Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: folk horror movies

  • The Film-of-the-Week Horror Odyssey 2025: Summary and Thoughts

    A personal archeology of fear: what I unearthed in fifteen first-time horrors.

    I’m ending the project at 15 movies. My goal was 16, but the season is long over, and I’m itching to watch other movies.

    What have we learned?

    There was a French horror movie that was basically as important as Psycho.

    Eyes Without a Face proposes that a face transplant is as simple as cutting around the outside of someone’s face with a scalpel and lifting the skin off like a Halloween mask. I don’t think the procedure is quite that simple, but the movie shows it in its entirety, and the only thing keeping you from fainting is pure disbelief (or hope) that it wouldn’t work that easily.

    In 1960, this was shocking enough to make some audience members pass out—and probably caused a few to wish they could.

    It was one of the first films to make the respected father the villain, even a killer. If that doesn’t equate to brilliance, it comes close.

    The Best and Worst Zombie Movies Since 1980

    By sheer luck, I watched both the best zombie movie made since 1980 and the worst.

    28 Years Later was the first in the series that felt like a true “franchise picture” in the best meaning of the phrase. It’s not really about the rage virus—it’s about losing a parent to cancer. The score by Young Fathers (virtually unknown in the U.S., semi-popular in the U.K., and respected everywhere else) is phenomenal. The “tower of skulls,” a modern mausoleum for treasured loved ones, is instantly iconic. The characters actually do know how to handle fast zombies, but the threat becomes the backdrop for a story about people who only have their families left.

    World War Z, on the other hand, is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Expensive-looking, hollow at every level, and completely neutered by its PG-13 rating. The zombie virus seems to spread through aura or osmosis. No one ever actually gets bitten on screen, yet everyone instantly looks like they’ve been rotting for a month. How does that even work?

    Every scene is a problem except for the car chase.

    Eraserhead and The Lighthouse: Two Triumphs

    Eraserhead was another highlight. It’s the movie that inspired half the 1980s cult creature-features. Poor Henry’s life is staring at a brick wall outside his bedroom window while his mutant baby screams in the next room. His partner is gone; she couldn’t take it anymore.

    It’s brilliant—part Cronenberg, part Twin Peaks, part stop-motion nightmare—and possibly the biggest spiritual influence on Beetlejuice. Next time I see this playing at midnight somewhere, I’m going.

    Almost as good was Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse. Hallelujah: I finally liked one of his movies as much as people say I should. The “lighthouse drives men mad” trope deserved a full exploration, and this one dives straight into mythology, sea legends, and Cthulhu-adjacent imagery. The lighthouse setting itself is spectacular. You’ll see more of these in the future—there have already been two: this and The Vanishing from a year earlier.

    The Creature, The Camp, and The Witches

    After those, I recommend Creature from the Black Lagoon. Not respected enough then or now, but the monster’s theme music is one of the best ever written (alongside Bride of Frankenstein). The editing, music, and cinematography could have made this a masterpiece, if the script hadn’t seemed like it was written in a weekend.

    Friday the 13th was almost brilliant—for half an hour. It feels like it was written by a playwright trying to compete with Halloween, but lost a tug-of-war with producers who just wanted something fast and sellable. It’s preposterous, but believable enough that the silliness becomes irritating. The score is as good as Creature’s for the first 30 minutes, then even the editor gets bored of it.

    And The Witches—the makeup work by Jim Henson’s team on Anjelica Huston is indelible. Huston never became the next Meryl Streep, but this is a role no one else would’ve played that way. I didn’t show the full getup in my review because seeing it for the first time is the reason you pay for admission. The mouse work feels like an afterthought, but everything else? The mouse work feels like an afterthought, but everything else? Burned into the psyche of every kid whose parents mistakenly took them.

    And Then There Was Midsommar

    The other lowlight was Midsommar. In some ways brilliant, in most ways incoherent. It did, however, introduce me to the Swedish folklore of elderly people jumping off a cliff once they became a burden. (Folklore only, but compelling enough for a filmmaker to say: “Okay… make this a movie.”)

    It’s the Tokyo Story or Make Way for Tomorrow of human-sacrifice rituals, but the execution is a B- for the assignment. A C overall.

    —

    Horror Movies Seen for the First Time in 2025 (ranked)

    1 Eyes Without a Face (1960) – 9.5

    2 Possession (1981) – 9

    3 Eraserhead (1977) – 9

    4 28 Years Later (2025) – 9

    5 Strange Darling (2023) – 8.5

    6 The Lighthouse (2019) – 8.5

    7 Onibaba (1964) – 8

    8 House (1977) – 8

    9 Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954) – 8

    10 The Stepford Wives (1975) – 8

    11 Weapons (2025) – 7.5

    12 Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) – 7.5

    13 Sinners (2025) – 7.5

    14 Train to Busan (2016) – 7.5

    15 Revenge (2017) – 7

    16 The Witches (1990) – 7

    17 Night of the Creeps (1986) – 7

    18 I Saw the TV Glow (2024) – 7

    19 Ringu (1988) – 7

    20 The Invitation (2017) – 7

    21 X (2022) – 7

    22 Possessor (2020) – 7

    23 Paranormal Activity (2007) – 6.5

    24 Nosferatu (2024) – 6.5

    25 Heretic (2024) – 6.5

    26 Mandy (2018) – 6.5

    27 Blade II (2002) – 6

    28 Dead Calm (1989) – 6

    29 Frankenstein (2025) – 6

    30 Arcadia (2024) – 6

    31 Cube (1997) – 5.5

    32 28 Weeks Later (2007) – 5

    33 Midsommar (2019) – 5

    34 Scream (2022) – 5

    35 Friday the 13th (1980) – 5

    36 Death of a Unicorn (2025) – 5

    37 The Conjuring (2013) – 4.5

    38 Longlegs (2024) – 4

    39 The Endless (2017) – 4

    40 The Coffee Table (2022) – 4

    41 House on Haunted Hill (1959) – 3

    42 Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – 2.5

    43 World War Z (2013) – 1

    —

    Twenty horror movies on my docket for October 2026 (if not before then):

    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

    Cat People (1942)

    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

    Pirhana (1978)

    The Changeling (1980)

    The Howling (1981)

    Tenabrae (1984)

    Critters (1986)

    Monkey Shines (1988)

    Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

    Saw (2004)

    The Orphanage (2007)

    It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

    A Monster Calls (2016)

    Under the Shadow (2016)

    The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

    Halloween (2018)

    The Wolf House (2018)

    Oddity (2024)

    Dangerous Animals (2025)

    —

    Final Thoughts

    Of those upcoming films, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Cat People are the ones I wish I’d squeezed in this year. I always hope to find new personal classics, but it’s rare that any actually qualify.

    I also recommend Sinners and Weapons, two mainstream horror films that might even be nominated for Best Picture next year. I’d give them both a 7.5—which for me qualifies as a personal classic, just barely.

    Every October feels like a tunnel you walk into, hoping something in the dark will change you. The best horror isn’t about fear at all; it’s about seeing the ordinary world more clearly afterward. Give me truth, memorably distorted and I’m a happy Crystal Lake camper.

    The full list of reviews are here.

  • Day 15: Midsommar (2019)

    Goal: What is the one horror movie I would still like to watch before closing the book on this year’s project?

    —

    What I know about it:

    Basically nothing. For years I assumed it had something to do with ancient Roman elites — something about the poster gave me a Caligula vibe; maybe it’s the hairstyle. Only now am I looking it up.

    Apparently it’s closer to The Wicker Man than I, Claudius: a remote European commune hosting a mysterious summer festival. I’ve heard it takes place almost entirely in daylight — a neat subversion for horror — and that it falls under the “folk horror” umbrella.

    So why watch it if I know so little?

    About a year ago, a friend told me it was really messed up. She stopped before spoiling anything — impressive, since she hadn’t seen it herself. That was enough to lodge it in my head.

    Also, I more or less tuned out new releases around 2019. As a rule:

    > If you were released between 2018–2021 and scored under a 77 on Metacritic, there’s a good chance I never heard of you.

    On paper, Midsommar was a hit — but the reputation seems complicated. It came after Ari Aster’s breakout Hereditary, and the consensus appears to be something like: “good, but not as good.” I never cared much for Hereditary anyway, so this actually raises my hopes. Sometimes the follow-up to a major work — the one that gets dinged for being weirder, less focused, or more self-indulgent — ends up being the real gem.

    It’s the Kid A to OK Computer: a stranger evolution of the same concerns, initially received as a disappointment but later appreciated on its own, maybe even preferred.

    I actually like Punch-Drunk Love more than Boogie Nights or Magnolia, so I’m open to the possibility that a “disappointment” can be the quietly great one.

    So I’m excited for this. Let’s hope this is the Return of Saturn to Hereditary’s Tragic Kingdom.

    —

    After the movie:

    Hmm. That was a very pretty bad movie. It has all of the makings of a good moral fable, but it tries to do too many vague things with character motivations. Too many beats are awkwardly piled on at the same time, so the overall effect is watching a filmmaker grasping at straws.

    A key dynamic concerns Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian, who are in a relationship that seems to continue mostly from inertia. Christian isn’t exactly the villain, but he is shapeless and passive. The film never fully convinces us why these two would have gotten together in the first place.

    Christian and his friends decide to travel to Sweden to visit a fellow student’s rural commune during the midsummer festival. Given their ages, you might expect a hedonistic vacation driven by drugs and hookups, but the draw seems more like cheap cultural tourism — the promise of “experiencing something authentic.”

    —

    What educational value is there in Midsommar?

    What do we learn?

    First, there is a portion of Sweden where the sun does not set for part of the summer (“the midnight sun,” as they call it).

    Midsommar is a real cultural tradition across Sweden, and it takes place during the summer solstice, so the timing overlaps.

    The film also references ättestupa, a legendary cliff from which elderly people were said to leap once they became a burden to their family. Importantly, this is folklore only — there is no historical evidence that such a practice ever occurred. The stories were meant to shock or caution, not to endorse the act or portray it as noble.

    The rest? Pure fantasy. The architecture of the ceremonial building is not based on anything recognizable in Swedish culture. There are no psychedelic rituals at Midsommar; no fertility ceremonies to choose a queen; no temples built intentionally to be burned to the ground. They could have made this about the Burning Man festival and it would have been just as true to factual life — if not more so.

    You also get the sense that Swedish people believe life is grounded in reincarnation, which is not representative of Swedish culture broadly; that’s an invention of the fictional commune

    So what is this movie trying to be?

    It imagines a culture that treats outsiders as expendable, but believes that someone with no family or sense of belonging can be absorbed into the group — if they are willing to surrender themselves totally.

    The most haunting part of the movie comes when Dani screams in furious grief and the surrounding women mimic her cries. They are not mocking her; it is presented as a communal expression of empathy.

    Aster seems interested in how grief can isolate as much as it bonds. Dani’s personal tragedy is so extreme that she becomes untethered from ordinary life, and the commune offers what her real world does not: absolute emotional mirroring, however sinister the cost.

    In that sense, Midsommar is about the seductiveness of belonging. When genuine support systems fail or prove indifferent, even a dangerous one can feel like salvation.

    > “The last known whereabouts of his cell phone was where, officer?”

    —

    5/10