//

The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

While our political culture grows more repressive and reactionary, horror cinema is growing more diverse.

The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017
Photo: Netflix

Horror cinema this year was most notable for the efforts of Blumhouse Productions, a pioneer of found-footage thrillers that released two sleeper sensations within six weeks of one another. M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Jordan Peele’s Get Out respectively announced the redemption of a faded auteur and the emergence of a confident new filmmaking voice while tapping sensitive social pressure points. The resonance of Get Out has been widely celebrated, but expect Split, a disturbing riff on abuse and mental illness, to be reevaluated as a prescient work, released at the beginning of a year that would be racked by sexual scandals and political legislations that seek to widen the already vast gulf between the classes. With these films, Blumhouse may have placed itself at the center of a new wave of protest horror that manages to routinely break through to mainstream culture. This year also saw the release of Natalia Leite’s M.F.A., which examines American rape culture with an audacious sense of humor, and Julia Ducournau’s grim and disturbing Raw, which suggests a David Cronenberg film that’s been informed with a feral female perspective. Horror cinema is growing more diverse, in other words, while our political culture grows more repressive and reactionary—a duality that could at least make for great future cinema. Chuck Bowen


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

10. Super Dark Times

The boys in Kevin Phillips’s Super Dark Times, a coming-of-age story that unexpectedly transforms into a serial-killer thriller, engage in realistic adolescent attitudinizing. In between riding bikes down tree-lined residential streets, they discuss masturbation schedules, mock their male classmates and assess how hot the girls are, even the female teachers, and debate who would be worth having sex with even if you had to do it in front of the whole student body. These all feel like ways that awkward young men would kill time when they don’t yet have access to drugs or booze. The bloodletting bursts into Super Dark Times as shockingly as it would the characters’ lives, like a buck through a classroom window. But the violence also emerges organically from their teenage posturing, making it seem hauntingly plausible, even if you can also spot how it depends on screenwriter contrivance. Three teens help cover up a crime, and the rest of the film deals with the emotional fallout. The characters’ immaturity is exposed and amplified by the circumstances, revealing that, of course, these teens aren’t old enough to remotely deal with this sort of thing. Henry Stewart


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

9. A Cure for Wellness

Gore Verbinski excels at disorienting crosscuts, and in a larger sense, A Cure for Wellness thrives on a collision of tones (the film’s literally hell-raising climax juxtaposes ghastly happenings in the spa’s basement with jubilant festivities in the ballroom above). The immaculate cosmetics of the wellness retreat itself, from the prudently manicured foliage to everyone’s spotless white uniforms, contrast with an alarming emphasis on creepy-crawly body horror. There’s enough sickly exposed white flesh on display throughout the film—often submerged in water filled with man-eating eels—to make Ulrich Seidl blush, while one bit of dental treatment/torture administered to Lockhart produces a retina-searing image worthy of early David Cronenberg. Carson Lund


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

8. Hounds of Love

Throughout Hounds of Love, Emma Booth is uncannily dexterous at projecting the internal struggle of the battered Evelyn’s inner turmoil. Through the character’s confrontation of her inner demons and the kidnapped Vicki’s (Ashleigh Cummings) attempts to cope with her own dilemma, the film tackles the disturbing issues of domestic violence and pedophilia without relying on exploitative shock tactics. Writer-director Ben Young’s camera is expressive yet tactfully implies rather than revels in the depths of the characters’ depravity, while his framing and editing fractures the space within John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn’s house so as to amplify the sense of Vicki’s entrapment. As both Vicki and Evelyn struggle in their own ways against the unhinged and impulsively homicidal John, Hounds of Love builds to a crescendo that earns its emotional catharsis while staying true to its roots as a truly chilling and intense thriller. Derek Smith


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

7. M.F.A.

M.F.A. dramatizes an intersection of exploitation, government-sanctioned violence, gendered bitterness, and personal expression that’s ironically fostered by trauma. Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) is an art student who sketches and paints female portraits that’re dismissed by her classmates for their formal timidity. The rejection of Noelle’s art sets up a story of troubling self-actualization, as director Natalia Leite and screenwriter Leah McKendrick use rape as an inciting incident for Noelle’s emergence as a daring artist and superficially confident sexual being. The filmmakers understand that people’s sexual tastes don’t conform to a handbook concerned with politically correct gender relationships. There are too many private and socially conditioned neuroses for such a concept to be realistic or even desirable, as suppression is arousing for both genders in certain contexts. These aren’t comfortable truths, and M.F.A. intensifies its discomfort with parodies of women’s activist groups, which are likened to book clubs that trade platitudes without getting their hands dirty. Noelle’s black-widow pose is ultimately understood as a partial truth, an evasion, a cliché, and both a corrector and enabler of injustice. The heroine’s imbalance is representative of our country’s unforgiveable biases, which too often liken rape to an inconvenience of paperwork. Bowen

Advertisement


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

6. The Blackcoat’s Daughter

The Blackcoat’s Daughter has a sad, macabre integrity. Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Emma Roberts, Lauren Holly, and James Remar are poignant in their minimalist roles, and writer-director Oz Perkins arranges their characters in a cleverly constructed narrative prism that simultaneously dramatizes violence and its aftermath in an endless chain reaction of perpetual cause and effect. And the carnage, when it arrives, is staged with an aura of guttural bitterness that refuses to give gore-hounds their jollies, elaborating, instead, on the desolation of the characters committing the acts. When the demons appear in the film, and in terrifyingly fleeting glimpses, Perkins understands them to spring from the deepest chasms of human despair. Bowen


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

5. XX

As in every other genre, women are underrepresented in the horror film. XX, then, is a humble gesture of correction, offering four shorts and a wraparound segment that are all written and directed by women, following female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts. XX utilizes the strength of the horror short: its brevity, which allows a filmmaker to point toward a social fissure and leave it hanging without the pressure of padding a running time with over-explanatory gimmickry. With the exception of “Don’t Fall,” these narratives are preoccupied with motherhood, particularly the way that a father can overshadow a mother without even consciously trying to, suggesting that children’s observation of this state of affairs is the first step to inoculating one into patriarchy. Binding these short films together are a series of elegantly chilling stop-motion pieces by Sofia Carrillo, which involve dolls in various poses of death and resurrection. In this context, their blank eyes connote rage against the machine. Bowen


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

4. 1922

In 1922, Wilfred James (Thomas Jane) initially scans as a broadly brutish characterization given by an actor looking to disrupt his handsomely aloof image, following a cinematic tradition of expressively filthy, monosyllabic and flamboyantly antisocial characters such as Daniel Plainview and Karl Childers. Though Jane’s dramatization of rage is haunting and shrewdly comical in its overt and ultimately moving über-manliness. The casual violence of Wilfred’s physicality is subtly calibrated, particularly the tension in his muscled back as he drinks lemonade on the porch after a hard day of murder. Complementing Jane’s portrait of coiled wrath, Molly Parker physicalizes the fear that informs every minute wrinkle of Arlette’s relationship with her husband, which the character attempts to paper over with bravado, inadvertently sealing her doom. Arlette is one of countless women who’re damned if they do and if they don’t, yet somehow the men are able to rationalize themselves as the victims. 1922 informs Stephen King’s pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force. Bowen


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

3. Split

The opening abduction scene in Split, in which Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) kidnaps three teenage girls in a parking lot, displays a mastery of filmmaking economy and grace: M. Night Shyamalan uses only a handful of camera setups and almost no dialogue—just a well-placed thump or two. It tells more with what it doesn’t show, obscured by a raised car trunk or in a rearview mirror, than what it does. Such sophistication is typical of Shyamalan’s work; if his visual language were written, there would be no adverbs, and the sentences would be concise yet dance with poetry. In the film, a literal cult of personalities develops inside Kevin’s head, calling themselves The Horde, controlling the host body and believing that a Beast is coming to feed on privileged young women. This gets at the film’s central theme: that trauma can break you, but it can also make you, giving you the skills needed to survive under duress and thus an advantage over sheltered suburbanites. In the end, the last girl standing is literally saved by her scars. There might be something discomfitingly romantic about this outcome, as though we should cultivate harm in order to improve ourselves. But maybe it just falls under the rubric of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Stewart

Advertisement


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

2. Raw

As in Ginger Snaps, which Raw thematically recalls, the protagonist’s supernatural awakening is linked predominantly to sex. At the start of the film, Justine (Garance Marillier) is a virgin who’s poked and prodded relentlessly by her classmates until she evolves only to be rebuffed for being too interested in sex—a no-win hypocrisy faced by many women. High-pressure taunts casually and constantly hang in the air, such as Alexia’s (Ella Rumpf) insistence that “beauty is pain” and a song that urges a woman to be “a whore with decorum.” In this film, a bikini wax can almost get one killed, and a drunken quest to get laid can, for a female, lead to all-too-typical humiliation and ostracizing. Throughout Raw, Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that’s reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg, often framing scenes in symmetrical tableaus that inform the various cruelties and couplings with an impersonality that’s ironically relieved by the grotesque intimacy of the violence. We’re witnessing conditioning at work, in which Justine is inoculated into conventional adulthood, learning the self-shame that comes with it as a matter of insidiously self-censorious control. By the film’s end, Ducournau has hauntingly outlined only a few possibilities for Justine: that she’ll get with the program and regulate her hunger properly, or be killed or institutionalized. Bowen


The 10 Best Horror Films of 2017

1. Get Out

Get Out’s central conceit, about a Stepford Wives-ish plot by blithely entitled suburban whites to colonize black people’s bodies, is a trenchant metaphor for white supremacy. The timing, character development, and gift for social satire that writer-director Jordan Peele honed as a sketch comedian all translate effortlessly to horror, allowing the first-time filmmaker to entrance his audience as deftly as Catherine Keener’s Missy mesmerizes Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris with that tapping teaspoon. The Sunken Place where Missy maroons Chris is the film’s most indelible image, a stomach-churning representation of how it feels to be stripped of your autonomy and personhood by a dominant culture that remains cruelly blind and deaf to your plight. In a world where almost no one is what they initially appear to be, Get Out anatomizes the evil lurking in the relatively benign-seeming prejudice that plays out as fetishization or envy, a form of racism that doesn’t see itself as racist at all. Elise Nakhnikian

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.