15 'WTF Did I Just Pay To See' Horror Movies
8. Kill List
Ben Wheatley's folk horror knockout Kill List is like a grotesque yet beautiful butterfly, in that it is constantly metamorphosizing. It begins as a straightforward thriller about two hitmen (Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley, both superb) being asked to carry out three hits and by the end, it has turned into a demented, surreal and captivating folk horror nightmare that hits like a hammer between the eyes.
It is a genre-bender that would make Bong Joon-Ho proud, and it's also made even more startling thanks to its notably graphic violence and mind-blowingly unhinged ending, in which Maskell's protagonist is tricked into killing his family and is then crowned king of a Pagan cult. Truly, this is a whole 'nother level of bats**t crazy horror cinema.
Kill List is also one of those great movies that, given how much it messes with genre and gives convention the finger, could so easily have been terrible. Yet praise be, Wheatley and co. pulled it off unbelievably well. Kill List remains not just one of the finest British horror films of the century, but perhaps among the finest ever.