5. Triangle (2009)Remember how at the beginning of this list I talked about how High Tension's twist ending totally undermines the movie and makes repeat viewings endlessly frustrating? This is the opposite of that. Triangle is a sharp, harrowing Mobius strip of a movie, with a mind-bending, quantum storyline that withstands the closest of scrutiny. Watching director Christopher Smith's previous feature, the satirical slasher Severance, you could be forgiven for going into this with modest expectations. But Smith delivers something exceptional here, in a chiller that's as clever and polished as it is haunting. It's hard to really talk about the plot, since it's best to go into Triangle with no prior knowledge--but suffice it to say that this is almost like a horrorshow take on the non-Batman Christopher Nolan films (most obviously Memento, but there are definite shades of The Prestige as well), and a flick with a seemingly endless number of rabbits that it pulls out of its hat. Surprising, smart, and very unsettling, Triangle is a cruelly overlooked movie that deserves a wider audience.
Note: if you liked Triangle's mind-bending style, try and track down a copy of a 2004 movie called Primer. The DVD seems to be out of print, or at least going for an obscene amount on Amazon--but if you thought Triangle was a mindfudger, Primer will well and truly do your head in, with a subtle sci-fi plotline of boundless, chart-requiring complexity. (Or, you could just watch it on YouTube.)
4. Ju-on/The Grudge (2000; 2003; 2004)
If The Ring is the father and Pulse the son, then Ju-on is the very unholy spirit. What defined J-horror as a style was imagery: while a lot of horror derives its mileage from the unseen, J-horror, like The Exorcist, was about showing you images you'd never forget--and Ju-on is very much the apotheosis of the style. Director Takashi Shimizu took Hideo Nakata's grim vision of Sadako and ran screaming with it, abandoning the strange mythos of The Ring for one of the purest, most nightmarish takes on the haunted house ever filmed. This series is infamous for its number of incarnations, and although many connoisseurs cite the first, straight-to-video feature as the best, they're all total screamers. And actually, Ju-on: The Grudge, Shimizu's first theatrical version (pictured above) is the definitive version: it dispenses with the gore and unnervingly glacial pacing of the original TV movie, but features the most coherent story and the most haunting visuals. Even the American remake is quite good, which is no surprise considering it's directed by Shimizu himself and is basically a "greatest hits" reshuffling of scenes from the two original movies.
But in any incarnation, Ju-on is nothing short of a master class in cinematic tension: the folktale themes and minimal plot are a skeleton that Shimizu fleshes out with sheer, oppressive dread. The scares are numerous and legendary; by the end of the sequence in Hitomi's condo you may need a clean pair of pants. And again, what really pushes Ju-on over the top is the imagery, as what is seen here cannot be unseen: a flash of Toshio reflected in a glass door, a bedroom suddenly filled with keening black cats, Kayako descending the staircase. A truly essential modern masterpiece.
3. Inside (2007)
As I neared the end of the list, I agonized a bit more over the ordering: should Inside really beat Ju-on, a movie I'd call a five-star classic? In the end, I decided yes, but the truth is that they're not that far apart, in more ways than one: both are movies about an average house where things go very, very wrong, and where cruelly wronged mothers seek their grisly revenge. Part Halloween, part Tenebre, and part Die Hard, Inside is a gruesome nerve-jangler that also functions quite well as pure, popcorn entertainment. In terms of "the new French extremity", Inside is very watchable: this is an altogether enjoyable thriller that will leave you feeling guilty about having so much fun watching so many people get butchered so horribly. I've seen a lot of violent movies, but Inside can quite honestly stake a claim to being the bloodiest there is (at least outside of played-for-laughs bloodbaths like Piranha and Dead Alive): it isn't especially shocking or transgressive for the seasoned viewer of extreme cinema, but this is a movie where the arterial spray is almost a character in its own right, dousing the scenery and actively transforming the look and mood of the film. In classic Sadean fashion, every time you think it can't go any further, the film throws some new, pioneering innovation in bloodletting at you. (The "zombie" scene towards the end is unparalleled in this regard.) Truly a scorcher, and as good as horror films get these days. Also: the DVD features one of the best "making of" featurettes I've ever seen, offering great insight into how hard it really is to make a movie like this.
2. Audition (1999)My original concept for the list was strictly movies in the last ten years--but I had to include Audition, and for a while I actually thought of giving it the number one spot. The overused horror superlatives used to describe Audition, a movie that became almost instantly legendary for its audience walkouts, are all completely warranted; Audition really is one of those movies that no one forgets. It's an outlier as well, almost to the point of being a satire (yet another level the film works on): the long-haired spirit of vengeance in this one is very much alive, and spends most of the movie smiling cheerfully (regardless of what's going on onscreen). The best compliment I've heard paid to the film came when I subjected a friend to it: during the film's climax, it offers a brief, illusory moment of respite before plunging you back into its unique brand of sadism, and at that point she turned to me and simply said, "Help me." If you've seen any of the promotional materials for Audition, you know something is coming--but it doesn't matter. You really can't prepare yourself for what happens in the last half hour, in an agonizing sequence that earns the oft-used comparison to the shower scene in Psycho.
To be honest, I find a lot of director Takashi Miike's work overhyped and insubstantial--but Audition is such a left-field masterpiece that it will nonetheless forever cement him as a great director in my mind. And truthfully, my favorite moment in Audition isn't actually the final scenes. I don't want to say too much in case you haven't seen it, but it comes midway through what, up to that point, has been a slow-moving, Japanese family drama. Along the way, Miike has been feeding you brief, eerie glimpses of Asami at home, waiting by the phone. But all of a sudden, we're hit with a scene that, visually, is so unsettling that it forces you to rethink everything you've seen up to that point--and then it really makes you jump. This is what makes Audition so great: it is a virtuoso performance in the art of audience manipulation, and its sheer cruelty to the audience would make Artaud blush. If you haven't seen it, watch it--you won't forget it.
1. Let the Right One In (2008)Let the Right One In is not just a horror movie, but a downright beautiful coming-of-age tale, a delicate love story, even a period piece. But it is also, unashamedly, a horror movie, and one that performs a miracle by finding new territory within that most moribund of horror tropes: the sympathetic vampire. Modern horror has had an ongoing love-hate relationship with the idea at least since the advent of Anne Rice's tortured vampire aesthete, and it's back on the rise again with fare like Twilight and True Blood. But Let the Right One In makes the idea of a humanized vampire seem wholly fresh again, thanks to the incredible character of Eli: a 12-going-on-300-years-old vampire who is simultaneously sweet, endearing and viciously murderous. Lina Leandersson's performance is uncanny, but it's also truly a composite: much like with the fully demonized Linda Blair in The Exorcist (whose blasphemous dialogue was actually delivered by veteran radio actress Mercedes McCambridge, who tragically had to sue for a credit in the movie!), all of Leandersson's lines were overdubbed by Elif Ceylan, giving the waifish vampire her appropriately world-weary voice.
But it's not just Eli that makes the movie great. Kare Hedebrant is every bit her equal as Oskar, a pale, fragile-as-porcelain boy struggling to assert himself and to figure out how to be a man. The film also looks absolutely gorgeous, with Swedish suburban scenery so icy and beautiful your breath will practically turn to steam in front of you. It's also filled with indelible, shivery images: Eli scampering up the wall of a hospital, or wreaking a bloody retribution on Oskar's tormentors. And as for the tenuous, innocent relationship between the two principals, I would paraphrase a famous accolade extended to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: it is one of the only truly believable love stories of our time.
Postscript: what, then, of the American remake, needlessly retitled Let Me In? The change of name says it all: while it's an extremely faithful remake, and it'll do in a pinch if you can't get your mitts on the original or just suffer from morbid curiosity, it loses a lot of poetry in the translation. In the US version, Eli is just a girl, with more special effects to make her scary, and all the gorgeously grey ambiguities of the original are smoothed over. Most notably, Eli's gender is never brought into question, and Oskar explicitly agonizes over his budding romance with a killer in a way that seems more like a Hollywood artifact than a real piece of characterization. On the up side, there are some interesting changes: the disfigurement of Eli's guardian is re-imagined in a pretty tense and suspenseful fashion, but it's not enough to justify a movie that simply did not need to be made. The original, as it stands, is perfect.
That's it, it's over...or is it? (Musical sting)
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