Usual caveat applies. I haven’t seen all the interesting movies from this year as often movies do take time to find their way here, so I will make another list at some point.

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For context, Psycho was released only 3 years later, so it isn’t as if there weren’t more modern horror films at least in the horizon. At the same time, this feels like a typical example of a 50s horror movie in many ways. Giant animals were pretty common, because those movies were easy enough to make with the technology available. This just goes the other route: Instead of radiation growing ants or lizards or something, there just happens to be a man who shrinks.

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Here’s the inspiration on this list: There’s an American film critic called Chase Whale. I wasn’t familiar with him, so don’t take this as a recommendation of any kind and his website seems to have largely shut down in the last year and a half. Anyhow, he called Lola aka Princess from The Loved Ones one of the great horror movie villains of all time.

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Let me start with an admission: I don’t know anything about Bhutanese politics, so I can’t really tell you how accurate this is. My understanding of the history of Bhutan is on the Wikipedia level, so accurate, but surface-level. One thing to note here is that the country did not become a full democracy but instead moved from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy. What has happened after the events of the movie is that last year Bhutan was removed from the UN list of least developed countries.

And is this “refreshingly different”? The more I think about it the less I’m sure about this.

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I don’t usually go out and watch biographies of musicians, because they tend to be so formulaic. In this case, I didn’t know its a real rap group, so I guess that kind of saved this for me. The movie actually makes fun of formulaic movies straight from the start. It begins with archive footage from the Troubles, including burning cars and unruly mobs (although I don’t want to disbarrage the people fighting for their freedom), but the narrator just stops that and tells us that every Irish movie that references the Troubles in any way always starts like this, but their story doesn’t.

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After seeing a couple great movies directed by people better known as actors, I started to think about this. How often does it really happen? There’s plenty of actors who have tried their hand at directing, such as Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp and Bill Paxton, to mixed results, but one would think there are benefits to coming up through the acting pipeline.

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I previously mentioned this theme as something I might want to do a favorite list on, but having realized that I just haven’t seen enough of these, I decided that maybe I’ll try this instead. So, here is a very subjective ranking of all the Australian horror movies I’ve seen.

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There’s a piece of trivia on IMDb I find perplexing.

Said to be following wealthy people, a first for director Sean Baker.

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Note that the key here is “spooky” season. There’s a playful side to this. It’s not all blood and gore or psychological torment. It’s about having fun with the possibility of those. So, no Halloween here.

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Specifically movies made in the 80s, not movies about the 80s.

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