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.