let it mess up his ability to kind of explore feature length projects. No, I'd say it's a, is it a horror film technically? Not really, but it's a lot of its sinister and really, really creepy in a way that I just can't compare anything to. No, I can't argue with you partly because I do love the film so much, one of our favorites from last year. My number four is a Spanish horror movie, a Spanish ghost story. It is The Others from Alejandro Amenabar starring Nicole Kidman. Hey, oh, Scott loves that film. Good, good. Well, you know, he's always had pretty good taste, right, Michael? Except when he disagrees with you. Yeah, he had moments of good taste. She's a mother of two children, lives in, I guess you'd say, this manor house, remote manor house in England, and it's the aftermath of World War II. Her husband has not come back from the war, presumably dead, and the kids suffer from a rare disease where they can't see sunlight, and then three servants show up and things kind of go crazy. Not just the three servants who show up, but other uninvited guests, if you will, at the house who appear to be to Nicole Kidman and her kids potentially ghosts, and that, that shaky coexistence between the living and the non-living becomes the core of the movie. Amenabar said something interesting about the film in an interview. I think for better or worse, I'm trying to do exactly the opposite of what you see in most horror films today. Start with the special effects. In other films you might be seeing ghosts flying around. It doesn't disturb me, so I tried to work in a more realistic way and play with primary fears and very simple elements, the things I was scared of when I was a child. I tried to adopt the role of a child when I was writing, and I tried to put the audience in that position, or the sound, for instance. I think nowadays the levels of sound in many mixes are completely unbelievable and insane, so we tried to make a very quiet film and use silence as a way to create suspense. That's really what I appreciate about this movie so much. He definitely succeeded. That sound design, the silence is unnerving. Like the movie we both appreciated from last year, the Babadook, it's mostly about the horrors of grief and the way it can completely consume you and the negative effects that can have. There's a key line in the movie I alluded to already where we hear, I think it's one of the servants, the main maid, if you will, who says the living and the dead must learn to exist together. As I think about that appearing a couple times in the movie, it's not necessarily she's saying literally, sharing the same space, but figuratively speaking, how do the living live with the dead as we tie it back to this notion of grief, and that's really what Kidman's character is dealing with. I also think it's a movie about our capacity for rationalization, because you can construct as she does an entire world around her and see perfectly how every little piece fits in until it finally unravels so far that she has to accept the reality of what she's seeing and talk about primary fears and simple elements. The biggest scare for me in the movie is when they look at a book, the Book of the Dead, which as the character says, it's macabre. Yes, it is. The film's got a great central reveal that can't be discussed, but it's and I'm eager to see the second time to see how much of the film, which is very well made and almost every respect, I think, how much of it succeeds in other ways once you know that central reveal that comes around the midpoint. I haven't had a chance to revisit it, so I wonder if it does. You mentioned books, let's talk about it. The Babadook is my number three. The idea here in writer-director Jennifer Kent's horror film, which comes from her short film called Monster, is that you have a mother played by Essie Davis, terrific performance from an actress we don't know very well here in America. She plays Amelia, who's an elder care worker. Her husband died in a car accident a few years earlier, and her son Samuel has had a difficult life ever since, and they live in a ramshackle old house and the rooms are painted in a very unsettling grayish blue tone, and the house is essentially begging for trouble, right? And out of nowhere, this story book shows up at their doorstep. It's called The Babadook, and the monster in the book is terrorizing a young boy after being allowed inside the boy's house. Now, Samuel, of course, begins seeing this monster for real, and that's kind of that's that's that's a starting point. Now, this is not, these are not necessarily daisy fresh ideas. The idea of storybook characters coming to life and haunting these folks, but Kent, who's really making an incredibly good film debut here, and she's got I think got a great career ahead of her. So good. It's just it's a perfect blend, I think, Adam of character based horror, and as you say, sort of real word grief, because you we have a grieving widow here and her son who's like truly anguished in many ways. And yet you have a lot of scare sequences that simply have to deliver. And she really does it without making you feel just sort of beat up or knocked around by either, you know, as other people have said, sound designs that just kind of get in your face and your ears too too much. I don't know, it really it's a very brisk and very fleet footed horror film, but it's got real people in it. And I'm glad that it got the attention it got. I am as well. Let's give a little bit of attention to a guest expert here, Michael. I did solicit a voicemail from one of our local Chicago critics who sees a lot of horror movies and who has seen a lot of horror movies. I asked Steve Bricope, aka Capone for main and cool news for his pick for the best horror film of the 21st century so far. And this is what he came back with after a much thought and viewing over the years, I got to say, I've narrowed it down to director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett film, Your Next, which came out a couple of years ago after sort of being on the shelf, inexcusably on the shelf for a couple of years. I was really in love with this film because these two guys, these two filmmakers are so aware of genre tropes from just being fans of it that they know exactly when to avoid them and when to embrace them. The hardest thing to get right in horror films is not the scares, it's the surprises, it's giving us something we haven't seen before and are not expecting. And Your Next is a tightly wound and sometimes very nasty piece of work with a lot of character development, which is something else we don't get a lot in horror films. So we actually care whether someone dies or whether they're in jeopardy. As I said, without compromising the horror elements, the movie does justice to its home invasion story, but still keeps it fresh and unpredictable and of course terrifying. That is my pick, Your Next for the best horror film of the 2000s so far. Thank you Steve for that great pick. A film spotting confession had never even heard of Your Next until I started preparing for this list, but Steve makes a very compelling case. I like what he had to say Michael in terms of filmmakers understanding those genre tropes and knowing when to avoid and embrace them. I think that's a dance a lot of horror filmmakers do have to figure out and what he said too about the surprises being just as important, if not more important, than the scares. I think that applies to my number three pick, Everything Steve Said. It is the 2009 Ty West film, The House of the Devil. Michael, you joked off air that I was going to find some way to sneak a movie from 1973, The Exorcist onto this list. I did not come up with a way to break that rule, but I got to have Satan represented somehow. He's the big guy. He is, right? And this film includes a ritual scene where a super gross, super scary creature cuts her arm, pours the blood into a goat skull, then draws occult symbols onto another character using that blood. This is from going clear the Scientology thing? No? Well played. She also forces the character to swallow a couple gallons of it. All that does freak me out, but I think what really freaks me out is how Ty West draws out the dread and sustains the dread. Those scenes actually end up kind of being a relief because it's been so dreadful. You're waiting for that payoff to finally happen and I do think that West delivers. Speaking of my last pick, the others and the capacity for rationalization, you know from the moment this main character, Samantha hears the job to babysit for Tom Noonan. Originally his kids, then he changes the plan on her and makes it, well actually, his wife's mother. You know that she should get out of there. Listen, this is not anything like you're imagining. There's nothing medical that you have to do whatsoever. In fact, you don't have to do much of anything. I find this all a bit awkward, but you have to understand I have only the best intentions. I've been putting advertisements out for the past two weeks to get someone for tonight, but nobody responds to elderly assistance or home care anymore, so I thought maybe babysitter would get better response. And I think that's the real fear here and what scares me the most is I watch the House of the Devil. It's not knowing when you should truly be afraid. This character is always saying to herself, get it together, settle down, everything's going to be okay, even though all these things keep happening that show her that something is definitely off and she should be worried. She keeps calming herself down saying, no, it's going to be fine, and then it's not fine. And I think we've all been in situations like that where we wonder, okay, is this going to go somewhere? I don't want this to go. I mean, every taping and film starting I've had is had an element of that. Well, hopefully it's not quite as bad as ending with goat skulls and blood. Michael, but hey, the night's young. The night is young. It's a midnight yet? I don't know. It's not. It's a really good film. I like it at Great Heel 2. And I think, we always expound, I think both of us tend to really seek out and we respond to horror films that don't necessarily rely on a lot of blood and gore. This is different because this has got a lot of it, but it's really shrewdly judged because I think what I remember is the first act of violence comes very suddenly and it's placed just perfectly in what is a very simple story. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. This is a film that definitely knows all its precedents, acknowledges them, Halloween, Rosemary's Baby, you name it. It's there. And it's at the very beginning too. I knew I was going to have fun with this movie when I saw that old school 70s font for the title, The Freeze Frame on the title, that music, everything about it where the freeze frames happen in time with the music. There was something about the fun Ty West was having that cued me in right away that this was going to be fun, but also a little bit scary. And we talked about it follows and whether or not these horror movies you can read into them larger sort of metaphors. If you want to go there with this film, for me, it's really all about what happens when you compromise yourself, like compromise your integrity or you do something that you know you really shouldn't be doing. It's not just that it could go off the rails here, but she does this whole thing that she doesn't really want to do for money. She just needs to pay the bills and she says, okay, I'm going to do this thing that I know I shouldn't be all because I'm desperate. And that sense of anybody in any walk of life when you do something for that reason, can something horrible go wrong to you? And well, you hope that it doesn't go wrong the way this goes wrong, but it's a heightened scenario. You know, you know, you know what for me, the most frightening thing that I remember from this film is and it's only been what like five years, I think five, six years since it came out, but there's a great use of the answering machines of the 1980s where the voice is, you know, instructing. It sounds very kind of alien and robotic, like, you know, please leave a message. It just makes me think of like, is this some sort of, is this like the twisted stepfather of Siri? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like the early version of, it's like Siri's horrible uncle. I love it. You know, that's the film I want to see. Well, we can make it. All right. Someday, that brings us to our number two picks for the best horror films of the past 15 years. Michael, what do you have? All right. This is another genre bender for sure. And people will just, you know, hood it right out of there because it's not a horror film really, but Lars Ventreer's Antichrist to me qualifies in many ways. I think I love it in its sick way, especially for the first hour and really, I hate to say only, but when the first hour of Antichrist, I think, is truly a masterwork and it's just a unique, coal-black comedy of a marriage that just isn't going to work out. And that's how I look at it. You know, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsburg play a couple that whose young son dies in this miserable accident and this is in the prologue. And as part of their grief therapy, they do a couple of really, really, really unfortunate things. They retreat to their cabin in the woods so that the wife can finish her thesis on witchcraft and violence against women throughout the ages. And the other dubious idea is that Dafoe, who's a psychotherapist, decides to kind of really press his point and say, look, I'm going to be the one to cure you. And he's got this just enough of a trace of smugness and patronizing sort of authoritarian nonsense in this guy's whole makeup that you just know on some level he's asking for trouble. He's going to deserve what happens to him. And my God, when Ventrere starts delivering what happens, it's, the second half is a whole different story. Some of the images are just so outlandishly explicit and painful to watch that it throws you out of the film and throws you out of the theater. I remember people leaving the theater and can. But I guess I just find the first hour so crafty and gripping and really psychologically astute. And even if the film eventually goes the way of you can't trust the women, which is too bad and it reduces the thing to a different kind of stupid or horror movie for sure. And yet, Adam, I got to say this one, I will just defend that first hour of Antichrist to the day I quit talking about movies. That's another one I need to revisit. I don't know if I'm ready for the pain of Antichrist. Such an easy revisit, isn't it? I think when we talked about that movie on the show, we joked about needing a t-shirt that says, I survived Antichrist. I mean, it's a haul to get through it. I keep waiting for the right holiday to kind of like have the occasion to see it again and there is no holiday. No. No, there's no holiday. Well, my number two is a little more straightforward than Antichrist. It is another Spanish horror movie and another Spanish ghost story, The Orphanage. Oh, I love The Orphanage. El Orfanado, which is more fun to say. Actually, Josh Larson's number one terrifying character from 2012 came from this list, Tomas, the not so imaginary friend in this film. And this ghost story is about a woman who returns to the abandoned home she left when she was adopted 30 years before. Her name's Laura, her husband Carlos. They have a great plan to turn the home into a center for special needs children until their seven-year-old son, Simone, goes missing. And he has this imaginary friend, actually has a few imaginary friends, but he just disappears without a trace and that then starts this whole mystery that unravels with Laura trying to get at the secrets of not only what happened to her son, but maybe what happened to all of the orphans that were originally at this home, the kids she grew up with. And I look back at my notes from this movie when we reviewed it, and I actually said, I didn't think it was very scary. I meant it in that context as praise for the way it doesn't rely on cheap scares. Yeah, the shocks. Yeah, it's not about those jump out of your seat moments. The suspense is almost entirely psychological and it requires us to fill in certain blanks that we don't really want to fill in. And I love that about this movie. I mean, Geraldine Chaplin shows up as a woman who's hosting a seance. Oh, that's the scene. It's so good. Juan Antonio Bayona, the director, doesn't show us what she's seeing. It's just her take on what we imagine she is seeing and that fear is really palpable in it. Looking back on it, I misspoke though. I mean, it's legitimately scary. It really is. Yes, it's psychological, but it's really scary that Tomas character freaks me out. And there's also a sequence where Laura played wonderfully by Bieland Rueda. She tries to contact the spirits of those dead orphans that she grew up with, and they basically play this game of red light, green light. It's chilling. It's really chilling. That takes your breath away. At least it does for me. I thought it was interesting, again, looking back at my notes, that my last comment was with Bayona's direction, I can't wait to see what his next project is. And of course, that ended up being one of my least favorite movies of a few years ago, The Impossible. Right. I still have faith. This is the tsunami picture of Naomi Watts. Naomi Watts. Yeah. And Ewan McGregor. Ewan McGregor, not a fan. Interesting because all the craftsmanship and technical preoccupation of that film is all about just how literal and bombastic can you make real world horror. This massive tsunami that killed so many people and how realistically can you render that? And yet, yeah, does it have even a tenth of the kind of lingering effectiveness of the orphanage? No. No, it doesn't. Number one, then, Michael, what's your favorite horror movie? Man, this was tough. This was really tough. This was a tough assignment. And I know you've talked about this and I actually tried to pick a different one just to avoid vampire films for some reason, just because it is a type of monster that we've seen so much of that we're all a little weary. But the Swedish version of Let the Right One End, the one that led to the American remake called Let Me In, which is pretty good. But director Thomas Alphardson's original version is just amazing. Now, I think when you talk about what scares you, Adam, I think for me it's not really like an easy list of like the Mark Harris list of like woods, you know, stairwells, whatever. But one thing I find always wrenching and I kind of resent it in movies is any kind of severe bullying situation. Maybe it's because I just didn't have much of it in my own life and I had a pretty easy going childhood. I'm with you. Lovely brother and all the rest of it. But this is a key component in Let the Right One End because this is a severely bullied young boy who's kind of at the center of this story. But every time you have to actually deal with this behavior and its effects in the film, it's taken just seriously enough without being kind of lingering and sadistic in the wrong way about it that once you start getting this supernatural element and this friendship with this girl who's in fact a vampire, I don't know, it opens up a whole another world and somehow all the vengeance that comes out of this feels not just kind of justified by the story but emotionally in some sick way, you just can't wait for it, you know. And I think that's a horrifying impulse. But why is Let the Right One End good? Simply because it does what you've seen a million times before, you know, when is the vampire going to attack the next victim? Every time this happens, every jump, every placement in the frame, every time you see somebody crawling up the outside of a building or just leaping down from a bridge, it's all a second earlier than you expect and it's handled just masterfully. It is. It's a marvelous film. And I don't know what lessons could filmmakers take from it. I guess just that you can, if you take the time to figure out how you're going to handle these things visually, then you can do almost anything with familiar material. Probably would have made my list if not been near the top, if not for the fact that it recently came up on a top five, that pool scene in particular. Oh, great. At the end is so well crafted. And I'm with you as well. I like that you bring up the impulse there, Michael, because I remember talking about this on the show and I didn't read everything about this movie, certainly, or anything that's followed really since that review happened. But not a lot of people that I saw talked about that sort of bloodbust, which of course, the vampire is a perfect fit with that, where it is about that bullying. It's about that sense of revenge. And as a viewer, you find yourself asking yourself, when are you almost waiting for that blood to spill, because you think it's justified. It's forcing you to confront that. And so much of popular entertainment in the non-horror genre is all it's completely built on our blood, on stoking the audience's bloodlust. And I frankly kind of hate it. I've had it. And I resent it just as a moviegoer. It's the easiest thing to get out of an audience is that impulse. If you just simply mistreat or, you know, grind down the characters in the audience hard enough, then all you want to do is you're sort of whimpering in your seat, sort of psychologically and saying, you know, strike back, strike back. Well, you know, this is Mel Gibson's entire directorial career. It's really, it is. And I just think it's an easy, cheap way to go. But if it's done well, the paragon for me would be to palm us carry, you know, because I mean, you know, Sissy Spacek in that film is just enacting a revenge fantasy that is so fully invested and so kind of operatically crazy and, you know, really violent. And it's all about bloodlust. And I just loved every second of that. Yeah. My number one is a film that maybe is my one departure from sort of the standard horror movie fare. And I was looking at various lists because we're not the first to think of this sort of review of the past 15 years or so and look at the horror genre. And there were lots of lists that had picks like under the skin, which I would say are just a little bit, you even said, isn't it quite horrible? A scary movie, but it does fit in terms of its dread and its kind of creepiness, whether they're movies that don't have any ghosts or monsters or paranormal activity, but they do have a lot of that dread and discomfort. I get it. But I was surprised that I didn't come across any Michael that listed this movie, despite the fact that serial killers are horrifying, partly because serial killers actually exist. And the movie is David Fincher's Zodiac. Oh, great pick. One of my favorites of the first 10 years of the century. So good. So good. And never thought of it in the horror in the horror genre. I guess what really crystallized for me is I was thinking about this movie in the context of a few years ago. I remember late at night, flipping channels, couldn't fall asleep or whatever, landed on some A&E special, I think it was A&E, where they were talking about the original night stalker, not Richard Ramirez later, but this violent criminal who, as far as we know, still unapprehended, killed 10 people sexually assaulted, like 50 women in Southern California between 1979 and 1986. And they don't know who he is, obviously, they never caught him. But he left a message on a woman's answering machine that the police are sure is this character. And they play the answering machine message. And it's this psychotic man basically repeating, I'm going to kill you. You talk about being just scared to the core of your being. I was watching that and Zodiac has a similar effect on me. How about just the surreality of that moment when the Zodiac killer comes across those two teens who are just hanging out by the lake and he ends up killing those kids. It's broad daylight. There's something about just the vivid colors and the way Fincher realizes it that just takes you back as you see that whole thing unfold. Jake Gyllenhaal, when he goes into Charles Fleischer's basement. Oh, it's a great scene. It's so good. Everybody in the theater is on the edge of their seat during that scene. But the one that I always go back to, Ioni Skye appears as a mother of an infant driving along who ends up picking up unwittingly the Zodiac killer. And here's the best part of me mentioning this, Michael. Right now, our co-producer, Sam Van Halgren, is up really late at night in his dark house. Everyone's asleep. He's trying to put this show together. He's listening to my voice, realizing that he's got to go pull this scene and watch the whole thing so he can find the best piece of audio to embed in the show right here. Nice. I think we just passed a filling station. It was closed. Just... Tours go around helping people in the night. When I'm done with them, they don't need much help. Shh, it's okay. Before I kill you, I'm gonna throw your baby out the window. It's okay, Sam. There's nobody in the house. There's nobody outside your window. You really are safe. I tell you the most frightening thing about Zodiac, and I love that, I think it's Fincher's best film. I think it's truly his most... I don't know, I hit the word mature, but it's like his most mature work, I think. And at the time, he gave interviews that said, look, after this, I don't think anyone ever should need to make another serial killer movie. Now, ironically, the guy went on to make a lot of lesser pulpier, just lower down the food chain, serial killer movies, I think, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you know, Gone Girl's very good pulp, but there's something about that frustration of not solving the case in Zodiac, where the film is really about human frustration and inability to kind of provide themselves and the audience with a handkerchief with a kind of a satisfying ending. And that film, God, it's got nerves of steel. It just won't give the audience what it wants. Well, Zodiac is my number one horror movie of the 21st century. Michael, let's get to a few honorable mentions. What were some of those movies that were really tough for you to leave off? I mean, really tough. And some of the ones that don't quite fit the standard horror genre, I would include the two David Lynch films, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. I think both of them have moments that are truly sinister and nightmarish, and not really horror films, but I really love 28 weeks later. I do too. This is the 28 days. I think 28 weeks is actually, it's politically really a student kind of of the moment. This is why you're my favorite film spotting guest host, Michael. Oh yeah. Because we share the same love for 28 weeks later. We don't need two of us here. We don't need two of us here. I really love the descent in terms of spelunking for humanoid demons. I think that's a subgenre. Can't watch it again, my claustrophobia. Really good film. I'm not claustrophobic. I enjoy tight spaces. It's fine. And then there's a few I'll just close out with that I would consider kind of, you know, not minor, but they're just sort of less ambitious. But I really love Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. I do too. I really love Slither. I really love The Crazies, the remake of the Romero film, and Bong Joon Ho's The Host is technically a monster movie, but to me it's next door to horror and it's got serious, serious style and wit. And not enough people know it. I mean, if they haven't seen The Host, they should see it. I mean, the guy's going on an amazing work. He did most recently, he did Snowpiercer, which was a big success. And that's another one that doesn't really fit easily in any kind of simple science fiction genre. But The Host, that's monster movie enough for me, horror movie enough for me. And I love it. Yeah, it's a good film. And you covered a lot of the ones I wanted to get to, Let the Right One In, obviously Major List, The Babadook Major List, 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, both highly considered by me. And I just couldn't have three Spanish ghost stories on my list. But I considered a movie I finally just caught up with this past weekend, Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone. Never seen it. Really good. I'm overdue. There you go. And The Mist, another one I like a lot and Drag Me to Hell, you mentioned the Raimi film, the loved ones, a recent movie nobody saw that is really good, kind of a throwback horror movie. Guy trapped in a basement by the girl that wants to take him to prom. You know, everybody's nightmare, really. So good film. And I mentioned a few of those movies or how I avoided movies that maybe didn't fit that category, whether they were simply not scary to me or just didn't feel like horror movies. But if you do want to talk about just being terrified by certain situations that characters find themselves in, four months, three weeks and two days, the Romanian film from Christian Mungu. And recently Indie Wire in their Critic Wire survey, they asked people in honor of it follows, what is the best horror movie since 2000? And Jordan Hoffman said Beyond the Hills, another Romanian film from Christian Mungu. Well, it's got an exorcism. It does have an exorcism. I almost put it on my list for that reason. Yeah. And it's certainly the most plausible, realistic exorcism. You don't have to, you know, it's the one for the secular humanists, you know, I mean, you don't need to be a believer to be frightened. We would love to hear your picks. What have been your favorite horror movies of the 21st century so far? Which ones did we overlook? Email us feedback at filmspotting.net and check out all the benefits of being a Filmspotting family member at filmspottingfamily.com. They include access to the Filmspotting archive at any time via whatever podcasting platform you use, bonus shows every month, a weekly newsletter, early access to events like Filmspotting Fest 2, discounts on those tickets for Filmspotting Fest and more. Once again, FilmspottingFamily.com. Thanks for listening, everyone. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.