Note: This listicle does not contain jump scares, but it does contain spoilers. Viewer discretion is advised.
Baskin (2015)
Director : Can Evrenol
Country : Turkey
Five Turkish police officers end up in the bowels of Hell in this visceral, phantasmagoric movie that combines all the physical and psychological horrors of the nether regions. Every trickle, discharge, burble, and squelch will make your insides tremble and your toes curl.
Arda, the youngest of the cops, enters the antechamber a boy and leaves it a man. As such, the movie is about hazing: the forceful and ritualistic initiation of a rookie into masculinity.
Surprisingly, but rather befittingly, almighty masculinity is embodied in a vertically challenged, grotesque figure called The Father, the leader of an orgiastic cult that mortifies and mutilates flesh and psyche.
The Shrine (2010)
Director : Jon Knautz
Country : Canada
Carmen, a Canadian journalist, persuades her boyfriend (Marcus) and an intern (Sara) to accompany her on an unofficial visit to the fictional Polish village of Alvernia, the site of several unsolved disappearances.
The village is remote, its people are hostile, its clergymen emanate a cultish whiff, and its centrepiece is a localised fog enshrouding a demonic statue.
The lack of backstory weakens the plot and characters. What we know about the sleuthing trio (the ambitious journalist girlfriend, the simple frustrated boyfriend, and the wide-eyed intern) does little to endear them to us. As for the villagers, we are clueless about them as they speak Polish (with no subtitles) and commit unspeakable acts for unthinkable reasons.
While the movie could have capitalised on the theme of cultural and language barriers, it leaned into the usual Western stereotypes of Central and Eastern Europe (backward, superstitious villagers).
In Ari Aster’s Midsommar, one of the Americans ignorantly urinates on a sacred tree. The Shrine pales in comparison to Aster’s movie but it, too, vaguely acknowledges the disrespect and defiance of Anglophone westerners who trespass into and piss in their neighbours’ backyards.
Considering Carmen and Sara are journalists, the actions of the Poles, taken metaphorically, stand to reason. They do not want their story dripping from Western mouths and darkening Western newspapers. Therefore, they ‘exorcise’ visitors who come sniffing around.
The Privilege (2022)
Directors : Felix Fuchssteiner, Katharina Schöde
Country : Germany
Though fictional, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein proved that medical misadventures actuated by pride and ambition never wrap up neatly for anyone involved.
Science has realised many dreams and just as many nightmares. The latter are the focus of the pharma horror genre.
Pharma companies are complex villains whose operations are ensconced in secrecy. The nature of said villain is hard to define and harder to defeat because it comprises non-human (equipment, drugs, branding) and human (pharmacologists, stakeholders, doctors) entities with various degrees of power, intelligence, and responsibility.
It’s fascinating that a supernatural family pharma horror movie is titled Privilege, because ‘privilege’ is a buzzword in social science and humanities discourses. It does not exactly conjure up images of malicious fungi or demonic spectres.
In real life, we have chilling examples of human experimentation during the Holocaust. As this is a German movie, you inevitably juxtapose the pseudoscientific ideologies of the antagonists with those of the mad Nazi doctors. The movie’s villains believed that embedding a rare fungus (grown on corpses) into a cleft in the subject’s palate would provide a host body for the deceased.
Psychologically, it explores the erotic-thanatic dialectic in the aftermath of trauma and the arbitrary dividing line between the past and the present.
Finally, the universal lesson: The people we expect to safeguard us are usually the ones who sabotage our psyches. That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Goodnight Mommy (2014)
Directors : Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Country : Austria
A pair of identical, inseparable twins resort to cruelty when they suspect the woman who has returned home after cosmetic facial surgery is not their mother.
This is a movie about unresolved grief and how drastically it alters individuals and relationships, rendering the former unrecognisable and the latter strained.
The house is decidedly important to the story as it visually represents grief. Its isolation is a nod to the loneliness of the bereaved characters. Its minimalistic décor silently conveys that something is missing. Its sterile colour palette, starkly contrasting the vibrant scenery outside, shows how grief saps the mind and atmosphere of happiness.
Masks are integral to the movie’s visual semiotics. They conceal people’s identities. Here, the mother, with her neatly bandages face, is covering up her misery. The twins wear ghoulish handmade and hand-painted wooden masks because untamed grief can bring out the dark and monstrous side in people.
Snowtown (2011)
Director : Justin Kurzel
Country : Australia
Based on the true events of the Snowtown Murders in Australia (aka the Body Barrel Murders), this true-crime horror movie depicts the evolution — or, to borrow the Criminal Minds neologism, ‘evilution’ — of John Bunting and his protégé, Jamie Vlassakis.
Suburban discontent is writ large in the lives and relationships of the characters who are socially stagnant and psychosexually perverse. Families live in unkempt, cramped houses where they suffocate on cigarette smoke and choke on alcohol. Their hobbies include killing and butchering kangaroos and their pent-up sexual urges find reprehensible gratification.
Overall, the movie is a cautionary sketch of grooming. After an incestuous incident of abuse, Jamie Vlassakis takes refuge under the wing of John Bunting (his mother’s boyfriend) only to get trapped in Bunting’s chokehold and become party to a series of torture killings whose victims Bunting deemed dispensable, weak, or sexually immoral.
Let the Right One In (2008)
Director : Tomas Alfredson
Country : Sweden
Oskar, a brilliant, bullied schoolboy, develops a friendship with Eli, the strange girl next door. He soon realises that she is a vampire connected to a series of local murders.
The movie ventures into transgressive territory by giving us insights into preadolescent sexuality. Shots of bare torsos, naked legs, and a sutured crotch, along with scenes of dressing, undressing, and kissing, are more disturbing than the fact that Eli is a vampire.
Reading the novel from which the movie is adapted reveals the theme of trauma. What we don’t see in the movie is Eli’s tragic backstory. She was castrated; hence the androgynous voice and appearance. In the present, she is chaperoned by a paedophile.
Vampirism is a metaphor for victimhood. Because of the irreparable bodily and mental damage, Eli can only live half a life with no end in sight.
Lake Mungo (2008)
Director : Joel Anderson
Country : Australia
After Alice Palmer’s disfigured corpse is dredged up from a lake and her ghostly image appears in pictures, her family strives to uncover and understand the circumstances that culminated in her death.
Lake Mungo explores bereavement and mortality through psychological, supernatural, and existential lenses. Shot in a mockumentary style with improvised dialogue and little-known actors, the movie achieves the illusion of reality.
To deepen the mystery, nothing is known about the director, Joel Anderson. That’s probably because Lake Mungo was a box office failure that witnessed belated recognition for its intriguing plot and masterful storytelling. (Let’s hope he’s not at the bottom of a lake somewhere.)
The real horror of the movie has more to do with uncertainty and loneliness in life and in death rather than ghostly apparitions and bloated corpses.
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