This is it. We've looked at 33 movies and this in number 34, marking my 34th birthday today. Have a look back at the list. You might be surprised at a few entries and want to argue for other movies. By all means, do so. Let's talk about it. I've had fun doing the My Years in Horror series and maybe next year we'll look at books, or comics, or something else. Who knows? For now, enjoy the last entry.

And really, is this much of a surprise?

An R-rated horror movie with very little bad language, no sex, barely any blood, but as intense as hell? Yeah, that's The Conjuring. Here's what I said when I saw the movie this summer:

"The Conjuring hits every haunted house/possession story trope known to cinema since before 1963's The Haunting. Scary dolls, suicidal witches, possessed mothers, somewhat creepy little kids, things that go bump in the night, music boxes, hidden cellars, skeptical law enforcement, reluctant religious officials, rural New England, and the troubled pasts of our hero paranormal investigators all come into play during the almost two hours of the film. On the surface this seems like a huge mess and a case of seen-it-all-before-itis. It's a legit complaint, but let's think about why all of that stuff is in this one movie."


All that is still true. I keep hearing it, too. The Conjuring is just a bunch of cliches. The thing is, you can be cliche, you just have to validate it. This film does that and more. You have too look at why we have cliches and why they stick around.

I just ask that you be open minded. Do that and you'll have a good time.

And that's it. Goodnight, everybody.

I'm torn between a movie I had waited for and knew would be great versus one that caught me off guard and actually gave me a few scares. Let's go with the one that scared me more.

Look, I love Cabin in the Woods but I can't say I was ever scared during the film. Sinister, on the other hand, continued to freak me out for about a week. I had zero expectations for the movie. I just needed a fix of horror. And oh boy, did I ever get my fix.

Yes, some of the plot is ridiculous. I thought we were beyond that here. The twists at the end can feel forced at the same time they are a surprise. You'll feel it coming, change your mind, and then regret it.

What you won't regret is giving up some time to Ethan Hawke's Ellison Oswalt (great name) and his family. Hawke plays the former golden boy crime writer looking for one more bestseller. So he moves his family (wife, son, daughter) into a home at which a brutal multiple murder occurred. AND DOESN'T TELL THEM.

Early in the film, Tracy (Juliet Rylance) asks her husband if he has moved them, next door to another crime scene (because he did that once before). He answers honestly, saying, "No, not right next door."


As much as my wife loves me, I wouldn't blame her for ditching me if I did that. You think Ellison is just a douche, but he really wants to be a good family man but he thinks the only way he can do it is to hit the bestseller list again. So, yeah, he's a douche, but he's also very human and asks for sympathy even when he may not deserve it.

Sinister is not only the best of 2012, but one of my favorite movies of this decade.

We started Warning Signs in 2011, which means you can probably look back and guess what the best from the last three years has been. I'll even make it easy on you. Here's my initial review of the best of 2011.

Two years later, Insidious remains the best of 2011.

 The question, then, is what is left to say? I will tell you that I have seen The Second Chapter and it certainly finishes what was started in the first half. I'm looking forward to watching them back to back once the sequel is available via home media. I'll have to watch them alone, in the dark, with a big bowl of popcorn.

It's Halloween night which means by the time you read these last four entries looking at the best horror movies from every year I've been alive, it will be November. Sorry about that.

By 2010, the found footage craze was well under way and the best of that year was one of these.

One of the reasons I love The Last Exorcism so much is because I wasn't sure it would be any good. The film stars ... no one. I mean, no one I'd ever heard of. Eli Roth was a producer and that's the only name attached to it. In some genres, this would be a problem. But think of all the great horror movies that had zero star power. Horror creates stars.

As far as the found footage goes, it's a bit more of a set up. We didn't just "find" this footage. Within the framework of the film, it was meant to be a documentary (placing it firmly in the Blair Witch camp). We follow a shyster preacher who gets involved in something real for the first time. Patrick Fabian, who plays Reverend Cotton Marcus (read your early U.S. history for the brilliance of that name), convinces us that he is the real deal: a 100 percent fake. The conceit of the film is truly brilliant if not entirely original. Yet the cast, even in the most stereotypical redneckedness, come of as genuine. Having unknown actors only reaffirms that aspect of the film. Because we don't these people from anything else, we more readily believe in their characters.


Sure things get a bit illogical and unruly toward the end and the final shot is just about as Blair Witch as it gets, but this movie stuck with me. It's a tough one to let go of and when it comes to horror, that counts.

2009, for my money, included some above standard remakes. Last House on the Left, Friday the 13th, and My Bloody Valentine 3D were all better than they should have been. (This, of course, gives us an out from saying any of them were great; I simply said they were all better than they had any right being.) We were also blessed with one of the best zombie horror-comedies not called Shaun of the Dead in Zombieland. By now, you should know how this goes: we name a bunch of good horror movies from the year in question before getting to the one we think was the best. So, Zombieland, even with its Bill Murray appearance, is not the best of 2009.

Because I am in charge, I name Drag Me to Hell as 2009's best horror movie.

Normally, I would tell you a bit about the movie and why I think it's the best of the year. Given that Drag Me to Hell was Sam Raimi's return to horror, you should have a good clue where that would go. Instead, I want to tell you a story about the second time I saw Drag Me to Hell.

Yes, the second time. I went by myself the first time and was impressed enough to convince my mom (who earlier this year went to the Evil Dead remake with me) to go with me and see it again. We went to the Spanish 8 in Spanish Fork, Utah, to see this PG-13 frightfest. I knew what was going to happen and I wanted to see it again. What I didn't expect was the two teenage girls sitting near the front of the theater getting the scare of their brief lives.


They didn't even last 30 minutes. After the first attack from Mrs. Ganush on poor, unsuspecting Christine, they were gone. And not just gone, but weeping in terror, wondering why they ever paid money to see such a thing.

Don't mistake this story for me poking fun at those girls. They didn't think what was going on was funny at all. I would never laugh at them for this, but I'd be a liar if I said my own experience was not enhanced by their tears. (Man, I am such a bastard. I get the same reaction out of people who scream and cry during Paranormal Activity movies and so far, I'm 4 for 4 in that area: someone always loses it.)

Even though there was about an hour left of the movie that those girls missed, they were still in the lobby waiting for their scheduled ride home. They were not yet 100 percent composed and I'd be willing to bet they didn't sleep well that night. I'm not advocating for prolonged effects from a movie (Keep telling yourself, "It's only a movie."), I'd hate to think those girls ended up despising the elderly or never going into a bank, but I do hope they learned a valuable lesson: horror movies should be dangerous. If you don't have at least one bad night's sleep after a really good horror movie, it must not have been as good as you thought.

There were some good horror movies released in 2008, including The Ruins, which I still use to creep out my mom. But you won't be able to convince me that there was a better horror movie from 2008 than Let the Right One In.

This Swedish vampire flick (remade well by Matthew Vaughn in America as Let Me In) raised the bar for the genre. Not only is it effective as a modern vampire tale, but it also highlights the reality of certain living outsiders: the bullied. Let the Right One In is arguably horror's best statement on bullying since the original Carrie. Much has changed since 1976 when that film came out, but any things haven't. There are still bullies and there are still victims. In this vampire film, it is a young boy, Oskar, who is a classic victim of bullies: he looks different from every one else, he's from a broken home, he has no friends. And then he gets a new neighbor.

Eli, supposedly an 11-year-old girl, moves in to the apartment next to Oskar's with her "father." Things next door are not what they seem: Eli is a vampire, but since she has the body of a child, she has a hard time hunting for herself. Her "father" kills and collects blood for her ... until he gets caught.


As the relationship between Oskar and Eli develops, they each let the other in on their secrets. Eli is a killer by nature and Oskar wants to kill he bullies. The resolution of this situation is brutal but not any worse than watching CNN on one of those dreaded days when another school shooting is announced. Oskar must comes to terms with what happens and both must live on. Neither asked to be put in the situations they are in, and they fight against it by trying to enlist outside forces before ultimately accepting that they are the agents of change in their lives.

The Swedish setting of the film lends a unique oddness to the experience. There is always snow on the ground and if a scene is indoors, there is always something white, which plays to Oskar's pale hair and skin. Eli has pale skin, too, but is the dark to Oskar's light. She has dark, almost black eyes, and deep brunette hair. Her appearance make sit obvious that she does not belong.

Let the Right One In includes some difficult backstory and revelations which the American filmmakers chose to leave out of their remake. I think they made the right decision for the tone of their movie but if those same moments had been left out of the original Swedish film, I think it would have lost some of its impact.

Holy crap. There are eight (8) legitimate contenders for the best of 2007. We had the double-feature Grindhouse, Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, Sweeney Todd (I love horror musicals), one of the top punch in the gut ending ever in The Mist, a great anthology film Trick 'r Treat, REC from Spain, the highly underrated spookfest 1408, and the potentially superior sequel 28 Weeks Later. (The original cut of Paranormal Activity hit the festival circuit in 2007, but didn't reach a wide audience until two years later.) Pick any one of these and you could have my vote. For now, I do have to pick one and I'm taking 1408.

 How good is John Cusack in this film? He's beyond good. He channels every manic weirdo he's ever played and uses their stress to bring a character whose fate we actually care about, who isn't entirely a jerk, and who is indeed a mutuality-faceted person.

1408 is based on a short-story by Stephen King. In the story, Mike Enslin is failed poet who turned to writing stories of "true hauntings" in order to survive. That's really about it. King gives us enough to worry about Enslin the person but not necessarily Enslin the cosmic being. Director Mikael Hafstrom and his writers did what many of the best King adaptations do: they kept everything that was important, tossed what wasn't, and added their own twist. The twist happens to be the overriding presence (in memory and maybe even reality) of Enslin's young daughter who died of cancer.


This was hard enough for me to watch when the movie came out. I'm a dad now and a wanna-be novelist who has had to write things I didn't care about for money. I can just imagine trying to watch this now, with my son playing on the floor or sleeping in his room and absolutely losing my shit. (I'm also trying really hard not to think about the ending of The Mist right now, too.)

This is a well-made film that may not push you over the edge with fright, but certainly will make you question the nature of hauntings and how they effect different people.

The sad part is that I'm at work right now and will have to wait until I get home to hug my son.

2006 was a pretty great year in horror. We had movies that people went to just because of the title (Snakes on a Plane), a great meta-horror picture (Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon), my favorite of the Saw franchise (Saw III), evil farm animals (Black Sheep), a new rural menace (Hatchet), a horrible office retreat (Severance), and the usual plethora of junk.

But one movie stands above the rest and not just because I hate slugs.

 

Seriously, I hate slugs. I hate earth slugs and I hate space slugs. And you can't kill them. It just make sthem grosser. Gack! I just got a shiver thinking about it. 

So, Slither. James Gunn, the man who wrote the Scooby Doo movie and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead got to make his own movie. And now he's making Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel. How cool is that? Slither is his calling card. It can be genuinely scary, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious ("Gina, it's a country. It's where Ginese people come from."), and nearly pitch-perfect. If you didn't know any better, you might think this was a Joss Whedon film and not just because of star Nathan Fillion (Castle). The mix of action and dialogue is right out of the Whedon "how to be entertaining" handbook. 

Fillion, who I still think should be a bigger star, commands the movie as Sheriff Bill Pardy. He's an imperfect man who stills burns a candle for Starla (Elizabeth Banks) despite her marriage to local bigwig Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). Grant is the first to get attacked and taken over by the space slugs. Bill and Starla join with other townsfolk to combat the space menace as the slugs take over the minds and bodies of everyone they come in contact with. 

Things get gross, but Gunn's grossouts (including an exploding, slug-infested body and a killer deer) tend to serve the story. He is justified in being disgusting. 

Like its spiritual father Night of the Creeps, Slither ends with triumphant heroes and the possibility that things are not as safe as we want them to be. When you watch this, make sure you listen to the entire end credits song. If you didn't get a chuckle before then, you will.

If you wanted to argue that Neil Marshall's women spelunkers in danger film The Descent is the best of 2005, I'd listen. It's a great film with strong female characters, awesome creatures, and a genuinely creepy atmosphere. For me, however, there is one 2005 horror movie that is better.

 

To understand The Devil's Rejects, you need to first watch Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses. Both films are heavily influenced by 1970s horror and exploitation. Each has elements of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in them. The problem, however, is that the first film was horribly mishandled and decimated by its original studio before being picked up and released by Lionsgate. Zombie's follow-up was given its due and the results show.

My contention has always been that House is the nightmare the Firefly clan have and Rejects is what happens when they wake up. Rejects is a much more realistic film and the gritty '70s look of the film helps reinforce that idea. The characters -- mainly Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding -- are better developed, too. They really were cartoon characters to begin with but Zombie grounds his actors in the real world and turns them into real people. They just happen to be really bad people.

This is something horror movies do better than any other genre: we identify and even cheer for horrible people. Even knowing that Otis and his clan have murdered countless people -- including a few quite gruesomely in this film -- doesn't lessen our sympathy when they are nailed to chairs in a burning house. And when it comes to the final showdown, it is not law enforcement that gets the hero treatment, it's the known mass murderers who go nobly to certain death. 

If you think about it for too long, it will mess up your head. Which is probably the idea.

What a great year! The zombie comeback is in full force with Shaun of the Dead and the Dawn of the Dead remake. On the remake front, we also had Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge. It may surprise some of you that I'm not giving this honor to any of those movies, especially Shaun of the Dead. The thing is, for pure horror, the best of the year was Saw.

 I realize that Saw started the whole "torture porn" thing and that's not cool at all. Most of those movies just aren't very good. But we are talking about horror movies; most of these movies just aren't very good. What Saw did, however, was the same thing Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Blair Witch Project all did. It showed us that vision can overcome budget, marketing is important, and if you make a good movie people will want to see it.


The biggest difference for me is that the first Saw, and I'd say every other sequel, had a message: value your life. There are people dying every day and yet so many people just throw away their own lives. Maybe setting people up to die wasn't the best way to teach this lesson but for the original Jigsaw killer, there was always a way out. You didn't have to die. Sometimes you died because you were selfish, or stupid, or sometimes just because of a bad mistake or even something that wasn't your fault (I always remember how James Wan and Leigh Whannell managed to bring the first shot of the film back around to haunt the two imprisoned characters at the end of the film). The point is that in Jigsaw's traps, death was only certain if you didn't follow the instructions.

For six more years, we were given the great tagline: If it's Halloween, it must be SAW. None of the Saw sequels will top out their respective years and eventually Saw lost its Hallowed place to another franchise, but that's the way things go.

No, I can't say that Freddy vs. Jason was the best horror movie of 2003, even though it is a lot of fun to watch and made a ton of money. Part of me even wants to give this to Underworld except that I think that is more of an action movie with horror characters. I have to give this spot to the French film Haute Tension (High Tension) even though the ending does not make one lick of sense.

Let's skip to that ending, shall we? If you haven't seen Alexandre Aja's flick yet, you'd better just stop now, watch it, come back later. Because I'm going to spoil the whole thing.

Just like the ending spoiled an otherwise great film.

The central plot is that Marie and Alex are friends. Marie drives with Alex to Alex's family home in the French countryside. Intercut with moments of the two young women enjoying their relaxing trip are scenes of a faceless pervert killer doing his thing. The killer, his face constantly in the shadows, kidnaps Alex and Marie and does unspeakable things, especially to Alex and with Marie watching. Eventually Marie turns the tables and it appears that we'll have a traditional final girl vs serial killer showdown. But no. Aja throws the ultimate twist: it is in fact Marie who killed Alex's family and tortured her.


Now this would be OK except for all the times earlier in the film when we were shown Alex and Marie doing things together when the killer was out doing other things. Is this an American Psycho style twist in which the nutjob never did anything, just imagined himself doing things? You could argue for that, but I don't buy it. And that's too bad because otherwise, Haute Tension would be one of the best of these type of movies ever made. I dig Aja and his work since this film, but that ending messed the whole thing up.

This is one of the most difficult years I've had had to deal with. To give you a sense of it, Cabin Fever, May, and Bubba Ho-Tep all fell short when it came to choosing the year's best horror movie.

If I was only choosing the year's best horror scene, I'd have to throw in the opener from Ghost Ship. If only the rest of the movie had lived up to its introduction. Then there is the British war ghost story Deathwatch to think about. My brain hurts.

The two films left to consider have been influential in so many ways it's almost impossible to separate them. But I have to. What would you do? Would you go with 28 Days Later, the movie that truly kicked off the modern zombie craze or The Ring, which started American cinema's J-horror fad?

I've made my decision and I'm sticking to it. So what makes Gore Verbinski's stateside version of The Ring such a great horror movie? Well, in comparison to 28 Days Later, it is the lack of hope The Ring leaves you with. The cycle will continue and ultimately no one is safe. Sure, lots of people died because of the rage virus, and quicker than the spread of a videotape. But you get the sense (even without seeing the sequel) that things will get better for the world post-Z outbreak. But in The Ring, the viewer is left with the sense that things will only get worse. Our heroine blew it and more people will die.

And even before the "resolution," we're told the only way to not die is to set someone else up to die by showing them the tape. In other words, if you didn't want to die, you had to become an accessory to someone else's murder. That's no world to live in.


At the time, The Ring caught me off guard. I had no expectations. It's PG-13, so I thought that I wouldn't get anything for my time. But people screamed and at the end of showing, about half a dozen cell phones went off. How's that for scary?

Not often will I purchase a movie without having seen it first. The word of mouth regarding Brad Anderson's Session 9, however, propelled me to buy the DVD sight unseen. And now that film is 2001's best horror movie.

Session 9 follows a clean up crew working to clear asbestos out of Danvers State Hospital. Crew leader Gordon (Peter Mullan) needed the gig and so gave a low bid with a short completion window. This unfortunately put extra stress on the crew which includes Phil (David Caruso) and Hank (Josh Lucas). Hank and Phil are at odds because Hank ran off with Phil's girlfriend. Gordon has his own personal and family problems, which drove him to put in the ridiculously low bid on the project.

While cleaning, Mike (Stephen Gevedon) finds a box of old therapy sessions which begin to drive him bonkers. The rest of the crew gets in on the act and weird shit happens. Hank disappears, the stress builds and we end up with a pure psychological horror film. By that I mean everything is in the characters' heads. Whether the former mental institution is haunted or not, you can decide. But we never see a ghost. No spectral apparitions, just scary noises.


You might be one of those people who need to see a ghost or a monster to be scared. Session 9 is not for you. Session 9 is for people who can imagine the worst with only suggestions from the filmmakers. It's harder to pull off than you might think. That's why successful films like this are such a rarity. Session 9 will stay with you long after you watch it and make you question your own sanity or at least question what you believe to be reality.