Catch up on Part One here!
2005: The Descent
I think that people who explore caves for fun are lunatics, and this point of view was confirmed forever by The Descent. Neil Marshall’s creature feature masterpiece is full of horrific moments of gore, tension, and surprising scares, but none more memorable than the groups first proper sighting of the crawlers. This is a scene that every found footage filmmaker has been ripping off in the 19 years since. I couldn’t watch The Descent until my 20s, and after this scene I had to turn it off and go outside into the sunshine just to calm myself down.
2006: The Host
Bong Joon-Ho, who is mostly known for his scathingly funny Best Picture winner, Parasite, first came to the attention of English-speaking audiences with The Host, a creature feature about a loser try to save his daughter from a monstrous mutant from the Han River and also the real life American political screw-up that caused it. The monster looked incredible in 2006 (believe me, I was there) yet even now, stalking a little girl it has kidnapped in the sewer, it’s an example of how great sound design and tension can cover up for any aged CGI.
2007: [REC]
I have never watched Rec alone. Not just because I’m too scared to, but also because the stairwell scene of a fireman plummeting from the top floor to the lobby is always guaranteed to get a very entertaining yell of shock out of everyone with you. Rec only gets worse from there but the stairwell scene makes this list because it is both a brilliant scare in its own right, it is also a harbinger of what is to come.
2008: Lake Mungo
Lake Mungo has been having a bit of a moment in pop culture recently, and honestly, I couldn’t be happier to see this sensational piece of mockumentary horror brought into the horror mainstream. Of all the sinister scares in Lake Mungo, it’s this one – the moment that we’re confronted with the drowned version of Alice Palmer at the movie’s climax – that genuinely turned my stomach. There’s such a profound dissonance in being confronted with this dead girl as the live one, as-yet unaware of her fate, lives out her last days that makes this moment so shocking, so stark, and so memorable.
2009: The Loved Ones
There’s almost nothing from The Loved Ones that we can actually find on social media to show you, and rightly so – this Australian slasher has a well-earned reputation as one of the nastiest ever made. But it’s most horrific moment, for me, comes in the form of a single sound effect: a kettle boiling. With all the brutality on display in The Loved Ones, it’s the slow build of that whistle that chills me the most – the threat of a lobotomy looming large over our hapless leading man, the barely-sentient versions of him who’ve come before stirring in the basement below. It’s a sensationally restrained moment in such an extreme movie, and one that’s all the more horrific for it.
Be sure to check in over the next few days for the rest of the series in the run-up to Halloween! If you enjoyed this and want to see more stuff like it, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi.
By Kevin Boyle and Lou MacGregor
(header image via YouTube)
No But Listen 