Last Updated on March 16, 2024 by Michael Gingold
Horror was all over the map in 2012, in both senses of the phrase. We saw movies from across the globe—including an impressive first stab at the genre from Israel—and exercises in every subgenre imaginable. And my pick for the very top of the year’s offerings combined them all into one film.
The lists below are composed of movies that received some kind of commercial U.S. release in 2012 (with the caveat that I haven’t yet caught Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End, which VODebuts at the very end of this month). First up, the best of the best:
THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (pictured above): A knockout horror movie about horror movies, in which writer/director Drew Goddard and writer/producer Joss Whedon have their cake (satirizing and subverting the titular form) and eat it too (delivering real-deal suspense, terror, plenty of dark laughs and a marvelously sustained climactic monster blowout). Meta-horror risks condescending to the form, but every frame of this one is suffused with love for the genre.
The rest, in alphabetical order:
ABSENTIA: Writer/director Mike Flanagan makes a quietly attention-grabbing feature debut with this deeply felt, deeply unnerving horror/drama about a woman literally haunted by her long-vanished husband. A crucial scene in which one of his “visits” proves not to be what it first appears is one of the most spine-tingling moments in years.
THE AWAKENING: As the paranormal continues to suffuse movies and TV, a subset dealing with skepticism of the otherworldly has emerged recently, and Nick Murphy’s intelligent period spooker is the best example. Rebecca Hall is terrific as a debunker in post-WWI Britain who has her beliefs and soul shaken when she visits a remote, haunted boarding school.
COMPLIANCE: Can a uniform and a badge wield power when those on the receiving end can’t see them—and they don’t actually exist? The answer is an unequivocal yes, as writer/director Craig Zobel presents a truly disturbing, fact-based examination of how a prank caller posing as a cop manipulates and exploits workers at a fast-food restaurant, inexorably leading the audience to question how they would react in such a situation.
THE GREY: Animals (specifically wolves) attack, but this isn’t a nature-run-amok movie. Rather, director/co-writer Joe Carnahan plunges Liam Neeson and his fellow plane-crash survivors into a wild that simply goes about its ruthless business, unconcerned about the puny humans stranded within it—and the result is gripping from start to finish.
KILL LIST: To discuss what’s overtly horrific in Ben Wheatley’s genre-blender would be to give his game away. Best to simply say that this study of two hitmen on a job with unexpected layers showcases a wide, chilling spectrum of the evil that men do.
PARANORMAN: Dismiss Chris Butler and Sam Fell’s richly conceived and animated stop-motion adventure as a “kids’ film,” and you’ll be missing out. The marketing’s understandable emphasis on the zombies masked the fact that the story’s true focus, as in the classic monster movies, is on fear—as an emotion not just felt by the characters, but wielded as a weapon against those who are deemed “different.”
THE REVENANT: Withheld too long from commercial release, D. Kerry Prior’s crazily ambitious indie mashes up vampire/zombie tropes, buddy comedy, social satire and extreme bloodshed into a wildly entertaining ride-along with an undead Gulf War veteran turned LA vigilante.
SINISTER: From the producers of Insidious, and similarly titled, this one elicits an equal amount of shivers. Ethan Hawke impresses as a true-crime writer who moves into the scene of a horrible family murder—without telling his own wife and kids about the house’s history—and confronts a series of increasingly unpleasant surprises, courtesy of director/co-writer Scott Derrickson.
THE TALL MAN/RABIES: French filmmaker Pascal Laugier and the Israeli duo of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado deliver a pair of features that at first appear to be going in generic directions, then head off on unexpected, satisfying and resonant tangents. Both offer strong acting ensembles (headed in The Tall Man by an excellent Jessica Biel) to boot.
The list of sometimes very close runners-up includes The Bay, Citadel, The Innkeepers, The Loved Ones, Lovely Molly, Sleep Tight, The Woman in Black and the best parts of the anthologies The Theatre Bizarre and V/H/S.
There are also a number of potential runners-up for the worst list—any number of mediocrities and worse that just managed to escape by virtue of a decent central performance, an occasional strong scene or an inspired stylistic choice. What follows is a very selective slate, as there were plenty of direct-to-DVD/VOD movies I didn’t catch—some intentionally, given the word of mouth. But among the stuff I did see, the very dregs were:
THE APPARITION: A clear victim of postproduction tampering, given its truncated running time and obviously ADR’ed climactic exposition—though what’s left remains an uninvolving saga of an uninteresting young couple moving through an unsurprising it’s-not-the-house-that’s-haunted-it’s-you scenario.
ATM: Confinement thrillers have become a cottage industry since Buried; what’s surprising and disappointing is that this, the most illogically and implausibly plotted of the bunch (with three very unobservant young people trapped in a cash-machine kiosk by a hooded stalker), came from the same screenwriter.
BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW: Some looked at this film and saw a trippy, spellbinding homage to ’70s surreal cinema. I saw a tedious, monotonous knockoff of THX-1138 that makes a sudden and inexplicable turn into slasher territory in the last 10 minutes.
THE BUNNY GAME: Misogynistic torture porn masquerading as Art. No doubt this was, as claimed, a cathartic experience for star Rodleen Getsic, but it might have helped to include a plot, characterization and/or a point for those watching at home.
DIE: That’s what you might wish for the Saw-knockoff trend, as yet another psychopath puts yet another disparate group of people though yet another round of life-or-death games that are unconscionably dull, wasting good actors Elias Koteas and Stephen McHattie in the process.
GREYSTONE PARK: One of too many found-footage movies this past year set in abandoned hospitals/asylums and ostensibly based on true events. Perhaps it’s unfair to grade based on expectations, but the presence of Oliver Stone’s son Sean as this flick’s director would lead one to expect more than the unrewarding bickering and often unwatchable camerawork on display here.
6 DEGREES OF HELL: Corey Feldman stars—er, excuse me, appears for about two minutes—in this incoherent time-waster, in which he isn’t even part of the main “action” (if one can call it that) set in a haunted attraction where genuinely horrible but never actually scary things take too long to start happening.
