Most of the King apatations are gonna be good. I’m not sure which my fav is, maybe Misery? Winning based on Kathy Bates though tbh, hahaha.
By weird I mean anything that’s not afraid to push limits as far as they can go. Terrifier is great, I Spit on Your Grave is my fav, House of 1000 Corpses is excellent (anything by Zombie is, tbh - I even think his rebooted Halloween is better than the rest, lol). There are of course films that are bad weird. A Serbian Film is bad weird. Do not watch that. Skinamarink was also a snoozefest but I appreciate what it tried to do
And actually following on from this, I went to see the rebooted Strangers tonight. 3/10 is being generous - no tension, nothing. It’s basically the same as the original, but missed all the things that made the original good. I think they were afraid to do anything a bit more out there - even the actors seemed more preoccupied with making sure their faces didn’t look weird lmao. Took all the emotion and conflict away.
Ha, unfortunately this is a whole thing. It’s a long-standing trope because it works. Scream rips into this quite heavily, despite also having their own final girl(s).
Give The Evil Dead: Rise a go. It’s got a single mom and her three kids along with the mom’s sister fighting off evil… it’s insanely good. We had a good run of horrors last year
This one gives me mixed feelings, but it also makes me question that a mercy killing would’ve been easier.
Like in the Ritual movie, I would love to survive the whole ordeal, but damn I lost my friends and witnessed something that I would need to take with me to my own grave.
I don’t want to spoil the movie, if you aren’t familiar.
Yep, saw it :') I personally quite like the final girl trope myself. Opens up for sequels. I’m also totally down for every single person to die too, though
Especially if it involves creatures and monsters of unknown origin. I keep thinking to myself that this guy could never tell a soul about that incident he endured.
Seriously, it’s great he survived, but it sucked that he survived it alone.
There is one particularly spooky part of a military action-thriller story called Tenth Man Down by Chris Ryan.
An SAS team operating in Africa attempt to save the life of a child, who had been hit by one of their patrol vehicles at night. The village witch-doctor visits the SAS team and announces that their tribe’s god will spare the child’s life, but in exchange their god will claim the lives of ten white men. Hence the story’s title. That scene is well written, the SAS team (and the reader) are quite unnerved by the witch-doctor.
All adventures ignore local superstitions at their own peril ~ a traveling saying.
So many b-movie types do this and often the one that survives is the one that is the quiet one, or the shy one, or the studious one, or the one the movie made you root for from the beginning because they have it difficult at home or whatever.
The fact is, they can’t, because they don’t know what happened The best way is for someone to return after the first casualty on their team, not the fourth casualty or when it looks like there really is no hope of anyone surviving.
Why wouldn’t you go looking for help sooner? Idk. Ego?
That is what irks me though. Like how many people are they going to send to their deaths to uncover what is happening? Then when a person does come back alive, they are so broken mentally that words can even describe the hell they’ve endured, but another new team has to go and see what the hell went on and if there any survivors…probably not.
It’s that hope thing that can be annoying at times.
Nice We have similar horror-movie tastes and watch histories
I watched The Evil Dead, but not the sequel. I even forgot about it. Is it a direct sequel or not really?
Speaking of the final girl trope, I didn’t even know this term “the final girl” until I read “My Heart is a Chainsaw”. If you like horror movies or slasher movies you might like this book. It has an MC that loves horror movies so much, she brings it into her own life.
That sounds interesting. I haven’t read many military-based books. Is it heavy on the military jargon or is it written in a way that anyone can get into it easily?
Ghost stories as in, any kind of ghost story? Like the kinds people tell each other during a camp night or sleepover?
This gives me mixed feelings. For one I am happy that they endure the madness and got out alive, yet secondly they survived watching their friends die, endured something that no human being should go through, then escaped alone to wonder if that was a terrible dream or something far more twisted.
It gives me that feeling that they have to go home without their friends or family and restart their life. Like all the therapy in the world can’t help someone get through that.
Especially sucks when that survivor made it through something that would question their whole reality and wonder if demons or ghost or aliens truly does exist and they had to witness and go through hell to find out.
But isn’t it better to be away from the horror than in it? Also, I often get the feeling that final girls unlock something within themselves. Something snaps and suddenly nothing scares them. But I suppose it would take them days to get over it and not flinch at the slightest sound or point a weapon at someone who touches them. They’re in fight mode.
Yet, somehow, they are able to move on.
Maybe that’s why they survived. They’re so resilient and have the remarkable ability to move on from the horror and go on with life.
My brain is so weird like that. I try to over analyze everything when I shouldn’t. LOL!
True. I’d rather be free than to die alongside my friends. I just ponder way too much when I should accept that the survivor got away and they are alive.
It’s better than them being in an apocalyptic setting, because they’ll have to continue dealing with it no matter where they go. LOL!
The military terms are easy to understand. One common term in the book confused me for a while. The SAS characters kept referring to their rifles as 203s. There is no such calibre for modern rifles. Then I realised 203* refers to the 40mm grenade launcher mounted beneath the rifle’s barrel.
I love horror movies. I wouldn’t say I’m a horror enthusiast but I’ve seen quite a lot — mainstream, indie, arthouse, extreme.
My all-time favourite horror film is Cemetery Man (1994). It’s part gothic romance, zombie, camp-comedy, sexploitation, action flick and heady philosophy. It’s absolutely unhinged. I think about it way too much. It feels like it was made for me — the aesthetic, the sensuality, the subject matter, the dark humour, the gore all speaks to me.
My preferred subgenre is giallo; 1970s Italian slashers. It’s so hot and hot weird. I do love a good supernatural possession movie though — The Exorcist (1973), The Wailing.(2016) and Talk to Me (2022) are a few faves.
Which Evil Dead? There’s Evil Dead, 2:Dead by Dawn, Army of Darkness, Evil Dead 2013 and then Evil Dead: Rise, so quite a few of them. Rise isn’t a sequel and Evil Dead 2013 was a pretty average reboot that didn’t quite work out as well as Rise unfortunately
I think my fav on that list would either be Get Out or The Gift, both are solid 10/10s imo
The best way is for someone to return after the first casualty on their team, not the fourth casualty or when it looks like there really is no hope of anyone surviving.
We have similar horror-movie tastes and watch histories 
