Persistent vision: Lake Mungo (2008).

"I am the victim
Of a persistent vision
It tracks me down

With its precision."

- Rites of Spring

Lake Mungo is destined to end up forlorn and forgotten, ghettoized in horror DVD sections and abandoned in clearance bins. Whether it's the schlocky DVD art (compare that silly design to this understated poster for the film) or its retail identity as part of the direct-to-DVD After Dark Horrorfest series, it's not hard to picture the casual viewer dismissing this humble little ghost story and moving on.

That would be a huge mistake, because Lake Mungo is one of the best ghost movies of the past 20 years. It has a purity and realism that makes Paranormal Activity and its ilk seem stagey, an emotional resonance that makes The Ring and Ju-on feel colder and more remote than ever, and a "twist" that's orders of magnitude beyond those found in The Sixth Sense or The Orphanage. And as much as it is a brilliant horror movie, it's also a devastating, human drama about loss, secrecy, and grief. It refuses to fall back on stale cliches, not trying to make you jump so much as trying to draw you in. It's the kind of film that you'll still be turning over in your head long after the credits roll.

Lake Mungo bears a significant David Lynch influence, but maybe not quite in the way you'd expect. This is, after all, a movie about a girl named Laura Alice Palmer who died under mysterious circumstances—but it's a film that seems to take influence less from the style and aesthetic that Lynch is beloved for than from his perennial fascination with dark secrets buried under the facade of normality. Skeptical viewers should know that Lake Mungo is also a film with a drum-tight story to tell, and little interest in surreal digressions. 

It seems like a bit of a red flag when the star goes to the premiere hoping to "learn more" about the film.

Like Twin Peaks in the beginning, Lake Mungo is essentially a mystery: who killed Alice Palmer? The film deserves credit for not structuring the entire movie around the twist, because Lake Mungo would work even without the shocking reveal in the third act. (As with most movies, it's one that's really best to see without any prior knowledge; you've probably read too much already!) So many movies ask you to withhold all questions until the end, putting up with an unbelievable quantity of bullshit in the hopes that the Big Twist will redeem everything—and it so often doesn't. But Lake Mungo is a patient, logical story that will already have you in rapt attention by the time it reaches the moment of revelation, and the surprise it has in store is of an entirely different species than most now making the rounds at the multiplex.

Lake Mungo actually owes less to the typical ghost movie or to David Lynch than it does to a film like Capturing the Friedmans: it's cut to look like a documentary about a family in crisis, and it's extremely convincing. It's actually much more believable than something like 2010's controversial Catfish, a purportedly genuine documentary that presents like a glossy fake. I'd love to show Lake Mungo to someone and tell them it is a real documentary, just to see how they respond. The brilliant editing is one of the film's greatest strengths, because it makes the low-key supernatural proceedings seem that much more authentic—and by extension, that much scarier.

In the post-Paranormal Activity era, we've got more ghost movies than ever to choose from, but what sets Lake Mungo apart is that it's genuinely haunting. Lake Mungo never comes within kilometers of a "cheap" scare, instead emphasizing deep chills and existential dread; there's no cats jumping out of cupboards, no orchestras shoved down the stairs. It's a film less interested in bludgeoning you with the paranormal than nudging you, gently but inexorably, toward an encounter with something that's beyond comprehension. This sense is mirrored by a camera that frequently emulates real-life "spirit photography", showing us a seemingly innocuous shot before slowly and steadily zooming in, Ken Burns style, to reveal the apparent presence of the otherworldly.

Director Joel Anderson nonetheless opted not to adopt Burns' trademark "Lego man" hairstyle.

Late in the film, we see a sequence where two separate sessions with the same psychic (one with central victim Alice Palmer, and one with her mother after her death) are cut together to make it appear as if they're interacting on a plane beyond our understanding. When you stop and think about it, this scene is kind of remarkable: the filmmakers are producing an uncanny effect in us by employing a technique that might be employed by real documentarians to produce the same effect when making a real documentary. At this point, we realize that Lake Mungo is less a horror movie with documentary trappings than an actual documentary about a fictional event.

The scene also encapsulates the film's theme of how the loss of a loved one can make them seem more present in our lives than ever, with our existence rearranged around the fact of their absence. 21st century viewers are so fluent in genre tropes, especially in horror, that movies reflexively commenting on them are now more common that those that treat them with a straight face. (Perhaps you've seen The Cabin in the Woods.) Such self-awareness can be great, especially when it allows a story's inherent unreality to express a basic truth about the way we live: Ringu and its successors spoke to our alienation in a world mediated by technology, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer used ghouls and goblins as metaphors for the painful process of growing up.

Battling the forces of evil, i.e. getting a job where you have to interact with the public.

But Lake Mungo is different, because it's really about us. The characters in the movie feel like real people coping with a real tragedy: not brutal mayhem wrought by a psycho killer, but the tragedy of losing someone in the prime of their life. The psychic in the movie isn't portrayed as the usual mystical seer, confirming the presence of dark forces; instead we get a painfully normal man who is in all likelihood a duplicitous fraud. Even the film's supernatural core is not without ambiguity: nothing in the film is immune to alternative explanation, and the story plays out with a sense of restraint and subtlety that makes the flaming Ouija board scene in Paranormal Activity feel like something out of Transformers.

Naturally, some people will hate it. Some horror fans will probably hate it. But, if you're comfortable with subtlety and ambiguity—and if you don't see the latter as a license to dispense with a good story—you're not likely to find a better ghost story these days.

Revenge of the '00s, Part V: A New Beginning (11-6)

11. Suicide Club (2001)

Battle Royale has become a real cult classic with American viewers, but Suicide Club attacks many of the same themes and anxieties and is a much creepier, more shocking and effective movie. Like Battle Royale, it's a J-horror outlier: no pale, black-haired onryō, but the same sense of social comment and the same earnest desire to shock audiences. And shock it did: Suicide Club became immediately infamous for its opening scene, depicting a mass teenage suicide in that most psychologically fraught of Japanese settings: the subway. In terms of sheer excess, this is as over-the-top as millennial Japanese "extreme" cinema ever got--but the real surprise is that, from there, Suicide Club just gets better and better. This movie is like what might have happened if Kiyoshi Kurosawa had decided to trade in his abandoned, derelict buildings and direct day-glo J-pop music videos (literally). This is a bright, kinetic, and visionary film--and at the same time, an utterly bleak and nihilistic one. Suicide Club truly has everything: there are real scares, real gross-outs, and a gnawing, pit-of-the-stomach sense of dread to complete the J-horror checklist--but this is no formal exercise. It's one of the most original and powerful Japanese films of the last decade, in any genre.




10. Eden Lake (2008)
Donkey Punch had more than a faint whiff of chavviness to it, but Eden Lake is where the nascent chavsploitation genre reaches full bloom. There's nary a Burberry tartan in sight, but this is as classic a "cruel story of youth" as you'll find in modern movies. It's all very rote at first: weekenders-on-holiday-run-afoul-of, and all that. But what puts this one over the top is an incendiary performance by the 18-year-old Jack O'Connell (above, with knife), as one of the most eerily pure film sociopaths of all time. O'Connell doesn't chew any scenery or throw any bombs, but he evinces such a cool, unfeeling malice that he's every bit as scary as 2008's other great psychopath: Heath Ledger's Joker. By the end of the movie, O'Connell only needs to turn his eyes directly into the camera to create a deeper chill than an army of ghouls. (Along with cast member Thomas Turgoose, O'Connell also starred in the critically acclaimed 2006 pic This is England, creating a subtle metacomment: where the hooligans of Thatcher's England had a streetwise soulfulness, the youth of today have nothing but bloodthirst.)




9. Martyrs (2008)
Man, you know a movie is going to be good when the DVD starts with an apology from the director. And unless it's all a huge put-on, it's hard to believe somebody as sheepish and bashful as Pascal Laugier could've directed such a savage, unapologetic film. Martyrs got a lot of hype very quickly as a new high-water mark in "extreme" cinema, for those always on the lookout for the next big shocking, bloody thing. But it's a movie with much, much more thought packed into its (literally) torturous run-time than the average post-Saw bloodbath; this is a movie that has a lot to say about trauma, victimization, and the justification for violence, with a bone-deep existential message as stark and intimidating as Being and Time. And Laugier is right: this is not a movie you enjoy, but one that you endure. Martyrs has to be the signal film on the horror end of what one Artforum critic has ridiculously (but understandably) termed "the new French extremity"; it is also a much better film than overheated shock treatments like Baise-moi or even Irreversible. And Laugier, in his wisdom, has downplayed the kind of hype which would give his movie a place at the Cahiers du Cinema table: in France, much like in America, horror is still a ghetto.

Postscript: of course there's going to be an American remake! And it sounds predictably dubious. Daniel Stamm, the skilled director of The Last Exorcism, is attached, but he says: "[The original film] is very nihilistic. The American approach [that I'm looking at] would go through all that darkness but then give a glimmer of hope. You don't have to shoot yourself when it's over." Very American, Mr. Stamm; we never did really take to existentialism.

8. The Descent (2005)

From the man who brought you Night of the Living Dead: Werewolves comes Aliens: Underground: Vampires. If my writeups of Neil Marshall's films seem flippant, it is only because they lend themselves to it. Don't mistake my irreverence for contempt, because as a moviegoer The Descent thrilled me like nothing in years. (Note that the first two Alien films are essentially my cinematic bible; they contain within them all great wisdom.) Marshall takes the unmapped caverns of the American backwoods, fills them with creeping, de-evolved Nosferatus, and drops a whole pack of spunky Ripleys into the mix (plus at least one Vasquez). The results, quite simply, are dynamite, and go deeper than the entirely respectable thrills and chills on offer: there is a subtlety and a human complexity at work here that dwarfs many similar films. But Marshall still expertly exploits our instinctual fear of the dark, and the movie's real triumph are its drooling albino CHUDs: taking a key page from the Aliens playbook, those are real people! (Who took an underfreak crash course, naturally.) A truly inspired directorial flourish: Marshall didn't allow his heroines to see the creatures in full makeup until they appeared in-scene. Also, bonus points for perhaps the gnarliest final girl transformation scene of all time (above).

Postscript: I discovered after seeing this movie that it shares the title with a surprisingly good 1999 thriller in the Michael Crichton mold, by a guy named Jeff Long. Book and movie share more than just a title: imagine the movie blown up into an epic, near-future saga about the colonization of an enormous world below, populated by the dread underbiters. It's really good, and if you liked the movie you'd do well to check it out.

7. Rogue (2007)
With Wolf Creek, director Greg McLean tapped into the blind spot behind our smug sense of mastery over the world around us, transforming a beautiful (if dangerously isolated) tourist destination into an alien planet, inhabited by a stalking menace wearing a human face. Rogue actually continues in a surprisingly similar vein, and it's also a better, tighter movie overall. More than that: Rogue is the best Jaws movie since Jaws. It's another movie about a big, man-eating bastard of a beast, but a couple things put it over. One, as in Wolf Creek, is naturalism: they may not have the same dimension as Brody, Quint, and Hooper, but these characters are believable, and they behave suspiciously like real people. The other is the simple fact that the titular croc is the best creature effect since The Host: this is, again, CGI done right, at its most subtle, restrained, and effective. The big lizard doesn't tear through the mise-en-scène, wagging its complex modeling in your face, but instead acts like a real crocodile, drifting slowly and inevitably your way before exploding into brutal, even clumsy motion. You will really forget you're watching a special effect, and mistake it for a real crocodile of extremely generous size. And the film's climactic moment is a concerto of suspense, and in its key moment even offers an inspired variation on the perfectly simple, stabbing heartbeat of the Jaws theme.


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: a time paradox, black cats (gone awry), an unexpected zombie, little monsters, and--you guessed it!--a last act surprise.

Revenge of the '00s, Part IV: The Dream Master

16. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
It's better than the original. Yeah, I went there. Dawn of the Dead is not actually a remake of the Romero zombie classic; it's the 5,679th remake of Aliens (which you could argue was itself reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead), but it's also one of the best ones ever made. Compared to 28 Days Later's revisionist, almost apologetic take on the genre, Dawn is stubbornly traditional (although it keeps the hated "fast zombies"). It's actually more classicist than Romero himself, who has proven eager to "evolve" the genre with each entry, for better (Day) or worse (possibly barring Land, everything since). As such, I'd argue that this is the key movie in the modern zombie renaissance, for that one simple reason: it isn't afraid to take itself and its chosen genre seriously, and it points directly towards fare like World War Z and The Walking Dead (which, to be fair, began in its comic incarnation one year earlier). This isn't to say that the pic is without humor: watch for Modern Family's Ty Burrell in a great turn as a rich, self-involved asshole. This is also Zack Snyder before he became buried under the weight of his own schtick, degenerating into video game farce. I'd contend that if this movie had been titled anything else, it would've been much more readily accepted by genre connoisseurs--even with the fast zombies. A better straight-up, no-bullshit zombie flick is tough to find.




15. Paranormal Activity (2007)
Necessity is the mother of invention. In the world J-horror made, we saw vindictive spirits visiting an apocalyptic vengeance on a lonely, high-tech civilization. Paranormal Activity is a $15,000, back-to-basics riposte: an intimate, quietly devastating story about our fear of what goes bump in the night. It returns to an antiquated view of technology as tool rather than transformative. Even if you bracket the low budget hype, Paranormal Activity works because it's a lean, muscular film, focused like a laser beam. This is a ghost story as pure as Ju-on, but it abandons the J-ghost template to once again draw tension and chills from what you don't see. While the film actually shows us plenty of the title phenomenon (especially compared to a found-footage predecessor like The Blair Witch Project, which relied totally on suggestion and implication), we still never get to face the monster itself. As a result, I personally find it much less frightening than the Japanese greats--but the film is driven by an amazing grasp of our psychology, basing its pull on our own desperate desire to see documented evidence of the spirit world. Just like the film's victims, we are roped in, incapable of turning away even as we see things getting worse and worse.

14. Sheitan (2006)

In America, Vincent Cassel is typecast as a snooty French dickhead, in movies ranging from Steven Soderbergh's Ocean series to Black Swan. But in his native land he's a superstar, and in case you doubted his acting chops, Sheitan is proof positive that he's the real deal. Here Cassel plays Joseph, one of the most unforgettable horror characters ever: a grinning bumpkin oozing with sweaty menace, a cheerful malevolence always just below the surface. It's a totally committed, incredible performance; Joseph not only lives on when he's offscreen, he casts a ghoulish shadow over the entire film. As a major star totally committing himself to such a weird, off-putting role, stateside comparisons are hard to come by: Brad Pitt in Kalifornia, maybe? The film is less about chills and shocks than a queasy, mounting sense of revulsion--and the final frame is almost in the same league as Sleepaway Camp.

13. The Ring (1998; 2002)
It's hard to appreciate in the same way after all the hype and the inevitable backlash, but The Ring is a stone-cold horror classic, with a pioneering mix of medieval spookiness and millennial tension that still resonates. Part Japanese folktale and part Candyman-style urban legend, this is a clever, original, and pioneering movie that was way ahead of its time: The Ring is a ghost story for the age of viral video and social networks, avant la lettre. In Sadako J-horror found the perfect icon: the vengeful female ghost is a longstanding trope in Japanese folklore that pushed some deep cultural buttons, a la The Exorcist; for western viewers, this spectre exuded an even more profound, alien hostility. And again, it's hard to view it the same way today, but The Ring is also a great example of how to do a twist ending right. There is simply nothing else in cinema like the sledgehammer blow delivered by that scene, where the smoldering tension of the entire film explodes like a hydrogen bomb. The American remake is really not that bad: it's very faithful to the original visually, and for the small amount it loses in translation (mostly just the ESP/psychic angle) it atones by upping the hair-raising intensity of the jump scares by about, oh, 10,000 times.




12. Kairo ("Pulse", 2001)

Takashi Miike gets all the press among horror and cult cinema fans, but a bulletproof case can be made that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is Japan's greatest outre/genre filmmaker. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) has developed a brand of horror that is very distinctly his own, defined by a crushing sense of isolation and the most perfectly unsettling locations ever filmed. Kairo (which I'm told might be better translated as "Circuit") could be his masterpiece, and it is without a doubt the bleakest and most apocalyptic of all J-horror films. The classic themes are present and accounted for--chief among them, technology as the vehicle for spiritual annihilation--but they are given the ultra-bleak Kurosawa edge, and never has the sense of desolation so key to J-horror been more acute than it is here. The fright does not come in sudden stabs or sharp chills, but in a devastating sense of hopelessness. Note: of all the terrible remakes of horror classics we've seen in recent years, the American Pulse is, by far, the worst--avoid at all costs.


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: death cults, more chavsploitation, bloody misdirection, a final girl fake-out, and a three-hour tour...gone awry.

Revenge of the '00s, Part III: Season of the Witch

21. The Host (2006)
For the most part, CGI deserves the bad rap it gets these days, but every so often somebody gets it just right. The Host is another victory for mixed messages, as much an absurd family dramedy as it is a horror movie--but the film's monster is a Promethean triumph of special effects, and the way it rampages across the banks of the Han River reminds you of why we thought computerizing our monsters was a good idea to begin with. You can't help but believe in this freakbeast, whose relatively small size and slimy versimilitude help it to reach Jurassic Park levels. The Host's environmentalist edge has gained a little extra poignance from the disastrous BP spill, but the film is so offbeat that it blunts the social comment a little. That's okay, because this is a one-of-a-kind creature feature that succeeds on its own terms. The obligatory (and late) American remake is reportedly in the offing, and it really seems like more of a doomed endeavor than usual: the original is so quirky and singular that even the upcoming sequel may be hard-pressed to replicate its magic.




20. Saw (2004)

After six sequels and numerous imitators, it's easy to forget what the original Saw is actually like. Watch it again, and chances are you'll find that (1) it's not really as bloody as you remember, and (2) it's still damned entertaining. Saw is essentially a mystery, with terrific pacing that feeds us new information bit by bit, as we struggle along with Dr. Gordon and Adam to figure out just what the hell is happening to them. It's not an especially scary film in my opinion, but it is a tense and compelling one, with a personality all its own. Honestly, I think comparisons to Seven are a bit misplaced and superficial; the real forefather of Saw is the terrific 1997 sci-fi thriller Cube, which also offers a blood-drenched take on game theory. But where Cube revels in its own refusal to provide answers, Saw is all about the Seinfeldian tie-up, with a twist ending that still works better than many of its contemporaries.




19. Marebito (2004)
Takashi Shimizu apparently shot Marebito in just eight days, while he was between incarnations of Ju-on. But don't make the mistake of thinking this is a throwaway: it's actually a huge departure from the harrowing, merciless Ju-on series, and an altogether unearthly, hallucinogenic head trip. The opening plays with your expectations, making you think you're headed into familiar J-ghost haunt-and-kill territory, but before long things start to get...odd. There's still the requisite riff on modern technology and alienation, but Marebito sucks you into a surreal fever dream more reminiscent of David Lynch or Cronenberg than any ghost story this side of H.P. Lovecraft. But unlike Lynch at his worst, Marebito is always coherent, while still offering a myriad of possible interpretations--and its underlying plot has that same eternal, folkish resonance found in the best J-horror. (The title can be rendered, in an eerie English translation, as "The Stranger from Afar.") In its depiction of an everyman disappearing down a rabbit hole of uncanny weirdness, it's also not unlike the work of Shinya Tsukamoto (the filmmaker behind Tetsuo: The Iron Man, amongst others), who also happens to be the film's star. The closest comparison might be Uzumaki, but I actually find Marebito both more watchable and even more bizarre. Compared to the brute minimalism of Ju-on, Marebito is a heady blend of ideas, mixing arcane lore, literary allusions, urban legends and dense, symbolic social comment. There's really nothing else like it.




18. Piranha (2010)

As a Joe Dante superfan, I was dubious about this one for sure. And at first, Piranha (3D) (2010) (Parentheses) seemed to be trying to antagonize me: by the time I got to the pandering Pixies reference I was ready to give up. But I'm glad I stuck around, because in the last act this pic becomes the most hysterical, over-the-top operatic bloodbath imaginable, like Julie Taymor's Titus with more dick jokes. This is a movie in the same spirit as the early Peter Jackson flicks or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, with (literally) gallons of blood, pinballing punk energy, and a tongue planted so firmly in cheek that it threatens to tear its own face off. It even offers a kind of metacomment on the plague of CGI, shoving what seem to be deliberately shitty effects in your face whenever the screen isn't filled with gore and/or nudity (i.e. rarely). Alexandre Aja, the auteur behind dire bloodbaths like High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes remake, gets in touch with his inner goof here, and the results are priceless. Ludicrous, endlessly fun and totally unconcerned with the boring herbs that'll never take it seriously anyway, Piranha is the "Touch Me, I'm Sick" of horror movies. (How's that for an "indie rock" reference, you Hollywood hacks?!)




17. Dark Water (2002)
One of the weak spots in a lot of J-ghost movies is the flat, interchangeable characters; so much energy is invested in creating haunting imagery and atmosphere that the human element fades into the background. (This is partially by design, since a lot of these movies are about the dehumanization and anomie of modern life.) Not so with Dark Water, a film that depicts two of the most sympathetic, fragile characters you can imagine sinking deeper and deeper into a waking nightmare. This is Hideo Nakata's de facto follow-up to The Ring, but you could almost be forgiven for thinking it's a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie, as Nakata channels Kurosawa's genius for location scouting to create a film world that positively seethes with menace. Nakata will likely never escape comparisons to his own pathbreaking megahit, but this might honestly be his best work: in contrast with the annihilating, spectral power of movies like Ringu and Ju-on, Dark Water is a heartbreakingly human film about love and loss. (The American remake, while not a terribly-made film by any means, is nonetheless the worst of all worlds: extremely faithful to the original, but significantly less frightening. Avoid it.)


Next time on Revenge of the '00s: bumps in the night, fast zombies, man-shaped stains, yet another holiday gone awry, and THAT scene.