31 Years in 31 Days: Horror Flicks from 2014
Oh 2014, how I loved you. So many excellent movies. A lot of them have been covered incessantly on these here interwebs over the years, though. You should definitely check out Dead Snow, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, What We Do In Shadows, Annabelle, Tusk, and It Follows. Since those movies have been so well covered I wanted to lift up two spectacular movies that haven’t gotten as much love as they should. And they could not be more different from each other. The first flick is Housebound. Housebound is a New Zealand made horror comedy starring a bunch of people you probably haven’t heard of and one dude who looks surprisingly like John Goodman on the movie poster. The story goes that Kylie, who is terrible at being a criminal, gets caught whilst attempting to rob an ATM. She is sentenced to house arrest and forced to live with her mother, who she thinks is crazy, and her stepfather, whom she doesn’t care for. Oh, and her mother believes her house to be haunted. Things begin to unravel from there and a ghost hunter is called in. The ending is quite a twist and was not something I saw coming. The film is beautifully shot, well acted, and entertaining, basically everything you could want. And while there aren’t many truly scary moments, there are some satisfying jump scares. A great flick that I cannot recommend highly enough.
My favorite flick from 2014, and one of my favorite horror flicks of all time, is As Above, So Below. First of all, check out that poster, brilliant. It was that poster that got me interested in the film in the first place. I was traveling through Texas and had to stop so my kids could use the bathroom. The shopping center happened to have an art house theater and this poster was featured prominently. I was obsessed. And damn if this flick didn’t deliver. The story goes that a young alchemy student, Scarlett, is on the hunt for the fabled Philosopher’s Stone. She finds a Rose Key in Iran and is almost killed in the process. She then travels to France where she uses the key to translate the code on the headstone of Nicolas Flamel. The translation leads Scarlett hundreds of feet underneath Paris, through the famous catacombs. She travels with her ex George, cameraman Benji, and a group of tunnel guides named Papillion, Siouxe, and Zed. Once they enter the catacombs the fear factor of the film amps up considerably. There are certain areas of the tunnels that even the guides are nervous about entering. As they delve deeper and deeper into the tombs things get stranger and scarier. I don’t want to give anything else away as this movie does an incredible job of keeping the viewer guessing and delivering scare after scare. It is an amazing film and one I demand you see immediately. Everything about this flick is done at the highest levels of quality. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
