![]() Assembling a knockout ensemble cast including Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Garland pulls from Vandermeer’s novel of the same name to craft an artful, experiential trip down the rabbit hole of self-destruction.Īlternately beautiful and disturbing, Annihilation offers twisted visions of biological perversions that shatter the natural order and complex character portraits that reveal the painful truths of the human condition. Sure we do plenty of damage to each other along the way, but it’s the coded inclination to self-destruct that serves as the wellspring of horror in Alex Garland’s sci-fi head trip Annihilation. Throughout history, no matter the circumstances, societies, marriages, kingdom and mankind have always found a way to pull themselves apart and burn themselves to the ground. A Quiet Place isn’t just a technical achievement - though the performances and sound design are award-worthy in their own right - but a thematically rich piece of storytelling that transforms the human desire to provide for and protect our family into a stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing rollercoaster of anxiety and emotion. The concept does a lot of heavy lifting on its own, but Krasinski directs the hell out of the material, staging a number of stellar set pieces strung together with piano wire tension, and wisely putting the spotlight on Blunt, who carries the film with a whopper of an unspoken performance. Don’t scream, don’t cry, don’t even whisper - or the armored beasts will obliterate everything in their path, including you and your loved ones. The alien invasion horror-thriller stars Krasinski alongside Emily Blunt as a pair of parents trying to keep their family alive in a world where alien monsters hunt by sound. John Krasinski does his best Spielberg with A Quiet Place, and it turns out his best Spielberg is pretty damn good. Here are the very best horror movies of the 2010s. ![]() At the same time, production companies like Blumhouse and New Line continued to double down on the potential for horror franchise hits with the enduring appeal of IPs like Halloween and IT. The A24 horror revolution gave us some of the best horror titles of the 2010s, starting with Robert Eggers' VVitch. The 2010s saw the arrival of just as many new up-and-coming voices, including critical and commercial successes from Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, and festival favorites from international filmmakers like Julia Doucournau, Coralie Fargeat, Issa López, and Panos Cosmatos. This was also when Rob Zombie put down the down-tuned guitars and picked up a camera, and his filmmaking has increasingly suggested a liberated artistic vision unlike anyone else in the horror racket, or really anywhere on the cinematic spectrum. At the same time Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski came on the scene, so did Ti West and Adam Wingard, arguably the most talented of this youthful generation of horror hounds. The same went for most genres of filmmaking that were given brand-new vistas with digital becoming the new norm.Īnd yet, at the same time, a slew of smart, young filmmakers used the freedom that digital allowed to start making films of astonishing ferocity and intimate detail, as much in horror as in drama, comedies, musicals, or film noirs. Cunningham could now make something similar with a production budget well under a million. It just meant that anyone who had a fondness for cheap scares and cheaper effects in the same vein as Sean S. The ease of production didn’t necessarily mean that those who envisioned and made these films had the scrappy problem-solving abilities that Walter Hill had, or even had the heightened sense of composition that made Carpenter a legend. ![]() Directors like Wes Craven and John Carpenter emblemized this kind of thinking in the 1980s and early '90s, but the scene exploded with the advent of digital filmmaking in the 00s and, soon enough, the market was flooded with…well, mostly junk. Horror has, in many ways, taken up the mantle of the B-movies code of creativity, using often itty-bitty budgets to create atmospheric, expressive visions of terror and the grotesque side of humanity’s desires.
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