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Abigayle Laurenitis
Well it's not on streaming yet I don't think since I just saw it in the cinema but 'The Black Phone' is terrifying. Really really scary, and has a gripping plot and really great female lead too.
On Netflix, I'd suggest 'Run' (about a girl who uses a wheelchair who discovers a dark secret). Not really super scary but tense and lots of jump scenes.
'Creep' (the one set on the London tube, not the more recent one) is terrifying.
'Hush' is on Netflix and is scary.
'Happy Death Day' is a horror comedy that's more comedy than horror but a very good movie.
This might be useful? www.buzzfeed.com/jeremyhayes/best-horror-movies-netflix
I love horror films but Hush scared the wits out of me, I think I thought about it every week for about six months after watching it, definitely recommend!
I found Sinister really good, if you haven't already seen those, and The Strangers is a bit old now but I rewatched it recently and it still made me jump
I loved The Descent! Creeped me out, especially the fact it's British, felt so much closer to home lol.
Have you watched Midnight Mass? It's a Netflix series rather than a film but I thought it was brilliant. Slow burn but great last few episodes. (5 or 8 episodes I think).
Is this the dinner party one? There's a new film also called The Invitation starring the actress who played Daenerys' handmaid in Game of Thrones, as an American who finds out she has posh English relatives who try to embroil her into what looks like some kind of cult, per the trailer. I don't think it's out yet and I think for cinemas not streaming?
A scary movie that isn't a horror movie is 13 Lives, the film about the Thai soccer team being rescued from the cave. So tense!
PJ: Is because, for a very long time, something that we've talked about, is that I am too scared of scary movies and have always been too scared of scary movies to watch them at all. Like I derive no pleasure from them. Forever, I was just like, "Okay, that's fine. That's gonna be a thing that just skips me." Then a couple years ago, Get Out came out.
PJ: And it became such a zeitgeist-y thing that everybody was like, "Oh, it's so great. You gotta see it. It's not that scary," which is what people always say about things that, in fact, are that scary. But I think for the first time I felt left out and I wanted to be able to watch it. And like also, it seems to have sort of augured in this era of really smart, interesting horror movies. And I feel like I'm missing out for the first time. So I started looking into it. I read a study that said that you can actually kind of habituate yourself to horror movies by watching them.
PJ: We'll see. So we're gonna watch a movie every episode. You're gonna pick it and we're gonna have guests, some of the time at least. And today our guest is comedian and film buff Jason Mantzoukas...
JASON: I am not. I will say this. I am not a scaredy cat, in that I don't shy away from horror movies for being afraid or easily scared. But I am neither like Alex, horror isn't like one of my genres.
JASON: Correct. Yes, I'm one of the co-hosts of How Did This Get Made, which is a movie podcast about bad movies. Not horror movies, specifically, but certainly horror movies have been featured. Such as, Chopping Mall.
JASON: Because you would have had such a different experience of this movie, if you'd watched it all the way through at night with nobody there with you. And that should be the intention of this podcast. Here's what I'm willing to say. This, the first episode, is an unmitigated failure already.
JASON: So we're five minutes in and you have failed. Now, what my solemn promise to the audience is, that because of these fuck ups, PJ is gonna get it together and from now going forward, I think, Alex you should just choose brutal movies. And you should just start sending him like Ukrainian horror movies that are just absolutely terrifying.
PJ: You barely got me on the hook right now. I was like literally I was like, how could I get out of this? We promised a bunch of episodes. How can I get out of this? Maybe we could just put something else out? Maybe there's something that you don't know about that I know about that it could change to instead? Like I was like really trying.
PJ: And you keep thinking they're gonna meet. And I should just say, when I say "pause", I mean like it wasn't like a half an hour pause. It was just like I kept going to the bathroom, unnecessarily, because I was scared.
JASON: Which you'll start to pick up on and notice. You know? You'll start to see, oh, because it depends. Some movies are full of jump scares, where it's like suddenly, something's gonna jump out and scare you. And then some movies, like this, are just like building toward terrifying, unsettling imagery or moments, right?
PJ: Like when the priest is like in his apartment, there's not gonna be a demon under the bed. It's kind of like, you dread it and imagine what's gonna happen when you get there but I liked that there were entire parts of the movie that just felt like you were watching a movie with characters and like decent writing and good acting and like I really liked that. Like that's what felt safe about it.
PJ: It doesn't feel like a movie, it feels like you're watching a movie and behind you, there's a guy with a baseball bat, who's going to hit 4-6 times really hard during the movie. And so like, you're watching the movie kind of but so much of my brain is just like, "How bad is this gonna be and when's it going to be bad?", and like...
PJ: She's like in the hospital on like a sort of a CAT scan looking machine. It's not really a CAT scan machine. And they're sedating her and they put a syringe into her neck and then like put a line on the syringe and it's just so bloody and she looks so vulnerable. And that was really scary because I felt like I thought she was gonna kill everybody in that room.
ALEX: So two things about that particular scene. First, is that when people describe when they're all these descriptions of people fainting and going crazy at the screenings of the movie when it came out, it was primarily because of that scene because of the amount of blood in it.
JASON: And it eases you in cause if it really had just started supernatural, you'd be like, "Who cares? This is fake. This is a...I don't even care what this is.", but by pragmatically presuming what a real person would do? First, go to doctors. Then go to therapists. Then, what hope do we have left?
JASON: What's insidious about this movie is that she pragmatically goes systematically mad. Her mother goes insane trying to figure it out and knows that what's she saying when she says, "What about possession? What about exorcism?", she says to Father Karris, you now?
PJ: So I was watching it thinking about COVID and all my friends who have young kids who are having to teach them and who are struggling with it? And to me I was like, "Oh, this seems like it's a movie about wanting to kill your kids.", because they're really poorly behaved. And like loving them but them having like complicated behavioral problems where it's like, "I love you but you're acting like an insane person."
PJ: They don't know anything and they're very poorly behaved. So okay, the other thing that was interesting about watching this for me is that even though I found it really scary there were scenes that I thought were really funny. Sometimes like while they were scaring me. Like it wasn't like, "Oh, this malfunctioned.", and so I'm laughing. But they were so over the top. Like when she comes down and pees on the carpet, I thought it was really funny. I thought like, it's such a weird bold choice.
JASON: Well, that's what I like about this movie is like it's more like waiting in Jaws, they don't show you the shark for over an hour. You know the damage it's doing. You might get quick shots of something happening but you don't see the shark...
ALEX: So when I was watching it last night, I started getting super nervous. I watched it last night in preparation for this conversation, that I started getting super nervous. I was like, there's so much time you spend with Reagan in full on demon mode, where she's just like sitting around chatting? I was like PJ's not going to be scared by this at all. I picked a stinker.
JASON: But it wasn't right. And he met Linda Blair and her mother and sat in a room with them and was talking to the mother, primarily, and then Linda Blair just started speaking on her own behalf and telling him about how she'd read the book that it was based on. And he said, "Wait, you read the book?" And she said, " Yeah, I read the book." And then he started asking her if she understood because I think at that time she was like 12-years-old or something. Did you understand? And she showed such an understanding and a maturity for what the content of the book was that he was like, "She can do this."
In order to get legitimately scary reactions from the actors he would fire a gun when they were supposed to jump. The guy who plays Father Dyer, who's the person who delivers the last rights when Father Karris falls out the window.
ALEX: He's an actual priest and he kept trying to deliver the last rights and wasn't doing a good job and so William Friedkin got up in his face and he's like, "Listen do you trust me?", and the guy said, "Yes." And then he slapped him as hard as he could across the face.
ALEX: Oh the other thing I should say is he decided that when she was possessed, you had to be able to see everybody's breath in the room. So what he did was he got this gigantic restaurant air conditioner and would leave it on overnight. So they were all freezing the whole time they were shooting.
JASON: And that's what I really love about, like this era like Hollywood big, scary movies are really psychologically unsettling. The others that I would put in this category are Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, also movies that are about parents and children.
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