10 Best Horror Movies Of The Decade So Far
Horribly good cinema.
It’s always dangerous talking about horror movies because the people that love horror films, truly love horror films. They’re like fans of Death Grips or Bernie Sanders in that anything bad said about their genre soul mate is determined slander and worthy of a fatwa.
See, from an evolutionary standpoint alone, man is predisposed to notice quick movements out of the corner of his eye and wake up when he hears things that go bump in the night. The prehistoric man who didn’t was the one who got eaten by a bear. But there’s another reason we flock in droves to watch people die and nearly die at the hands of possessed spirits and that’s the hit of adrenaline you get when you’re engaged with what’s happening on the screen.
It’s like nectar. You get this overwhelming tidal wave of dopamine when you’re terrified, a bit like when you narrowly avoid a car crash or watch a cage fight live. It’s an intoxicating cocktail of excitement and fear.
Which is why there are few things better than a bona fide, honest to God horror movie. One that gets your back sweating and your synapses fidgeting like a smoker in need of a nicotine hit. In fact the only thing better than a great horror movie is a genuinely awful one. The sort that Crow and Tom Servo would pick apart like carrion on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
In recent years, the horror movie genre has been somewhat supplanted by the horror gaming genre. Games like Outlast, Amnesia and Five Nights at Freddy’s have become the speedball of choice for all the terror junkies out there. Which is a shame, because the horror genre has been going through something of a renaissance this decade.
Here’s 10 of the best.
10. Spring
Being completely honest, this feels a little dirty putting this on a ‘horror’ list. Technically, Spring is listed as a romantic body horror flick but in reality it’s more like a mixed genre buffet cherry picking the bits it likes from romantic films, sci-fi stuff, coming of age stories all the way down to shock and gore forming a sort of horror chimera. It’s a certainly a nuanced horror movie, but Spring takes chances, which you can only respect in the light of the cut and paste ethos a lot of horror seems to be taking these days.
It follows the meanderings of Evan, a young man going that period of post adolescence/ young adulthood where you simultaneously feel that the world is both too big and too small. He escapes to Italy to try and find himself, the same thing your friend is currently doing in Thailand. Before long he meets Louisa, a beguiling heterochromatic girl so beautiful you want to bite your hand off. And then the world begins to explode. Slowly at first, far off in the distance as pyroclastic flow engulfs you and you now know why you’re in Pompeii.
Spring is an interesting, almost post-modern take on mutation and metamorphosis. There’s a relaxed, almost catatonic ambience encapsulated in the Italian back street serenity and the Sigur Ros soundtrack. Which makes it all the more diabolical when it rips out your jugular and devours it right in front of you.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a horror film that everyone will enjoy or even like and it’s certainly not the scariest on this list, not even close. But it is one of the most interesting, which is completely fine by me.