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 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.