Sentient Vibes : October 2016

Every Halloween, a selective group of people, watch horror movies to satisfy their scary-movie craving. To kick off the Halloween season right as the horror enthusiast I am. I prepared early by watching a bunch of horror movies everyday in August.

In a world of movies, horror is a genre that is overpopulated, overplayed and overrepresented with a few gems. With the unimpressive techniques of jump scares, siren music and the cliché of having characters make terrible decisions. The horror movies that breakout from these cliches belong in peaks of cinema excellence.

To inspire fear is an art form. Fear has the capacity to make you apprehensive. It's the fear of the unknown, it's the concept of the gap that gets your imagination all worked up. For example, not knowing how you truly did on a test gives many people anxiety. It's the anxiety that paralyzes you because the possibilities are endless.

So in the spirit of getting into the spookiness of Halloween I've compiled majority of the ones I've found to be not only be well-made but hopefully spooky and crippling as my anxiety (psychological horror).

Trigger warning ★: Please check out the links below each movie to see its content advisory as a safety guide

5. Babadook (2014)

This movie is a 2014 psychological thriller movie made by Jennifer Kents. A single widowed mother is reading aloud a book to her boy, Samuel. As she turns each page, she realizes with each page turn the book's prose gets disturbingly darker and disconcerting. The film is desperately sad. As the mother is being haunted by older memories of her husbands death and taunted by the "Babadook". It's creepy and has very chilling atmospheric moments. If you're looking for cheap jump scares, gores or scary monsters this movie may not be for you. However the movie does definitely explore the disturbing paranoia and realistic side of the genre. It definitely gets under your skin and a movie you'd want to see more than once.

Trigger Warnings

4. May (2002)

May is another psychological movie with a typical slasher outline. The movie is about your archetypal outcast girl named May who grew up with a lazy eye (which I guess was stigmatized during these times enough to not have any friends or social skills) and a overly attachment to a doll she was given on her birthday as she gazes at it through the cabinet. As we explore our heroine we learn she works at an animal hospital as an assistant surgeon. She has a brief romance with a guy named Adam and takes a detour for a lesbian named Polly. When both romances go sour so does our Heroine. The movie parallels "Carrie" in the concept of a women being wounded by society and retaliating in a deadly revenge. If you're trying to see an awkward slasher with your boo, or angry at the world, this may be the prime movie of your night.

Trigger Warnings

3. Good Night Mommy (2014)

Indefinitely Good Night Mommy is a visual thriller. The cinematography can be breath taking or literally breath taking. It has three main characters, twin boys and their mother. However both of the twins grow suspicious of their mother's identity, after her surgery. In a sense the movie's disturbing plot twist can be a nod to The Uninvited or The Sixth Sense. The movie explores the reoccurring themes of isolation, grief, delusion, and paranoia. The pace of the movie can be slow but escalates quickly to disturbingly creepy.

Trigger Warnings

2. It Follows (2014)

After teenage girl Jay sleeps with her date she is handed down the fatal curse that has been passed down from victim to victim. The idea of this 'curse' is that it has no true form. It can take the form as any person, being someone you know or don't. You don't know when it can attack you or what form its going to take place in. The only way you can get rid of it is passing it through coitus. However once one person dies it goes down through the line of people who had previously had it. Throughout this memento mori film there is a strong acknowledgement to Dostrovsky riddled with references. It's set in an alternate universe with their technology. Having one character read The Idiot from a clamshell e-reader, but others watch old monster movies on pre-digital television sets. It Follows is a movie that definitely lingers in your head after following through. It's vague ending provokes a sense of haunted intimacy.

Trigger Warnings

1. Creep (2015)

This film is a rollercoaster of emotions. It made me laugh but not out of sheer humor, however out of forced uncomfortableness. The film centers around two men. Aaron a naive cameramen meets Josef of out the need for money through a cryptic Craigslist ad. Josef is a man who finds out he has a brain tumor and explains that he needs documentation of who he was before his son is born when he's not around to witness him. Through their interaction Aaron realizes that Josef maybe isn't the man whom he claims he is.

[Trigger Warnings]
Profanity, Murder, Frightening/Intense scenes, Partial Nudity, Alcohol

Honorable Mentions: Circle, Occulus, The Invitation, The Conjuring, The Following, The Guest, You're Next

Thank you for reading!

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