Just to get away: It Follows (2014).

It Follows isn't just the best horror movie of 2014; it's the best horror movie of the last 20 years. It's a love letter to the genre, bursting with subtle and overt nods to the classics, but it's no postmodern pastiche. Elements feel familiar, but the parts that count—the scary parts—feel startlingly fresh. It's a gorgeous, vivid, wide-angle nightmare.

Believe the hype.

At times, you could be forgiven for thinking It Follows was the work of John Carpenter, come screaming out of retirement to deliver one last opus. Although Halloween was shot in Pasadena, the leafy Michigan suburbs where It Follows takes place could double for Laurie Strode's hometown of Haddonfield, and the whole film is laced with a wonderfully ominous, throbbing synthesizer soundtrack in the style of Carpenter's own sawtooth symphonies.

It Follows also suggests the golden age of end-of-the-century Japanese horror. Its central conceit—a lethal, unyielding supernatural contagion that operates according to a strange and unsettling set of rules—fits squarely in the tradition of Ringu and Ju-on, and the film's tableaux of crumbling Michigan houses and vacant public spaces recalls Kiyoshi Kurosawa's unique genius for finding the perfect abandoned Japanese buildings to get murdered in.

But It Follows is also a coming-of-age story, and it's every bit as aching and poignant as Let The Right One In. The standard horror template would see heroine Jay struggling to convince those around her that she's not crazy, but one of writer/director David Robert Mitchell's smartest decisions in It Follows is that her best friends—stalwart sister Kelly, boy-next-door Paul, and snarky bookworm Yara—believe her almost immediately, as we would hope our own friends would.

As frightening as It Follows is, it effortlessly evokes the weightlessness of drifting between adolescence and adulthood. Parents are little more than blurry background figures, but they loom large for the characters, who reference them often: "Won't your mom be mad?" Rather than the obvious readings some viewers have offered for It Follows (e.g. as AIDS allegory), the film often feels like a parable about a generation of young people adjusting to radically diminished expectations.

It helps that the whole young cast is sublime, from Daniel Zovatto's Damone-with-a-heart-of-gold to Jake Weary's anxious, apologetic Hugh, who sets the whole horrible drama in motion. The characters feel lived in, with unspoken histories between every line of dialogue.

One of the film's core themes (driven home by Yara's periodic quotations from Dostoevsky's The Idiot) is fatalism, a familiar mood for all of us marking time in a post-industrial cul-de-sac of downward mobility and paycheck-to-paycheck living. Jay's nightmare dramatizes a familiar contemporary predicament: feeling trapped in the place where you grew up, with all hopes for the future put on hold while you try and figure out how you're going to make it through another week, or another day.

But make no mistake: It Follows is a horror movie. And once it gets up and running, it ruthlessly and patiently develops its central premise, continually adding new wrinkles and raising the stakes. Like the original Ju-on, there are images in this movie that might haunt you for the rest of your life, and there are moments that will have you white-knuckling the armrest like a kid seeing The Exorcist for the first time.

After you see it, you just might catch yourself looking over your shoulder, checking the doors and the windows of the room you're in, wondering how quickly you could get away. You know, if you had to.

Is there any greater compliment to a horror movie than that?

Blood feuds: Blue Ruin (2013), Wer (2013), V/H/S: Viral (2014).

Blue Ruin (2013)
There's been some buzz online for Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier's upcoming feature that has Patrick Stewart playing a neo-Nazi. Interested parties would do well to check out Saulnier's prior offering, a festival darling called Blue Ruin. This spare, bloody film chronicles one man's quest for revenge as he finds himself pulled into an old-fashioned blood feud. It plays almost like an inverted version of Drive, where that film's icy, synthesized cool is replaced with leafy, Confederate pastoralia. Both films share the western's sense of violent grace, and its pinpoint focus on isolated outsiders who dispense a merciless form of premodern justice. But what gives Blue Ruin such a unique frisson is Macon Blair's turn as the hapless antihero Dwight: in contrast to Ryan Gosling's cool, consummate Driver, Dwight is a pathetic, marginal fuck-up, eating garbage and struggling to scrounge up enough cash for a gun to kill his enemies with. He is a figure of genuine pathos, closer to Gollum than Steve McQueen, but shot through with lethal purpose nonetheless. Blue Ruin is beautiful and strange, bloody and haunting. Highest recommendation.

Wer (2013)
Werewolves often seem to play second fiddle to vampires, but being so close to a silver medal just seems to make them hungrier, as werewolf movies often work harder to put a twist on the mythos. Such is the case with Wer, a wolfen murder mystery set in present-day France. A.J. Cook plays Kate, an American expatriate lawyer who takes up the case of Talan Gwynek, a towering, taciturn bumpkin believed to have torn a hapless family of campers to shreds. But there's more going on than meets the eye (isn't there always?), and Wer does a nice job of confounding expectations. What really puts it over the top are the startlingly violent action sequences, which are staged with a splattery, bone-crunching brutality that's downright refreshing in such well-worn mythical terrain. Wer presents the wolfman as he should be: a true force of nature, red in tooth and claw. The modern vampire has been fighting domestication ever since Anne Rice gave us the tortured Louis Pont du Lac, but Wer is proof positive that their hairy cousins remain as wild and untamed as ever.

V/H/S: Viral (2014)
I really can't say enough good things about the V/H/S series. Undeterred by the increasingly shrill horde of found footage detractors, V/H/S and V/H/S/2 not only made anthology movies cool again, but delivered a passel of stylish and imaginative shocks along the way, courtesy of young hotshots like Adam Wingard (You're Next), Ti West (The Innkeepers), and Gareth Evans (The Raid and The Raid 2). Unfortunately, many are going to point to V/H/S: Viral as the series' shark-jumping moment, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. The main thing that separates this one from the first two is tone: where the earlier entries had a hard-edged, illicit vibe that felt like a cleaned-up version of August Underground, V/H/S: Viral is pure B-movie, drive-in cheese. Once you accept this, though, it's also a blast. The opening salvo, concerning a stage magician with a bloodthirsty enchanted cloak, is a terrifically endearing piece of schlock, and the follow-up vignette about a scientist who builds a dimensional gateway in his basement follows suit. But the best short is the third, about a group of skateboarders who travel to Tijuana and wind up with more than cuts and scrapes. It channels Larry Clark, Jackass, and Adrián García Bogliano's awesome Here Comes the Devil in nearly equal measure, and it feels closer to "classic" V/H/S than anything else here. I'll admit that I hope this is more of a spin-off, and that we get a V/H/S/3 in the gritty, analog style of the first two—but if you can accept that V/H/S: Viral is a different kind of film, you'll have a lot of fun.

Men of the people: Wolf Creek 2 (2013), The Sacrament (2014).

Wolf Creek 2 (2013)
Slasher movie villains are typically depicted as unstoppable forces of nature, but Wolf Creek 2 takes a new tack. It reimagines Mick Taylor, John Jarratt's iconic outback butcher, as a deranged nativist, purging Australia of foreigners one dismembered corpse at a time. This is inspired: Australia has become one of the premier nations for horror, and in Wolf Creek 2 Mick Taylor represents the idea of Australia as forbidding territory becoming conscious of itself, actively seeking to purify the homeland and create an Australia "for Australians." It's a wicked, mercilessly clever revision of the first film, offering a portrait of rugged individualism taken to pathological extremes. (In one scene, Taylor is recast as the Marlboro Man himself, riding nobly out of the sunset.) But for all the film's social comment, McLean doesn't skimp on chills and thrills, maintaining the first film's chokehold right through the surprising final showdown. Here's hoping McLean and Jarratt come back to complete the trilogy—perhaps by showing us Taylor's outsider campaign for Prime Minister?

The Sacrament (2014)
In what may be Ti West's scariest film yet, The Sacrament offers a thinly fictionalized retelling of the fate of Jim Jones' People's Temple, where the congregants committed mass suicide in Guyana in 1978 by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Jonestown has long since become a universal point of reference, even for people (like myself) who weren't even born yet when it happened; how often do you hear a reference to "drinking the Kool Aid"? The great strength of West's film is that it drives home the sheer visceral ugliness of the event: a sermon delivered over loudspeakers promising transcendent glory and divine sacrifice while people died in agony, their bodies sprawled out on the grass as they tried to crawl away. The notion of framing the film as a Vice documentary was also kind of brilliant, giving it a sense of verisimilitude and freshness beyond the usual handheld horror. While The Sacrament is fictionalized, a great many of the details are true to the actual events—and for anyone who's heard the ghastly audio recording of the event (what can I say, it's been sampled by punk and metal bands for years), it's eerie how closely much of the final sermon echoes what's heard there. And Gene Jones (who you might remember as the gas station owner in No Country For Old Men—call it, friendo) is excellent as "Father." The Sacrament probably won't get much recognition outside of horror circles, but remind me to scoff when Ti West's next movie catapults him out of the horror ghetto and people who look down their nose at genre cinema start talking about what a great director he is.

Also: while The Sacrament loses none of the enormity and horror of the real events, it ironically understates them: the film's final death toll is revealed in an epilogue card as 167; at Jonestown, it was 909.

It came from Netflix: Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), Resolution (2012), Cabin in the Woods (2012).

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)
The suffocating debut film from writer/director Panos Cosmatos tells the story of Elena, a girl with fearsome telepathic powers held captive by a deranged psychologist. To some, Beyond the Black Rainbow is a Tarkovskyan masterpiece of glacial dread; to others, it's 110 interminable minutes of pretentious audience torture. I think it's a little of both, actually. The best thing about the movie is Michael Rogers, who plays the villainous Dr. Nyle as a kind of evil Carl Sagan, contemptuously hissing his dialogue like Agent Smith from The Matrix. The core idea—drippy Boomer acid spirituality rotting into a slow-motion Kenneth Anger nightmare—is rock solid, and at times (especially in the second half) you can just make out the great horror hidden behind a thick haze of obscuring pastiche. That's the worst thing about Beyond the Black Rainbow: too often, it feels more like a checklist of references than an actual movie. Still worth a look for those with properly attuned psyches and fully loaded bongs, and I wouldn't rule out Cosmatos doing great work in the future. Hilarious trivia: the film was financed with DVD residuals from Tombstone, which was directed by Cosmatos' father—who also made Rambo: First Blood Part II!

Resolution (2012)
At a remote cabin, Michael (Peter Cilella) tries to help his best friend (Vinny Curran) kick his methamphetamine habit by handcuffing him to a pipe. As withdrawal sets in and Michael has to fend off curious locals, he begins to suspect that someone else is watching them. Resolution creates a fantastic sense of skin-crawling eeriness without any of the usual tricks (gore, jump scares), making it a perfect film for viewers who think that all modern horror is torture porn and found footage. Resolution has been compared to Cabin in the Woods, but it's a much more subtle and provocative film, with an even more effective metacomment on the genre. It actually reminded me a lot of Lovely Molly, capturing the same numinous sense of helplessness as something uncanny and terrible descends on you. Special recognition is due to Bill Oberst, Jr., for a brief but profoundly unsettling part as an eccentric French hermit who may or may not know what's happening.

Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Cabin in the Woods is the ultimate horror movie for people who don't like horror movies: a snarky satire that gives people who look down on the genre permission to enjoy it. But the premise is a fun one, with a sinister control room (Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, giving new meaning to the banality of evil) watching as a group of teens fall victim to a carefully arranged horror movie scenario. Unfortunately, the youth segment of the cast (including a de-Thor'd Chris Hemsworth, handsomely wooden as ever) leaves a lot to be desired—and the notion that they're "supposed" to be forgettable victims is a bullshit cop-out. I guess it just goes to show: they can't all be Scoobies. There's also one visual early on that totally spoils what could've been a terrific shock later in the movie; this bugged me in the theater and it still bugs me now. Despite these problems, Cabin in the Woods is a lot of fun—and ironically, viewers who already know their deadites from their cenobites are the ones who'll get the most out of it.

Enemies foreign and domestic: The Unknown Known (2014), Excision (2012), and The Raid 2 (2014).

Click the titles to watch a trailer!

The Unknown Known (2014)
The main conclusion I took from Errol Morris' documentary on Donald Rumsfeld is that he's a true product of the Nixon administration, because nearly everything he says in the film can be reduced to "mistakes were made." As with his famously convoluted explanation for the paucity of WMD evidence in Iraq (from which the film takes its title), Rumsfeld explains himself with circuitous, pedantic constructions that have a superficial appearance of logic, but reveal absolutely nothing. One topic the film probes is Rumsfeld's disappointment at never becoming President himself, and he demonstrates an adeptness at evading responsibility that may have served him well in the Oval Office. The Unknown Known is very slickly produced, with cool graphics emulating scrolling microfiche and satellite photography—but viewers hoping for a real explanation (let alone an admission of guilt) for the disastrous Iraq War will have to keep waiting.

Excision (2012)
Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is a seventeen year old aspiring surgeon—but her bloody, sexually charged dreams (exquisitely staged grotesqueries reminiscent of Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle) suggest darker motives. The film belongs totally to McCord, who vanishes so completely into Pauline's weird, perverse world that even Daniel Day Lewis would be intimidated. Her mix of eccentric charisma and vulnerability is a bit reminiscent of Jason Schwartzman's star turn in Rushmore, but Excision has none of Wes Anderson's quirky cuteness to soften its hard edges, and by the finish it more than earns its horror designation. Credit's also due to Traci Lords(!) in a terrific turn as Pauline's mother, and Modern Family's Ariel Winter, who plays a little sister afflicted with cystic fibrosis. (And yes, that's John Waters as a priest.) I saw Excision when it came out, but I think it's a film that just gets better every time you see it. One of the best of the last decade, easy.

The Raid 2 (2014)
The Raid: Redemption delivered brutal, visceral action in an era of tedious CGI wank and reheated superhero garbage, winning fans all over the world in the process (including yours truly). Moments after the end of the original Raid, our hero Rama (Iko Uwais) goes undercover in order to bring down Jakarta's reigning crime family, ingratiating himself with a crown prince whose ambitions are beginning to outstrip his loyalty to his father. While the story is a familiar one (bearing more than a slight resemblance to Eastern Promises and The Departed/Internal Affairs), the story of one good cop who's in too deep has never been told with such terrifying intensity. This is a blistering, furious mushroom cloud of a film, but it's also a master class in pacing, investing every smashed face and shattered bone with dramatic weight. There are too many set pieces to count, from the dazzling prison riot near the beginning to a jaw-droppingly brutal subway car melee that makes Quentin Tarantino look like Nora Ephron. And Rama's final showdown with a fearsome pencak silat master (known only as "The Assassin") makes a strong claim on being the greatest fight scene ever filmed. It's easily the best action movie since Terminator 2—maybe the best ever. And guess what? There's going to be a third one.

Who's the fairest? Oculus, Contracted, and Megan Is Missing.

Oculus (2014)
Oculus is a ghost story built on the fallibility of our perceptions, with two siblings seeking to shatter the malevolent haunted mirror that destroyed their family when they were children. It also scores major points for having a truly great heroine in Kaylie (Karen Gillan), who is orders of magnitude smarter and gutsier than anyone who's ever appeared in a Paranormal Activity film. This is honestly really refreshing, and I suspect it's a big part of the warm critical reception the film has received: it's hard not to be impressed with the rigorous and thoughtful way that Kaylie researches the mirror and plans to confront and destroy it, rather than just setting up some cameras and hoping for the best. As the film goes on, past and present blur into a surreal nightmare, but the story hangs together through the ending (which I really want to say something about but won't for fear of spoilers). And it's awesome seeing Katee Sackhoff, here playing a role that couldn't be more different than her stint as Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. Highly recommended.

Contracted (2013)
After being date raped at a party, Samantha (a terrific Najarra Townsend) finds herself coming down with the mother of all STDs. Contracted is deceptive, though: it's a horror film that's big on metaphor, but the metaphor at work here probably isn't the one you're expecting. What really makes the film work isn't the squirmy body horror, but the way we slowly unravel the truth about Samantha's relationships; without giving anything away, there's a reason why a lot of them feel strained. Contracted is more than just Cronenberg for the hook-up era (although that would've been enough), and it even has a clever final twist that manages to tweak a pop culture cliche while also deepening the film's own themes. Not bad, right? (I also liked the fact that Samantha lives with her mom, which is a nice nod to the economic shit sandwich being fed to her generation.) It's on Netflix, so check it out.

Megan is Missing (2011)
Megan is Missing is sort of like Thirteen meets Irreversible or Martyrs, with teenagers behaving badly shading into sledgehammer shock tactics. Ironically, the best part is actually the first half, with a believably profane depiction of teenage life that carries some uncomfortable echoes of recent news items like the Steubenville rape case. Amy and Megan (Amber Perkins and Rachel Quinn) are a good girl/bad girl odd couple: proper Amy admires uninhibited Megan's confidence and independence, while Megan looks up to Amy for her basic decency and kindness. They're believable and sympathetic, which makes the film's last half hour all the more agonizing: it's a master class in cinematic cruelty, with some of the gnarliest audience abuse since Audition. Even some horror veterans may find themselves squirming (I did). But the movie also has a really subtle and wicked sense of black humor, as seen in the bit where a TV news crew solemnly interviews the airheads filming a dramatic reenactment of Megan's kidnapping. Director Michael Goi is also the director of photography for American Horror Story.

Christmasbland: NOS4A2 (2013).

When he was in Big Black, Steve Albini once said something (and I'm paraphrasing here) about how most bands fall back onto little signifiers of brutality, rather than trying to create a genuine sense of physicality and impact. This observation has always stuck with me, because I think it's an eloquent summation of a phenomenon you see absolutely everywhere.

With enough repetition, even the most outlandish aesthetics can become rote; consider how something like death metal—a musical style that would've been inconceivably harsh to earlier generations—can become surprisingly boring in the wrong hands. What once sounded sickeningly brutal becomes irredeemably silly, and vocals that were once frighteningly demonic are refined into the sound of a guy burping.

This is exactly what happens as NOS4A2 goes down the horror checklist: evil children who want to "play"; a serial killer who delivers sing-song rhymes with childlike glee; a stately, old-fashioned gentleman who is actually a predatory vampire; a symbol of joy and innocence (Christmas) warped into terror and bloodshed. It all just grates, because it's trying way, way too hard. It's the horror equivalent of one of those early '90s superhero comics where everyone has huge guns and clothes with a million ammo pouches on them, and every title is something like Bloodhammer or Darkfist or Killblade.

GIS for "90s comics", third result.

The biggest problem with NOS4A2 is very simple: it takes for granted that it's a Modern Horror Classic without ever doing the work necessary to become one. And since it is a horror story, this problem is most glaring when it comes to the villain. From the beginning, the book treats Charles Manx like a horror icon akin to the Joker or Hannibal Lecter, but he never actually rises above monster-of-the-week material.

Hannibal Lecter isn't scary because he eats people: he's scary because he's a well-respected genius with a highly-deveoped sense of culture and etiquette—who also eats people. The Joker isn't scary because he blows things up and kills people with poison gas, but because sometimes the things he says make a terrible kind of sense, leaving us wondering if it's true that the only thing separating him from us is one bad day.

But cardboard cutouts aren't very scary once you get past the initial shock. There's a reason why characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason and Chucky were all eventually played for laughs. People still get worked up over H.P. Lovecraft because the horror in his stories cannot be easily translated into cut-and-paste cliche, which is also why so many strict imitations of Lovecraft are so shitty—the idea of a profoundly indifferent cosmos is hard to fit into a rubber suit. (Of course, this hasn't stopped the Cthulhu plush industry from thriving.)

Unfathomable hate beyond time and space.

NOS4A2 isn't all bad. Vic McQueen is a decent character, largely because she exhibits the kind of complexity so lacking in the book's horror elements. Her combustible mix of decency and self-destruction is very human, and it makes her seem like more than another Final Girl from central casting. And the book's magical bikes and enchanted Scrabble tiles have a warmly nostalgic energy, recalling the way we invest such objects with power and potency as children.

But a lot of the time, NOS4A2 feels like an interesting piece of magical realism that got waylaid by a mediocre horror movie. Some of the early scenes when Vic is young crackle, and when she meets Maggie it seems like a whole new world is about to open up. But it doesn't, because it's been too long since we've been reminded that we're Making Christmas Scary™.

Note: this is not quite as fresh an idea as the book seems to think it is. See also: Black Christmas, Rare Exports, etc.

Did you see Insidious? It's a good movie, with some real standout moments. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that the best part was the ending. For some, the ending is acceptable; for others, it nearly ruins the movie. (This piece only goes so far as to argue that it "makes sense", not that it's good.)

But it's nobody's favorite part, because it tries way too hard and lays on the "creepiness"—again, not real creepiness, but Little Signifiers of creepiness—way too thick. That's exactly what happens in NOS4A2, but it happens constantly throughout the whole book instead of just boiling over at the end. It's never scary, just numbing.

Like any well-articulated genre, horror runs on the clever revision of cliche. This can often tend toward the postmodern (e.g. Scream, The Cabin in the Woods), but it can just as easily be done with great sincerity: Insidious director James Wan has made a career out of creating horror films that pay homage to the classics while adding his own gloss, and doing so with a lot of love for the genre and a lot of heart.

What sucks about NOS4A2 is that Joe Hill can do this, and do it well—but here, he just doesn't.

My favorite scene in Horns involved an encounter with a stray cat at midnight, which is about as stock a horror setup as you can find. But Hill didn't just toss these elements together and call it a day: he carefully and methodically painted a scene with them, and the result was a powerful, almost numinous sense of something dark and terrible irrupting into the everyday world. It's the same feeling you get from "At the Mountains of Madness" or the climactic scene in Ringu—and unfortunately, nothing in NOS4A2 comes close.

In this case, a picture is worth 175,000 words (conservative estimate).

All these problems would still exist if NOS4A2 was a lean, tightly edited novel of the same length as Horns or Heart Shaped Box, both of which are around 400 pages. Unfortunately for the reader, NOS4A2 weighs in at a terminally bloated 700, which just makes all of its faults that much more glaring.

I read that there's even a novella-length segment that was cut from the final draft, and which is restored in the special edition published by Subterranean Press (which admittedly has a really cool cover). As NOS4A2 character Lou Carmody might say: dude, seriously?

But with all that said, I still think Mr. Hill is a great writer who has a long and storied career in front of him. I just think that once all of his books are written, NOS4A2 is going to be like the ending of Insidious: nobody's favorite.

Vivisected for your magazine essay: American Mary (2012) and S&man (2006).

American Mary (2012) deserves credit for being one of the few films where I really had no idea what was going to happen next. It's a unique, stylish, and surprising chronicle of the title character's descent into slasher movie madness—but it's also a bit of a mess, both literally and figuratively. Where the unpredictably of a film like Kill List only adds to the mounting tension, Mary's lack of direction sometimes just makes it feel unfinished.

Mary (Katharine Isabelle) is a medical student struggling to cover her expenses, resorting to increasingly desperate options to pay the bills. At first, she thinks stripping is the worst thing she'll have to do, but as you might imagine, things quickly take a turn. And then another. Before you know it, she's wearing a rubber apron and...well, you'll see.

In the first twenty minutes or so, I thought I knew where the movie was headed, expecting a familiar "boiling frog" scenario where tension and weirdness would gradually ramp up until Mary found herself in previously unimaginable territory. That's not really what happens, though. The film's arc doesn't look like a steady climb, but a jerky polygraph—although Mary still winds up in a very different place from the character we first encounter.

The recurring theme of the movie is perception: the plot turns on the way people respond to images, both of themselves and of others. Mary never seems quite sure about herself or her rapidly changing niche in the world, and her frank assertiveness reminds me of that one Jawbreaker song where during the bridge Blake just keeps muttering "I know...who I am", as if trying to convince himself as much as the listener. In this sense, it's actually a pretty effective coming-of-age movie (although it's the kind of coming-of-age I wouldn't wish on anyone).

The setup of American Mary (which really seems like it should've been titled Bloody Mary but wasn't for fear of getting lost in a sea of IMDB entries) made me think of the gleefully nasty Pathology, but as it moved along I was also reminded of Girls Against Boys. Both comparisons are a bit too pat though: this is no medical horror, nor simply a battle-of-the-sexes vengeance flick. (There are distinct shades of Audition at times though, as you can see in the cap at the top of the page). Mary is a strange and stylized affair, and it sometimes feels like directors Jen and Sylvia Soska had more ideas than they really knew what to do with; Mary can feel like it's made up of material from three or four different movies.

Perhaps unfortunately, American Mary also reminded me of the phenomenal Excision, which similarly chronicles the psychic dissolution of a young, would-be surgeon. I say unfortunately because Excision is stiff competition for any film, and it's tough for Mary to measure up to Pauline, Excision's oddly endearing anti-heroine, who for my money is one of the most memorable horror characters of the last 20 years. But Mary is still interesting in her own right, and worth spending 100 minutes with.

While Mary left me with mixed (although ultimately positive) feelings, S&man (2006) is a film I genuinely loved. Where Mary spotlights the subculture of extreme body modification, S&man director JT Petty points his camera at horror filmmakers themselves. What makes S&man great is the same thing that opens it up for criticism: it honestly can't decide if it's a documentary or a scripted horror story. 

While it ends on a distinctly scripted note, the bulk of the film is an honest documentary, and a good one. That really is the great Carol J. Clover, who coined the term "final girl", intelligently discussing the through-lines between films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the Abu Ghraib photographs. And those really are underground filmmakers Fred Vogel and Bill Zebub, discussing their own subterranean, DIY works (Vogel is behind the infamously depraved August Underground trilogy, while one of Zebub's movies is titled Jesus Christ, Serial Rapist).

But there's a fictional element too, in the form of the unassuming director Eric (Eric Marcisak, pictured above), the auteur behind the S&man series, which features the director stalking, tormenting, and strangling a series of young women. Initially framed as an extremely verite form of artificial snuff, director Petty begins to wonder how much of what he's seeing is "only a movie". (Marcisak's unnervingly normal performance is outstanding.)

I can see the argument that the scripted bits bring down the documentary sections, which feature some incisive and thoughtful interviews with Petty's principal subjects and really are surprisingly excellent. (Even as a diehard horror fan the idea of a documentary about horror filmmakers seems a little boring, but these folks have some fascinating things to say, and Petty draws them out expertly.) However, the sequences with Eric bring a crackling, nervous tension to the film, and some smart editing allows them to enliven and illuminate the talking heads' commentary—at some points, S&man is actually a better documentary for having scripted content.

One of the central ideas in S&man and in a lot of horror is the porousness of the border between illusion and reality, and more than one of the subjects of the film make the point that watching people die on camera for real can actually be surprisingly boring. In one of the film's best moments, when Petty asks Vogel if he's seen the decapitation videos made famous by terrorists and drug cartels, he notes that his first response was that Toetag (his production company) can do it better. 

It gets at the idea that horror isn't really about watching real-life violence, which tends to be messy, awkward, and without dramatic punctuation. If you want snuff, Youtube is full of videos from Syria showing real-life deaths that make A Serbian Film look like an episode of Family Guy. Horror isn't just about watching people die: it's about exploring the sense of dread that suffuses human existence, thanks to the curse of reason and the knowledge that death is inevitable. 

It's Romanticism with a capital R, where the subject is swallowed up in something vast, impossible, and terrifying. An innocent young girl falls prey to an unholy malady that distorts her very being; beautiful people in the prime of life are butchered by a stalker without a face; alien forces invade our bodies and rip their way out. At its best, horror is a stark encounter with what Damien Hirst called the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living—the title, fittingly, to a piece starring one of horror's primal figures: a big, dead-eyed shark.

Bon appetit.