Check out the first part here, the second here, and the third here!
2015: Green Room
Green Room sits on the razor’s edge between horror and thriller. You take a scenario where pig-headed actions make sense – of course a punk band would rile up neo Nazis before stumbling across them murdering someone – and turn it into an entire bar full of slasher villains trying to kill these witnesses. Green Room works because of its delight in subverting expectations. In this scene, we have the band leader, played by actual leading man Anton Yelchin, making a clumsy stand against the villains. Then he has he arm near cut the fuck off. It’s scary, it’s thrilling, and threatens that just about anything can and will happen between now and the credits.
2016: Under the Shadow
Under The Shadow is a fantastically eerie movie packed with effective scares – probably the movie that terrified me the most from this whole decade, if I’m being honest – but this nightmare sequence serves as a masterful centrepiece. The unsettling visuals, long static shots matched with sudden movement, the use of lighting and sound design – it comes together to create this teeth-grindingly tense scene that’s as much an artistic achievement as it is really, really fucking scary.
2017: Thelma
At the end of the day, sometimes, a scare can be something just so fucked up that it makes your jaw drop, and that’s exactly what this moment from Thelma is. The young Thelma spiriting her baby brother to be frozen under several inches of ice in a frigid lake is a cinematic moment that really Takes It There, going full throttle with the unthinkable horror of its imagery and execution – that shot of the blue baby beneath the ice is, still, utterly shocking, even more so in the context of a child having committed the act. Thelma is many things, but a film of halves, it is not.
2018: Possum
Possum is something else. I don’t know what and I don’t want to know. If there is another film out there that can get under the skin like Mathew Holness’ cinematic debut, I want it cast back into the fire from whence it came. Possum, while boasting brutally amazing performances from Sean Harris and Alun Armstrong, is carried by Holness’ eerie imagery and that damn puppet. I could pick any scene in which it features for this list, but this one, where Harris tries to get rid of it, will make you wish he succeeded and that Possum was just a solid short film.
2019: The Hole in the Ground
The debut of Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin, The Hole in the Ground is a creepy-as-all-hell take on the changeling myth. It’s bad enough when your child goes missing, but what if what came back only looked like him, while also exhibiting the same abusive behaviour you fled from before? The scene works both literally, the threat of the son is shockingly made apparent, but it also shows us a different aspect of hereditary trauma. Is the son just like his violent father? What can be done about it? Are either mother and son safe from the trauma they endured? It’s as incisive as it is terrifying, a testament to Cronin’s deft take on all things horror.
Be sure to check in tomorrow for the last part of this 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 NPR)
No But Listen 