It’s a no-fucks-given gonzo experiment, laced with the riskiness of Giallo and the surrealist imagery of a Lynchian nightmare, disparate tones wrapped dreamily around an angry, blunt satire about the self-destructive, soul-sucking nature of greed and ambition. Hollywood’s versatile trickster, Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe go for broke cramming various sub-genres and mood-drenched tropes into an overstuffed, batshit-crazy horror epic, a loving nod to old Universal monster movies, among many, with the mad scientist conducting experiments that “defy god and nature” in a picturesque old castle perched atop a village that somehow skipped the 20th Century, Bojan Bazelli’s gorgeous cinematography taking full advantage of the Euro-gothic aesthetic.
It’s a bit of a tragedy that Gore Verbinski’s delightfully bizarre, absurdly violent and grotesque A Cure For Wellness went largely unnoticed. Here are the 15 best horror movies of 2017: A number of titles almost made our list, worth mentioning: The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a film awe-struck with despair for humanity and a mind-bogglingly great performance from Kiernan Shipka The Girl with All the Gifts We Are the Flesh Alien: Covenant, proving that the older Ridley Scott gets the grosser he’s willing to be Happy Death Day one of many good Stephen King adaptations this year (see below), Gerald’s Game and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which isn’t a horror movie but kind of works like one, and anyway it’s fine because you’ll see it on other lists elsewhere. In other words, it was a fertile year for horror, America’s most vital form of filmmaking, especially for non-white, non-male voices laying waste to the genre’s most tired tropes. We’re just trying to not wake up every day and assume the worst. In 2017, we’re just trying to find some way out of all of our most pessimistic impulses. Night Shyamalan’s pulpy thriller ends on a surprisingly bleak note. One is the highest grossing horror film of all time, and another is a genre-transcending treatise on America’s treacherous post-Obama racial landscape, both changing the industry for low-budget genre films immeasurably.
One film is a musical reveling in the harshness of young love, in the terrifying lengths to which someone, women especially, are expected to go to be loved. The best horror movies of 2017 writhe in grief and mourning: Evil is mundane, they say-sure-but what does that actually mean about moving on with one’s life? In two of these films, the grief-stricken struggle to communicate with those they’ve lost, realizing the process of doing so is difficult, an incredibly tedious series of motions (much like one’s everyday life) in which we’re never really sure they’re succeeding, or just feeding their own serious neuroses, plunging them deeper into depression.
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