Video Game Horror Movie 2000s

[Justina Ky]

LuisPomales-Diaz is a freelance writer and lover of fantasy, sci-fi, and of course, horror. When he isn't working on a new article or short story, he can usually be found watching schlocky movies and forgotten television shows.

Inexplicably versed in the art of the tarot/horoscope hybrid reading, protagonist Haley (Harriet Slayter) uses the obviously cursed deck of cards to map out the fates of each of her friends, one by one. Using their star signs and a single tarot card, Haley reads the group down boots and assigns them each a dedicated monstrous assassin.

While the standouts include a mean dancing jester and a ghoulish magician with a penchant for pain, there is a whole slew of creative creatures reminiscent of a lost DTV Thirteen Ghosts sequel. The script wastes no time before the ensemble faces their gruesome fates, as spelled out by the cards.

With a revolving door of spooky creatures, a script that refuses to take a smoke break, a cute ensemble of young talent, and the addition of some otherworldly musical contributions, Tarot allows itself to be exactly what it is. A fun, unpretentious throwback to mid-aughts lowbrow horror at its finest.

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This movie was a horror movie about this young girl who I think was trying to escape from someone or some group of people who kept finding her and I believe they kept torturing her? Or maybe she just simply was found by 'bad' people.

I remember a scene where this doctor or someone from an institution was trying to inject the girl with something with bad intent but she managed to escape.Another scene I remember is where she was in a warehouse with hundreds of other children who I believe were forced to work maybe? I remember her running into this smaller room and doing something that caused the building to catch fire.

The MAIN DETAIL that I believe will help identify the movie is that this girl had a 'guardian' monstrous creature named 'Artemis' who I believed helped her on occasion. The girl looked like she was around 8-12 years old with brown or black hair. I believe she was an orphan as well but certain. I don't remember her having any parents or family. I think the last scene was of her hugging 'Artemis' under a tall old bare tree. I think 'Artemis' looked sort of like a large version of when Remus Lupin turned into a werewolf in 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban'. Please help identify this movie! I live in America by the way.

Much like the 1970s before it, the decade between 2000-2009 was a particularly fruitful era in the horror genre spawned by a climate of international turmoil and rapid technological advancements in the filmmaking industry. In the post-9/11 era, America was thrust into paranoid, war-fuelled anxiety and grief, and with the internet fully emerging as a dominant force behind modern culture, those anxieties were shared globally as each and every new horrific worldwide event was broadcast in crystal clear detail onto the computer screens of international households. The flip side of that technological advancement was the emergence of digital filmmaking, laptop editing software, and rapid-fire communication that allowed for an unprecedented number of unique voices, who might never have had a chance before, to get their films made and distributed. All this considered, it's no wonder directors like James Wan, John Boorman, Zack Snyder, and many others spawned terrifying features during this period, many of which we've cataloged here in our list of the best horror movies of the 2000s.

At the same time, a number of international trends were sweeping the genre, with inventive emergent subgenres popping up the world over. Riding off the late '90s rise of J-Horror, Asian cinema emerged at the forefront of genre filmmaking with a consistent string of eerie supernatural chillers -- a trend that unfortunately led to the string of derivative American remakes that had half the heart and none of the edge of their predecessors. In French-language cinema, the sadistic hyper-violent stylings of the French New Wave swept through the horror community like a brash, invigorating force, while a string of Spanish-language filmmakers turned to the old-fashioned chills of lowkey, character-driven ghost stories.

Stateside, a number of trends also swept through the genre. Slasher films were out, but the impending zombie craze was in its nascent stages. Thanks to the rampant success of Paranormal Activity, the found-footage subgenre became the order of the hour for low-cost thrills, a format that was notoriously grating in the hands of the wrong filmmaker but offered plenty of opportunities for inventive perspective for others. And of course, the early aughts were the era of "torture porn", the much-maligned genre that focused on carnage and mutilation over narrative. Home invasion and survival horror also became particularly prominent genres in an era where audiences and filmmakers seemed to grapple with the fact that the scariest part of the human experience is the humans.

As I said before, it was a pretty spectacularly abundant decade for horror and there's a ridiculous wealth of movies I love that didn't find a spot on this list, so here's a rather lengthy list of honorable mentions: Calvaire, The Signal, Stuck, Frontier(s), All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Marebito, Suicide Club, Them, Versus, The Children, Silent Hill, The Cottage, Exte, The Ruins, Ju-On: The Grudge, Bug, Wolf Creek, Teeth, Hostel, 30 Days of Night, Sauna, Slither, Frailty, Severence, and to be honest, probably a few more that I'm forgetting.

Despite the reputation it earned as shock-factor torture porn thanks to the increasingly reductive format of the sequels, Saw is essentially a horror-grown thriller with hints of outright violence and shockingly little gore. James Wan and Leigh Whannell's nasty little puzzle box introduced one of the most iconic modern horror villains in Tobin Bell's Jigsaw, a murderer of ideals and dastardly creativity. Setting his sights on victim's who take their life for granted, Jigsaw constructs a series of puzzles and challenges designed to test the victim's grit and will to live. Jigsaw's essential credo is that if one doesn't value life enough to do whatever it takes to survive, then they are undeserving of it. The film's main action is set against two unlikely allies, chained together in a room with scant clues on how to escape. Jigsaw gives each of them pieces of the puzzle, turning them against each other despite their bet efforts to collaborate on an escape strategy. It's a chamber piece meets noir detective thriller that, along with Eli Roth's Hostel, became the progenitor of the torture porn craze. But while Jigsaw's grisly traps became the calling card of the franchise, Wan and Whannell were up to something much more clever and Saw is no parade of graphic perversion, but a twisty murder mystery that values narrative surprise over shock value set-pieces.

In a genre as tried and true as the exorcism film, it's a challenge to come up with a new spin that manages to make the threat of the devil feel fresh and dangerous. With The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Scott Derrickson pulled off just that feat with a mature, heartfelt drama that also chills to the bone when the moment calls for it. Were it not for the heavy horror overtones, The Exorcism of Emily Rose would have probably been positioned as a prestige drama. Supported by an A-List cast that includes Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson, the film dramatizes the real-life death of Anneliese Michel, a woman who was diagnosed with Epilepsy after a series of visions and fits. Uncured by conventional medicine, her family turned to the church in a brutal exorcism that ended her life. Telling the concurrent stories of Emily, the priest who was charged with negligent homicide (Wilkinson), and the Lawyer defending him at trial (Linney), The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a pensive portrait of faith and the chilling reality that, if you believe in god, you must also believe in the horrifying power of the devil.

As Emily, the fresh-out-of-Julliard Jennifer Carpenter delivers a career-making performance; contorting and screeching with the frenetic panic of an animal caught in a trap, and Derrickson utilizes these piercing moments of performance horror with a wise restraint. With one foot in the realm of reality as we know it and one firmly planted in the reality of biblical horrors, Derrickson interweaves the dramatic and the terrifying with a measured hand.

It's broad and cheeky, but never more than it is disturbing as the victims are picked off one-by-one by a force they are all but helpless against. There's a blatant goofiness to the ultimate discovery of how Death chooses the order of its victims and how it can (at least temporarily) be defeated, but like Nightmare on Elm Street before it and It Follows after, Final Destination deals in the ultimate and unavoidable fact that we will all perish. And in the Final Destination world, if we try to skirt that inevitable doom, we just become the target of an invisible, whatever-it-takes form of death that will have it's bloody vengeance.

Yes, Cannibal Holocaust was technically the first ever found footage film. Yes, 1999's The Blair Witch Project pushed the boundaries of the genre in ways no one could have ever imagined. But 2007's Paranormal Activity, the first of a seven-and-growing franchise, kickstarted the found footage craze that persists today, 16 years later. The simple but effective story follows a couple, Kate and Micah, who document the unexplained and creepy happenings in their home. It begins with a subtle noise in the middle of the night, Katie's keys drop to the floor without any explanation. But then it escalates to the door slamming, Katie finds a burnt picture from her childhood in the attic. Katie's behavior begins to become more erratic and aggressive. And it all culminates in an unforgettable finale that yes, seems predictable in today's climate, but terrified audiences at the time. Paranormal Activity is the cinematic embodiment of "less is more." No blood, no gore, no Freddy Kruger. It's what we can't see that makes the film so terrifying. The concept has been done to death, and to varying results in the subsequent sequels. But the original film has to be remembered for its innovative approach to a genre many thought was dead and for bringing it back to life. To this day, it remains one of the most profitable films of all time. - Emma Kiely

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