It’s been a helluva year for horror movies. I count more than 32 horror movies I saw in the theater this year — not bad for a genre that gets no attention. But before we count down the best of the best, let’s take a look at some hot trends this year:
- Movies based on beloved books: Box office was mixed, but it was a great year if you loved faithful book-to-film transformations including Let the Right One In, Red, The Ruins, Blindness, and of course, Twilight.
- Zombies: From a box office perspective, zombies didn’t burn up the box office, but that didn’t stop plenty of films from using them, such as The Signal, Diary of the Dead, and Otto (or Up With Dead People). And while the folks in Quarantine aren’t technically zombies, let’s face it — it’s a zombie flick.
- Remakes: On the other hand, with a ton of remakes this year, all did fairly well at the box office except one (sorry, Funny Games). But still — moviegoers who hated subtitles were treated to remakes of The Eye, One Missed Call, Mirrors, Funny Games, and Quarantine. And this trend ain’t going anywhere — 3 remakes will arrive in the first six weeks of 2009.
- Hand-Held Documentary Style: Many people hate to see ‘em, but 2 of the 3 this year were box office hits, so don’t expect them to go away. Cloverfield was a smash, and Quarantine hit pretty big too. Only Diary of the Dead didn’t take off.
And thanks to the way Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train got released, we now have a new verb added to horror movie vocabularly.
meat-trained [meet·trānd], verb: the action of dumping a horror movie into a handful of obscure second-run theaters to fulfill a contractual obligation. i.e., Did you see Rogue? It was sweet. Too bad it got meat-trained.
But enough of that. Now onto the top 10 horror movies of the year, starting with #10.
#10. The Strangers
Writer/director Bryan Bertino instantly made himself a talent to watch with this creepy, genuinely scary debut. While the ad campaign and an unnecessary opening-movie crawl removed some of the suspense, it still had audiences screaming, particularly in the first half. A refreshing lack of score did a great job of making you feel you were there, in the house, waiting for the strangers to make their next move. Rumor has it Bertino is already on board for a Strangers sequel, but we’re more eager to see his next original creation, Alone.
The top 9 films after the jump.
