NOV 16 — This has been a pretty phenomenal year for genre movies, especially horror ones, with plenty of crowd favourites tussling for the top spot in the best of 2024 lists that will be coming our way in the next month or so.
Whether you’re a fan of Longlegs, Late Night With The Devil, Exhuma, Love Lies Bleeding, Strange Darling, I Saw The TV Glow and lots more, there’s a wealth of horror treasures to be discovered this year, be it from the Hollywood studio system like The First Omen and Abigail, or the independent film sector like the abovementioned films.
I’ve managed to catch a few more good ones on streaming platforms in the last few weeks, and here are two films that I think are pretty outstanding and deserve to be seen by more people.
V/H/S/Beyond
If you’re a fan of horror films, I’m pretty sure that by now you’d have seen at least one of these V/H/S anthology films, which started in 2012.
If we include this latest one, there are now seven of these V/H/S films out there, just waiting to be discovered, if this is the first time you’ve heard of them.
The concept of these films is simple — gather some of the most exciting horror filmmakers from the indie scene, and let them loose making some of the most shocking and outrageous horror shorts they can think of, all under the pretext that it’s a found VHS tape.
There’s usually a wraparound segment to tie in all the different segments together, and for this one it’s helmed by documentarian Jay Cheel (who’s best known for the documentary series Cursed Films), who delivers a mockumentary about a pair of tapes that purport to show an alien encounter, which is basically the theme for this instalment of the franchise, which is to go beyond ghosts or the supernatural and into the realm of aliens and sci-fi, making this one a bit of an outlier in the whole franchise.
One of the strongest movies in the franchise yet, I’d probably put it in third place behind V/H/S/2 and V/H/S, or maybe even second place behind V/H/S/2 and slightly ahead of V/H/S, it’s really hard for me to pick my favourite segment here, as it starts like gangbusters with the action-packed “Stork” and then segues into the frankly bonkers Bollywood-set segment “Dream Girl” by director Virat Pal, only for us to find another killer GoPro idea in “Live and Let Dive,” about a bunch of friends celebrating their friend’s birthday by going on a sky jump, during which an encounter with an alien spaceship in the air results in some crazy mayhem on the ground.
Even the weaker ones, like “Fur Babies” (which probably proves how much Tusk has scarred Justin Long even today) and the very hallucinatory Mike Flanagan-scripted “Stowaway” ended up offering more value than most horror films manage nowadays.
Looks like there’s plenty of life in this franchise yet.
Caddo Lake
The best of horror films are usually very emotional ones as well, laced deep in trauma, and often involving the closest and most intimate of relationships — family.
This new film, produced by M. Night Shyamalan and written and directed by Logan George and Celine Held (who worked on three episodes of the Shyamalan-produced Servant) is unabashedly one of those emotional ones.
Focusing on two sets of characters living around a place called Caddo Lake, we’re first introduced to a guy named Paris (Dylan O’Brien), who’s haunted by the death of his mother, who reportedly had a seizure while driving when he was a little kid, plunging them both off a bridge.
Even as an adult, his survivor’s guilt has made him obsessed with finding the true cause of his mother’s death, pushing away the people he loves (and who loves him), including his girlfriend.
We’re then introduced to Ellie (Eliza Scanlen), who longs for a father she’s never known, despite being raised in a loving home by her mother and stepfather.
The only close bond she has in this new family is with her 8-year-old half-sister Anna, and after a family argument, Ellie races off to the lake to sleep at her friend’s place, only to find out the next morning that Anna tried to follow her as well and has now gone missing.
This description of the film’s basic plot might make it sound like one of those Sundance Film Festival dramas that keep on getting selected each year, but the fact that this one’s produced by Shyamalan and is HBO Max’s offering for the Halloween movie season should already alert viewers that there will be more than meets the eye with this one.
And so it proves to be the case, as the narrative gamesmanship from the co-directors here will impress even the most hardened of movie plot twist aficionados.
The way that the film connects Paris, Ellie and Anna is something that you really do need to experience yourself, and is best experienced cold.
So, don’t go looking for any more plot details or explanations, just sit down and watch the film knowing as little as possible about it, and thank me later.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
