1. 28 Days Later (2002)

This creepy post-apocalyptic zombie flick by Danny Boyle delivers on all levels: a frightening and fast-moving plot, a unique twist on zombies and their origin stories, a thrilling climax ,and the wonderful Naomie Harris in the lead. It’s a rarity to find mainstream Western horror films with black women playing leading characters. In 28 Days Later, Harris plays Selena, a survivor of the apocalypse with a tough, intense exterior, but who is caring and nurturing as well. She’s a multi-dimensional character that the film, and the leading man, rely on.

2. Audition (1999)

In this movie Eihi Shiina plays the protagonist Asami, and she brings a new definition of terror. Rated one of the scariest movies of all time, Shiina is what makes Audition come to life. Her acting is impeccable, shifting from quirky and adorable, to strange, distant, and eventually, horrifying. A warning though: Audition is disturbing. At times, it’s hard to tell what’s a dream and what’s real in the movie. It shifts through surreal sequences, with Shiina tying it all together.

3. Macabre (2009)

In this Indonesian gory horror film, both the protagonist and antagonist are amazing Indonesian actors of colour. Julie Estelle plays Ladya, the main protagonist, a woman who is determined to survive through extraordinary circumstances. Shareefa Daanish plays the terrifying Dara, who sufficiently gave me the creeps through the entirety of the film with her disturbingly calm smile and unquenchable blood lust. This movie is not fit for anyone who can’t handle scenes with lots and lots and lots of blood. Despite the overwhelming gore, the film is worth watching, especially to see the excellent performances of Estelle and Daanish.

4. Bhoot (2003)

Bhoot is a Bollywood horror film, relying on the basic, but classic, premise of a house haunting. While Bollywood is certainly not known for horror, Bhoot was a chilling film that was met with critical success. Leading lady Urmila Matondkar is credited for being the ultimate saving grace for the film, keeping it excellent with her brilliant performance. Her scenes as a possessed housewife received huge praise. Bhoot is truly a rare horror gem of Bollywood cinema, and a film that seemed to inspire other Bollywood directors to try their hand at horror.

Next time on Oh, The Horror, I talk about the virginity allegory in classic horror films.

1. Hostel (2005): The Hostel franchise is problematic for a variety of reasons. First and foremost it’s part of the torture porn or “gorno” subgenre and that automatically raises red flags for me. In one scene during the second Hostel film a woman is hung upside down from the ceiling completely naked—now tell me there isn’t something inherently wrong with that. Worse is the classic “scary Eastern Europe” undertones that many horror movies use to make their Western viewers feel uncomfortable, leftover fears from the Red Scare era. Hostel’s only merit is the possible critiques of elitism running through the film: The antagonists are rich sociopaths bidding on travelling young adults. Even so, if it is indeed a social critique it is utterly overshadowed by the rest of the film.

2. FeardotCom (2002): This movie was essentially a thinly veiled excuse to show image after image of brutalized women presented in a sexualized manner. It’s like a strange cross between bondage and actual brutality, and by the time this film ended, I just felt sick to my stomach. There are so many ways to portray a misogynistic antagonist, but countless shots of naked, bound and bleeding women is just not the way to do it. Fear.com gets a bit F in my books.

3. Human Centipede 2 (2011): This one is a no-brainer. In fact, I’ll admit I didn’t even watch this movie: I read the entire plot on Wikipedia out of curiosity. As if the first Human Centipede wasn’t repulsive enough, they made a second one that took gross to new heights. It seems like the ultimate goal of this film was shock factor—scene after scene after scene. There’s no real thought put into it. So how does mediocrity equate to something problematic? Let me think: the scene where a baby’s skull gets crushed, the scene where a guy masturbates with sand paper. I’m not going to keep going, but I assure you there’s more.

4. Skeleton Key (2005): Skeleton Key is absolutely rampant with racism. Using the slavery era and public lynchings as the historical context to the plot, the film creates no sympathy for its black characters; they are the antagonists. Not only does it demonize its black characters, leading lady Kate Hudson is presented as the frightened white woman haunted by a vengeful black ghost. As many thumbs down as possible for Skeleton Key.

5. The Hills Have Eyes (2006): There’s one infamous scene that renders The Hills Have Eyes remake horrible:  a graphic rape scene that really serves no purpose in the film’s plot. The film is scary enough without this scene—it’s thrown in for pure shock factor,  devoid of any type of social critique, or really anything that would justify putting such a graphically misogynistic scene in a movie.

In the next Oh, The Horror, I’ll list some great horror films that feature a woman of colour in the lead role.

Horror does not do disability well. Most “good” characters are able-bodied, whereas many villains in horror wear masks to cover birth defects, which the audience is supposed to find frightening. We’re supposed to learn that these faces are ones we simply can’t stomach; they’re meant to disgust us. Yet while special effects makeup often exaggerates a person’s features to make a strange mish-mash of a face, certain facial deformities do exist in real life and we cruelly shun them.

One film, The Orphanage (2007), which I included in my Scaretastic Halloween Edition scary movie list, sheds light on this reality. Spoiler alert: In the film, the main ghost is a young boy with a burlap sack over his head. We find out in the movie that he was born with birth defects that affected his face and they made him wear the sack on his head so as to spare him from teasing from other children, which no doubt made the teasing and curiosity worse. It was insightful commentary on how we perceive those with physical disabilities that are considered “odd” or “unconventional.”

In most of these movies, the deformities that affect a villain’s facial appearance also seem to mean the villain has a horrible personalities, for example the Wrong Turn franchise. In the franchise, the villains’ facial deformities inherently make them evil and devious. This is such a troubling notion. While I’m a sucker for the ridiculously portrayed cannibalism of the Wrong Turn franchise, much of the film’s gore is purposely heightened by their obviously deformed faces and that in and of itself is a problematic, albeit effective, scare tactic.

Take for example the classic Frankenstein: Frankenstein’s monster becomes a killer, not because he’s evil at the core, but because he is so neglected and hated because of his deformed appearance that he becomes angry and vengeful.

Other physical disabilities are entirely ignored.  Society can’t fathom the idea that a person who uses a wheelchair, for example, could be able to survive in a horror film, despite the fact that people with various disabilities across the world easily prove that notion wrong. It’s muddled thinking that horror reinforces: Somehow, we find hell dimensions coming out of a puzzle box more realistic than people with disabilities (physical or mental) being the heroes and persevering.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, horror’s hesitance to diversify is the genres own downfall. The plots become tired, the characters start melding into mindless tropes that seem the same in every movie despite the change of actor. Horror diversifying and not relying on cheap thrills like “look at his messed up face!” will, for one, help in eliminating many of its problematic elements, and get people to take the genre seriously.

Next week, I compile a list of some of the most problematic horror films I’ve ever seen.

But the success around this film has been ironic.

Let me explain: The Purge is a film about some ultra neo-liberal, practically fascist U.S. of the future that has created a single day where all crimes can go unpunished as a way of controlling crime rates. On that one day, people can go on a murder spree and will face absolutely no punishment. The whole concept is sickening, although much of it is a very insightful lefty critique of ideas of social Darwinism—whether the directors meant it to be or not.

In the first film, the antagonists are people who wish to cleanse society of the weaker link and prey on the vulnerable. They are a group of seemingly upper class well-educated white people, hunting down an unarmed black man that the protagonists have hid in their home. The antagonists are not raving blood-thirsty slashers motivated by a love for mayhem and destruction; they’re snooty sociopathic elitists.

Yet, the success of the film has depended, in part, on many people who seem to identify with the antagonists—those snooty elitists—more than the protagonists. Type in “purge makeup tutorial” into YouTube and you’ll find several tutorials on how to recreate the creepy mask look the film’s murderers wore to hide their identity. The Purge costumes were a popular choice this past Halloween.

What does it say about our society that a movie critiquing and showing the horrors of a state run by social Darwinism is interpreted as a “hey cool! I wanna look like the bad guy!”? It’s awkward, to say the least.

Perhaps the creators of the film intended this, but that’s just as awkward. It makes me wonder something truly frightening: Are we more like the villains or the heroes of the film? Are people really identifying with the villains or do they want to don their attire just for fun—and how is that even fun? Do they actually think it would be enjoyable to have a real life “purge”?

I suppose that’s the subtle brilliance of horror. It forces us to ask tricky questions and face uncomfortable realities about our society.

Next week, I look at physical disabilities in horror films and the ways in which they’re exploited for scares.

As soon as there’s a little kid in a scary movie, you know something paranormal is about to go down. Some of the most famous horror films include a creepy little kid: Poltergeist, The Exorcist, Child’s Play, The Sixth Sense, Village of The Damned, The Shining, The Omen, The Ring, and the list goes on. If a kid is fixated on a certain spot in the house? There’s a ghost there. If they find a doll or some kind of toy in the house? It’s possessed. If they have any imaginary friend? Get a priest ASAP. If they’re comfortable with sitting in the dark alone? Demon baby, be afraid.

Deny it if you will, but I think we might be a little bit scared of children. Or perhaps we like the chilling contrast of the idea of an innocent child actually hatching a plot of evil. It makes me wonder whether we enjoy ideas of innocence tainted.

Little kids are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. They have insights that are not over-complicated by adult-like anxieties and greediness. Kids are the people who can sometimes point out what should be obvious to us, and in a way it can be unsettling. If we’re the grown-ups, the wiser more intelligent ones, how come kids, in some ways, seem to have the answers to the simplest of questions that constantly elude us?

I think that’s why there’s an element of fear involved. It’s frightening to see a child know things that we don’t know. And that juxtaposition of the small bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked child actually being the Antichrist is a sure way to scare people. Why else would we, time and again, incorporate children into horror?

As I’ve mentioned in previous Oh, The Horror posts, the viewing of horror films has an element of sadism. And part of that sadism is to see the perfect wholesome image of a child tarnished by influences of pure evil via ghosts and demons. It’s such a contrast to the carefree, giggling innocence of actual children that we can’t help but secretly enjoy it, as strange and awful as that sounds. Horror is all about seeing good things go bad, so seeing a toddler follow the commands of a possessed doll is probably the ultimate embodiment of that concept.

Both the very young and very old, the latter of whim I talked about in last week’s Oh, The Horror, are a source of fascination in horror. We are drawn in by the extreme ends of age and twisting the norms of it. The truth is, adults are way more of a danger to children than children are to adults. Yet in horror, that idea is completely turned on its head, the adults are the victimized ones and the children are abusive. Perhaps that’s what makes a movie like Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs so refreshing, because the antagonists are the strict, mean parents, and the hero is a young boy.

Horror for young kids, such as books like Goosebumps, will often show the other side of it just like The People Under the Stairs. The parents will not believe the cries of the child that there’s a monster in the closet, and it’s up to kids to take matters into their own hands. For young people reading and viewing horror, these are positive ideas. Often, adults fail young children. The kid always points out there’s a ghost, a presence, something rattling under the bed and are ignored until it’s too late. Suddenly you have the forces of the underworld taking over your house and chainsaws buzzing outside your window. All in all, the creepy kid trope has both its downfalls and benefits; it’s an interesting contrast that is very reliable for scares, but also worth experimenting with and changing up since it’s been so overused.

Next week I look at The Purge franchise, and the ways in which its message has been twisted.