New Classics: Horror

What new trends in horror has the 21st century thrown up so far? Film4's resident gorehound Ali Catterall investigates

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Planet Terror

With a new century have come fresh - or at least defrosted - hells: international terrorism, human rights abuses, murderous juvenile delinquency, climate change and global recession. So how have today's horror filmmakers reacted to these seismic, post-9/11 changes? By churning out loads of rubbish remakes.

If the 1990s was the decade of the sequel, the noughties will go down as the age of the 'reimagining'. The Amityville Horror, Halloween, The Omen and The Fog have all been butchered in the name of making a fast buck, along with scores of other classic horrors (although Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes retake is generally agreed to have done justice to the original).

Most depressingly, Neil LaBute thought he'd take a crack at beloved British cult classic The Wicker Man and, appropriately, was roasted alive by public and critics. Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino's attempt to reinterpret an entire subgenre, with Grindhouse's Death Proof, resulted in the director's first feature-length flop. Much better was his co-director Robert Rodriguez's gleeful Planet Terror, a mid-period John Carpenter picture in all but name.

Next page • "'Torture porn' - old horror threads on expensive coat hangers"

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There are several truly outstanding Noughties horrors that have still yet to be released in the UK: - Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's gruelling maternity shocker Inside (2007) - David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry's low-budget genre-busting technophobe three-parter The Signal (2007) Also several of the horrors just screened at last weekend's Film4 FrightFest Halloween all-nighter at the ICA would suggest that there is still plenty of high-quality horror to come in the decade's last gasp - namely Mark Tonderai's Hush, Tom Shankland's The Children, Toby Wilkins' Splinter, and (best of all, and indeed the best, imo, of all 2008), James Isaac's Pig Hunt. It's got a Deliverance-style clash of urban and rural, masculine rites of passage, Orwellian allegory, total freakout psychedelia, murderous redneck bikers, a monstrous wild boar - and, to top it all off, oblique yet incisive commentary on the US campaign in Iraq.

Posted by Anton Bitel on 04/11/2008 12:38:33

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I love Mulholland Drive. It is horrifying but it is not generic. David Lynch exists in a category of one, and could never be situated as a part of a movement or trend. He is singular and that's what makes his obsessional films so terrifying

Posted by William Mooch on 02/11/2008 15:59:57

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What about Mulholland Drive? Honestly, why do David Lynch movies consistently get overlooked by horror movie critics? They are by far the most heart-stoppingly scary, and brain-curdlingly creepy movies you can see. And yet they always get overlooked, simply on the grounds that critics struggle to pigeonhole them into the usual derivative parameters of what they think horror should be. In other words they are too classy to rank. My top 10 horror movies of the decade, would definitely feature Mulholland Drive near, or at the top. Go check out the old grubby lady behind the Cafe again, if you don't believe me!

Posted by Rory on 01/11/2008 02:46:20

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