Top 25 Recent Horror Movies You Haven't Seen: 11 to 15

15. Pontypool (2008)

Character actor Stephen McHattie (2012, Watchmen) is outstanding in a rare lead performance as a shock jock trapped inside his radio station as an epidemic breaks out in the outside world. The movie has a lot of ambition, and puts a unique twist on the classic disease/zombie outbreak genre. My biggest gripe is that it tries to be a bit too clever at times, though I definitely prefer when a movie is too ambitious rather than not ambitious at all.



14. Julia's Eyes (2010)

Guillermo del Toro produced this Spanish thriller about a woman who starts going blind while investigating the supposed suicide of her twin sister. While the movie has some deep flaws in its plotting, there are some masterful suspense sequences (including a search through the darkness lit only intermittently by a camera's flashbulb) and good character development. And while I generally consider jump-scares to be the laziest kind of horror filmmaking, the ones in this movie are set up and executed very well.



13. The Horde (2009)

A group of corrupt policeman raid a derelict housing complex in the Paris slums seeking revenge against a powerful drug lord for killing one of their fellow officers. But soon the complex is under siege from hundreds of ravenous zombies and the cops, drug dealers and housing residents must work together to survive. The film is clearly paying homage to John Carpenter's classic Assault on Precinct 13, but makes up for its lack of originality by turning the volume up to 11. The film's pace is frantic, the action sequences are really fun, and the blood is plentiful. Plus it contains possibly the best "one man's last stand against the zombies" sequence I've ever seen (and I've seen a mind-boggling amount of them).


(Ignore the awkward English dubbing in the trailer's dialogue. The actual movie is in French with English subtitles)

12. The Dead (2010)

The Dead may be "horror" in its setup, but not in its execution. The film takes place in a zombie-ravaged West Africa, as a lone US Airforce engineer tries to make it back to safety after his cargo plane crashes. It's really a road movie across a barren land where water is scarce and zombies slowly wander around looking for flesh. The zombies are ignored just as often as they are put down. In fact, the first zombie encountered in the film is left alone and merely side-stepped, as though it were nothing more than an object in the way. Obviously the filmmakers use the movie to make a comment on how America and the United Nations largely ignore Africa's problems, but the point is never so heavy-handed as to become distracting. And it should be noted that the movie looks fantastic, and having sweeping vistas of the African plains in the background of every shot gives the movie a huge sense of scale.



11. YellowBrickRoad (2010)

Ah, this movie.

First, the plot synopsis:
40 years ago the entire population of a small New Hampshire town walked up a local mountain trail and were never heard from again, nor was any evidence of what happened to them ever found. So a small documentary crew gathers and heads up the trail to look for clues to what happened. Things don't end well.

Now the explanation:
The movie is rather divisive. It catches a lot of backlash for posing a bunch of interesting questions and ideas, and not answering or explaining a goddamn one of them. Plus the final scene is just terrible. Like really, really bad. So naturally, this turns a lot of viewers off. But as a story of people pursuing a mystery until it drives every last one of them mad, I found it to be a huge success (except for that last scene. Seriously, fuck that scene). All kinds of weird things happen, and the movie keeps getting creepier and creepier. The film's first act of violence is extremely effective, since it seemingly comes out of nowhere (but is not a jump-scare, just an unexpected act). It works almost like the inverse of horror's "torture porn" sub-genre. Instead of watching people be ripped apart physically, you want them all psychologically crumble.