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Thread: The 15 Best Horror Directors Working Today

  1. #26
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    11. Larry Fessenden
    (Habit, The Last Winter, Beneath)

    Life seems arbitrary and scary, consciousness seems subjective and tenuous. I like the horror genre because it invites the audience to see the world the way I see it: populated by demons, real and imagined.
    -Larry Fessenden



    Where to Start?
    Habit (1997)

    One of the fun ironies of horror is that so many creatives use the genre as a way to ask interesting questions - questions more reputable genres might not bother with. Let's face it, few romance pictures or family dramas come with commentary devoted to social decay or the illusion of perception. But that's how things go with Larry Fessenden, the writer/director responsible for thoughtful indie exercises like Habit and Wendigo. Given his passion for horror-as-social-essay in his own work, it's no surprise that he's the most vocal commentator on George Romero retrospective Birth of the Living Dead.

    Romero was the guy, after all, who made his zombies into allegories for revolution and gluttonous consumerism. Fessenden's The Last Winter, a snowbound supernatural thriller, takes a story about prehistoric ghosts (yep) and fashions it into a discomforting look at the USA's appetite for oil. Subtle in mood, if not in its core idea (Ron Perlman sounds like a member of the Bush/Cheney cabinet), The Last Winter succeeds in its atmosphere, and its thematic interest is genius. Let's face it: oil is literally the remnants of ancient plants and animals, and when humans turn it into pollution, and that pollution hastens the destruction of our own habitats - well, isn't that the ghosts of the past achieving some kind of revenge?


    The Last Winter is his most political work, but his previous two films challenge their supernatural stories. Habit asks if its central antagonist is a deranged sex bomb or a vampiric seductress, but it wisely never quite answers the question. Wendigo suggests that its Native American spirit might exist only in the imagination of young or mentally weak, in people who need illusions to make sense of reality's cruelty. That film struggled some with its final-act monster, a manifestation of the wendigo that looked more confusing than imposing. (The Last Winter also faltered with end-of-film special effects that felt too literal and weightless.)

    Fessenden's more recent works, however, subtract these headier ideas for more cruel, straightforward horror. His Fear Itself episode "Skin and Bones" succeeds mostly as a showpiece for the brilliant, eerie actor Doug Jones (a.k.a our generation's Lon Chaney). He plays a man who returns from the wilderness and forces his wife into cannibalism. And TV movie Beneath, a Jaws-meets-Lifeboat trifle, is kind enough to make its teenagers burgeoning sociopaths and opt for a big dumb fish puppet over a big dumb computer effect. That film was mostly dismissed, not without some reason - a film needs a lot of contrivance to strand six kids on a boat in a small lake. Maybe the problem isn't that the film is bad, but that, like its giant catfish of death, Fessenden's most interesting when he's got more to chew on.

    Side-note: credit also goes to Fessenden for founding Glass Eye Pix, which helped start the careers of Ti West (The House of the Devil) and Jim Mickle (Stake Land). Fessenden's currently supervising the first English feature of this list's #14, Adrian Garcia Bogliano.


  2. #27
    The Pan megladon8's Avatar
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    Great choice, and yes, his influence on the horror community is immense. Many of the "big names" in horror today (both in front of and behind the camera) are around because he helped them get into the 'biz.

    He's actually a really nice, interesting guy, too. After I saw and love The Last Winter I e-mailed his official website about how much I enjoyed it, and was surprised to have Fessenden himself respond. We started a short e-mail correspondence where we talked about indie film and horror in general. I don't remember many specifics from the conversation aside from his overall friendliness and how he seemed genuinely excited to talk to someone who had seen many of the films from Glass Eye Pix, and loved horror.

    I want to see Beneath because of his involvement, but it just looks so dreadful.
    "All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"

    "Rick...it's a flamethrower."

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    Quote Quoting megladon8 (view post)
    Great choice, and yes, his influence on the horror community is immense. Many of the "big names" in horror today (both in front of and behind the camera) are around because he helped them get into the 'biz.

    He's actually a really nice, interesting guy, too. After I saw and love The Last Winter I e-mailed his official website about how much I enjoyed it, and was surprised to have Fessenden himself respond. We started a short e-mail correspondence where we talked about indie film and horror in general. I don't remember many specifics from the conversation aside from his overall friendliness and how he seemed genuinely excited to talk to someone who had seen many of the films from Glass Eye Pix, and loved horror.

    I want to see Beneath because of his involvement, but it just looks so dreadful.
    Yeah, I enjoyed Beneath, but there's been so much hostility to it online that I hesitate to recommend it to anybody. It helps to go in with the expectation of a mean-spirited Corman production. Like Dante's Piranha. Maybe. The second half, where the kids start deciding who to feed to the fish, is involving. You have to be okay with the idea that the boat is inexplicably (i.e. literally no Earthly reason) stuck in the middle of the lake, despite its detritus washing to the shore. And with watching characters who are terrible human beings - in a genuine way, not in that mild idiotic way of most cabin or slasher movies. Like, these people are awful.

  4. #29
    pushing too many pencils Rowland's Avatar
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    Stuart Gordon tried to raise money through Kickstarter for a film adaptation of Nevermore but I don't recall it ever being close to making its projection, which is surely a pity, but to be frank, the project as it was pitched didn't sound terribly interesting. I can't believe his last feature was Stuck...
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    10. Pascal Laugier
    (House of Voices, Martyrs, The Tall Man)
    Horror is a way for me to express personal things. To escape from the irony and the intellectual misery public opinion has fallen into. The culture of “fantastic” is a good tool to feel far away from the dominating thoughts and the imperialism of the mass media. It’s a “counterculture,” free to express things that aren’t said.
    - Interview With Shock Till You Drop, 2008[/right]



    Where to Start?
    House of Voices (2005)

    What's cool about Pascal Laugier's first three movies is how they all push different approaches to suspense and terror... while keeping certain ideas intact. House of Voices is an old-fashioned ghost story. Martyrs is a slough of human suffering. The Tall Man is a moody, plausible mystery. All three are about strong women struggling against imposing social systems (a church, a cabal, an entire town). All three pay careful attention to the victimization of children. All three couch antagonism in older, matronly women.

    Laugier's best known for his middle film, Martyrs, a film so grueling I fast-forwarded through the final 20 minutes, stopping only to pick up necessary plot points. That may sound like a condemnation. It isn't, not necessarily. Martyrs centers on a woman made to suffer in the hopes that her pain will open her up to a transcendent, possibly divine knowledge. Get it? The film is literally asking what possible reward could justify the violence it contains. Of all the films labeled "torture porn" in the States and abroad, Martyrs is the one that goes furthest toward defending its own excess. Good on Laugier. I wanted to puke.


    Doesn't hurt that the film's gorgeous, with its candy-red gore presented in monochrome rooms of bright white and dull grey. Laugier started this visual in the big white rooms of House of Voices, set at a defunct orphanage. That film's premise calls to mind The Devil's Backbone and (go figure) The Orphanage. House of Voices is slightly different, the only real child in the film being the unborn child of Anna (Virginie Leydon). House of Voices wins few points for originality, but it works on a basic level, and Laugier adds some attention-grabbing style to his strong sense of craft. One conversation features the camera floating around two women's heads against a black background. Another neat shot compresses Anna's cleaning chores by superimposing three of her on the same space, one brooming, one dusting...

    As mentioned above, these three films feature strong women. Not the paradoxical type that horror films too often lean on (you know, the women that combine resilience with an uncanny ability to lose vital pieces of clothing and home in on trippable roots). Notably, Pascal Laugier has the good sense to test Jessica Biel's tough girl image in The Tall Man instead of rewarding it, putting her through an emotional and physical ringer as she tries to help children survive. I can't say I love all three of these films, but each one carries sincerity, forceful characters, classical style with deft touches. I don't know if Laugier's films are always "horror," and I don't think they're unqualified successes. But they feel imperative.


  6. #31
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    Own both Martyrs and Tall Man. Love them.
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    Winston* Classic Winston*'s Avatar
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    I thought the the ending of The Tall Man was inexcusably dumb.

  8. #33
    Here till the end MadMan's Avatar
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    Need to see some of Fessenden's work. I did love him in the underrated and rather delightful horror comedy I Sell The Dead.
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    Since 1929 Morris Schæffer's Avatar
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    I think I've only seen Gordon's Fortress, but I enjoyed it.
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  10. #35
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    9. James Wan
    (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring)

    The only thread is that I think I learned a lot from Saw since it was my first movie. I learned what I could do and what I couldn't do, within my budget. I learned what worked and what didn't work with Saw, and the same with Insidious.
    - Interview with Rolling Stone



    Where to Start?
    Insidious (2010)

    James Wan gracefully bowed out of the horror genre with the announcement that he'd direct the seventh Fast and Furious movie. Probably a good idea. After The Conjuring, what else could he do with horror? That film played like a summation of his career, using every trope in the playbook and exacting the story with a fastidious control of the mood. Were The Conjuring a debut film, I'd call it the work of a wunderkind. The fact that Wan worked his way up to it is impressive in a different way. It's proof that a creative doesn't necessarily have to start at "great," but can get there with hard work and discipline.

    Looking back on Wan's career now, it's almost ironic to see where he started: directing the hyperkinetic Seven-derivative Saw, a film credited with starting the "torture porn" movement in the USA. The music-video editing and heavy metal soundtrack killed any sense of dread, sure, but even in that film, there are hints of Wan's interest in classical horror stuffs. The most interesting drama amounts to a locked-room mystery, with two people chained to grimy sewers in an industrial bathroom. How did they get there? How will they get out? Alongside that story engine, the villain speaks through a carnivalesque puppet on a tricycle (!) with spiral-painted cheeks and dead eyes.


    Wan returned to living puppets again and again, with none more annoying than those in his hackneyed (if well-meaning) Dead Silence. Although that film didn't work, it pointed up Wan's interest in eschewing "modern" horror stories for simpler, more archetypal tales. Insidious plays as a fun riff on Poltergeist, borrowing that film's old woman oracle and journey-to-the-afterlife climax. The Conjuring went further, transplanting its drama in the past and basing it on "true events" (hah). That film made time for the rotting old tree, the bog, the ruined manse on the outskirts of civilization - and whatever you do, don't go in the basement.

    The Conjuring stands above his other work (including follow-up Insidious Part Two) in part because of the critical casting of Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor, who infuse basic characters with warmth and conviction. The other reason is because Wan refined his approach. Saw and Dead Silence played too loud. Insidious overemphasized its jump-scares but allowed for classic scare build-up - one step closer to victory. With The Conjuring, Wan finally quieted down and let events unfold. Think of that unbearable hide-and-seek game. Or the slow journey to the basement. Or Patrick Wilson standing beside the tree. Wan never quite delivered a masterpiece of the genre, but he came damn close, and his career reminds us that classical horror stories still work, goddamnit, so long as you learn how to tell them.


  11. #36
    Moderator TGM's Avatar
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    After his latest (produced) movie released, James Gunn had this to say:

    Quote Quoting James Gunn
    Can I take a moment to give a shoutout to James Wan? The movie he produced (along with my long-time manager Peter Safran) Annabelle, a sequel to a movie he directed, opened up to 37 million this weekend. That means this dude has created THREE huge franchises - Saw, Insidious, and Conjuring - that weren't based on pre-existing properties. Original horror films done with integrity that do well. That just doesn't happen in this day and age. I don't think he gets nearly enough props for the amazing feat of being able to repeat his success - he is the only director outside of James Cameron who seems to have such a keen insight into the public mind. Oh - and one more thing - he's a also a great guy. Congrats, James and company!

  12. #37
    collecting tapes Skitch's Avatar
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    Just watched his Dead Silence last night. Pretty decent flick!

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    Quote Quoting Skitch (view post)
    Just watched his Dead Silence last night. Pretty decent flick!
    I switched my TV color to black and white halfway through. Giving it that old-fashioned look helped a bit.

  14. #39
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    8. Rob Zombie
    (The Devil's Rejects, Halloween, The Lords of Salem)
    ...all the films I grew up watching and loving, from The Holy Mountain to Eraserhead and something like Cannibal Holocaust, they didn't appeal to everybody. They had a very heavy tone. They weren't made for everybody. That's the way I look at my movies: You can't please everybody with this kind of material.
    - interview with Complex



    Where to Start?
    The Devil's Rejects (2005)

    Rob Zombie is a Middle Ages alchemist stuck with a big pot of rocks. The goal? Make some gold. The process? Shove everything you've got into the cauldron, spark that fire, and hope that rocky soup doesn't bubble over and congeal into a mess on the floor. For Zombie, the "rocks" are inspirations like Texas Chain Saw, Peckinpah, Suspiria, Charles Manson (always toss in some Chuck Manson). The results range from the overblown excess of House of 1000 Corpses to the simmering images of The Lords of Salem. If the alchemists wanted gold, Zombie wants the Great Perverse Movie.

    Thing is, Zombie found it early on with The Devil's Rejects. The film sequelizes his previous film House of 1000 Corpses while requiring the viewer to know nothing of that previous film. Calling the movie crass is like calling Jabba the Hutt portly. The Devil's Rejects begins and ends with over-the-top shoot-outs and features, as its centerpiece, a motel scene where one of the "heroes" sexually assaults an innocent woman, kills her husband, and then wears the man's face for his sobbing wife. You know, as a goof. What the film offers over House of 1000 Corpses is a more modulated pace and, most importantly, a slyer sense of humor. During their cross-country murder spree, the trio of rejects bicker about stopping for ice cream. And the sheriff chasing them flips his shit when a local film critic insults Elvis Presley.


    Zombie's style pushes for fast cuts, grainy images, close-ups of demented or pained faces, beading with sweat and lined with joy or terror. His movies feel like someone left the film canisters in a dusty closet on the Texas border decades ago. This style didn't work so well in his Halloween remakes. Trying to wedge his style into the prerequisites of a slasher, Zombie's adaptations worked only intermittently. At their best, Halloween and H2 diverted from the Myers legend and found their own groove by indulging Zombie's white trash interests and passion for singular visuals. At their worst, the films felt inexplicable and incomprehensible - a climactic chase scene in the first Halloween feels especially confusing and overshot.

    H2 has seen some appraisal by defiant internet critics - the writers at Slant Magazine are fans. But its moment-by-moment image-making gets a much more effective treatment in The Lords of Salem. The film skips Zombie's usual interest in Southern-fried psychopaths and evokes Polanski in its story about a woman surrendering to encroaching malevolent supernaturalism. And as a deeply perverse, unapologetic baroque storyscape, the film works (I've discussed its virtues before). It's one of Zombie's two beautiful pieces of gold. Did I say beautiful? I mean nasty. Disgusting and nasty. I think Rob would appreciate the compliment.


  15. #40
    Winston* Classic Winston*'s Avatar
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    Stuart Gordon is the only director so far I've seen a film that I really liked from so far. Maybe I just don't like horror films. Haven't seen anthing by Bogliano, Khalfoun, or Wan though (turned off Saw).

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    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Winston* (view post)
    Stuart Gordon is the only director so far I've seen a film that I really liked from so far. Maybe I just don't like horror films. Haven't seen anthing by Bogliano, Khalfoun, or Wan though (turned off Saw).
    Honestly, Gordon's my favorite director on this list, and his low standing is purely because he hasn't made a movie-film of any kind for six years. I think his episodes of Fear Itself and Masters of Horror are the best of their respective series.

  17. #42
    Winston* Classic Winston*'s Avatar
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    Re-animator and Stuck are awesome. Edmund is straight garbage though.

  18. #43
    The Pan megladon8's Avatar
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    I've yet to see The Lords of Salem. I've read such mixed things. The BluRay is $5 on Amazon, I should give it a shot.

    Regarding the beginning fakeout in H2, I have always taken it as a joke and wink to the audience. "Thought I was just remaking Halloween 2, didn't ya??"

  19. #44
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting megladon8 (view post)
    I've yet to see The Lords of Salem. I've read such mixed things. The BluRay is $5 on Amazon, I should give it a shot.

    Regarding the beginning fakeout in H2, I have always taken it as a joke and wink to the audience. "Thought I was just remaking Halloween 2, didn't ya??"
    I feel like that joke isn't as funny when it lasts a quarter of the movie.

  20. #45
    Here till the end MadMan's Avatar
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    Lords of Salem is excellent.
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  21. #46
    pushing too many pencils Rowland's Avatar
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    Regarding Gordon, I'd recommend King of the Ants, Dagon, and The Pit and the Pendulum as some of his undervalued efforts.
    Letterboxd rating scale:
    The Long Riders (Hill) ***
    Furious 7 (Wan) **½
    Hard Times (Hill) ****½
    Another 48 Hrs. (Hill) ***
    /48 Hrs./ (Hill) ***½
    The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (Besson) ***
    /Unknown/ (Collet-Serra) ***½
    Animal (Simmons) **

  22. #47
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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    Zombie:

    House of 1000 Corpse ***
    Devil's Rejects ****
    Halloween ***
    Halloween 2 N/A
    Lords of Salem **
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  23. #48
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Rowland (view post)
    Regarding Gordon, I'd recommend King of the Ants, Dagon, and The Pit and the Pendulum as some of his undervalued efforts.
    I haven't seen his "middle movies." I.e.

    Robot Jox
    The Pit and the Pendulum
    Fortress
    Castle Freak
    Space Truckers
    The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit


    Probably start out with Pit and Castle Freak.

  24. #49
    Moderator Dead & Messed Up's Avatar
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    7. Jim Mickle
    (Mulberry Street, Stake Land, We Are What We Are)

    We kept our monsters in the shadows, mostly suggested. Besides, if you have good actors who can really look scared you can play scenes off of their reaction more than trying to scare the audience with showing the monsters. Our main aesthetic throughout was keeping it realistic and character-driven.
    - On Mulberry Street, interview with Slant


    The films of Jim Mickle play like eulogies for the genres they inhabit. Oppressive doom, communicated through careful sound design, soft scoring, and limited colors, pushes a constant feeling of the world in decay. In movies like Mulberry Street and Stake Land, that decay matches to the physical settings: a run-down New York tenement and a barren post-apocalyptic USA. In cannibal drama We Are What We Are, the decay is internal, as a family keeps up appearances while rotting from the inside out. Viewers know these stories, but not told with this melancholic style.

    That makes his films sound like a collective buzzkill, but all three feel renewing, filling the space between simple story development with sincerity and naturalism. These are real, plausible worlds into which horror intrudes. Consider We Are What We Are, in which a father preserves a family tradition of eating human remains. While he uses a glower and the specter of a dead mother to keep his children in line, his daughters fray at the edges. Mickle finds space for their struggle in pregnant pauses, moments of hesitation. The film plays like tragedy, Titus Andronicus as imagined by Nathaniel Hawthorne and adapted by Kubrick.


    Stake Land similarly reworks itself, using a vampire apocalypse (vampocalypse?) as a means to explore just how quiet and desolate an actual apocalypse would be. While movies like 28 Weeks Later and Land of the Dead escalate efficiently (if sometimes predictably) into high-stakes action extravaganzas, Stake Land sits perpetually at simmer. The focus rarely widens beyond its two main leads. Compared to those two films, Mickle's debut Mulberry Street is almost zippy, cross-cutting between a wide-range of New Yahwkers living on the eponymous street as a growing plague turns people into... but anyway, its characters are plausibly human, simple, grabbing what small reliefs they can find. An old man luxuriates in the idea of enjoying a good cigar. A middle-aged jogger quietly pines for an unwed mother.

    Mickle's co-writer Nick Damici (who also acts in all three movies) is undoubtedly a large part of why these films work. The two have their own little indie-horror Scorsese/DeNiro partnership, with Damici playing as gruff, well-meaning types in all three movies. Like those movies, he trusts viewers to pay attention, to listen. Most people who watch horror watch it casually, for the roller coaster of depravity. And that's okay - who doesn't like a carnival? Jim Mickle shows viewers what happens when the carnival's stopped, and all that's left are the metal husks of tents and rides, beautiful and eerie, standing against a setting sun.


  25. #50
    Replacing Luck Since 1984 Dukefrukem's Avatar
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