New Post has been published on GreyZombie.com
New Post has been published on http://greyzombie.com/top-horror-movies-2013-1629.html
Every year, when the winter vacation comes, I make a list of movies to watch and I spend my time with family and friends in the days between Christmas and New Years Eve watching movies. As we do almost every year, on top of the list we have some horror movies. Let’s see what is worth watching this year.
I have to tell you that the list is not ordered by any priority .
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier
Director: Andres Muschietti
IMDB: 6.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 66%
A couple are faced with the challenge of raising their feral young nieces when they are discovered in a forest after being lost for five years. Soon it becomes apparent that the girls are being haunted by a ghostly woman, who they believe to be their dead mother. Guillermo del Toro is serving as exec producer and that’s usually a good thing. Star Jessica Chastain, looking unrecognizable, is high caliber for this type of material – her recent credits include ‘The Help’, ‘Tree of Life’, and ‘Lawless’, and she’s front-runner to win Best Actress for ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. Early word is ‘Mama’s not quite as effective as the director’s excellent short on which it’s based, but it’s still tense and creepy, based in large part on the children’s performances.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
2. Hansel And Gretel: Witch Hunters
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton, Famke Janssen, Peter Stormare
Director: Tommy Wirkola
IMDB: 6.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 15%
Tonally similar to ‘Evil Dead II’, this has siblings Hansel (Renner) and Gretel (Arterton), 15 years after the gingerbread house incident, working as bad-ass witch hunters. We’re told to expect a steam-punk vibe mixed with a slight Goth edge and hyper-cartoon violence/R-rate gore. The director of ‘Dead Snow’ makes his US debut. This is part of an odd recent Hollywood trend for taking children’s stories and turning them into horror/thriller/action movies. Hopefully the excellent Jeremy Renner can turn ‘Witch Hunters’ into something more than a mildly-entertaining diversion.
It’s not exactly a horror movie but it’s fun to watch if you don’t have big expectations.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
Starring: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
Director: Fede Alvarez
IMDB: 6.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 62%
A small group of twenty-somethings hole themselves up in a remote cabin to help a friend go cold turkey. Discovering a Book Of The Dead in the property they unwittingly summon up dormant demons living in the nearby woods, which possess them in succession until only one is left to fight for survival. The series had become closely associated with Sam Raimi’s distinctive camerawork, humor and the unique performance of Bruce Campbell. This has none of those things but works well as a slick, straight-forward horror. It is very grim though, so only approach if you have the stomach for it.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
Starring: Gareth Evans, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kelsy Abbott
Directors: Gareth Evans, Eduardo Sánchez, Adam Wingard, & 4 Others
IMDB: 6.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 72%
Searching for a missing student, two private investigators break into his house and find collection of VHS tapes. Viewing the horrific contents of each cassette, they realize there may be dark motives behind the student’s disappearance.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Lucy Aharish
Director: Marc Forster
IMDB: 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 67%
A U.N. employee (Pitt) crosses the globe in a frantic attempt to halt the spread of a deadly zombie pandemic. This adaptation is almost unrecognizable from the sardonic, intellectual novel about slow-moving zombies which read like a U.N. report and didn’t really have a lead character. But it works well on its own terms. It’s great to see the undead swarming on an unparalleled scale, thanks to the $125m budget, this is the first time we’ve seen a zombie outbreak truly realized globally on screen. It’s also an interesting return to the big star horror of the ’70s, Brad Pitt is highly watchable. On the downside, the re-shot and down-scaled third act belongs in a different movie, and it still only taps a fraction of the novel’s greatness.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
Starring: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
Director: James Wan
IMDB: 7.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%
In the early 1970s, two paranormal investigators (Wilson and Farmiga) are enlisted by a couple (Livingston and Taylor) when strange things start happening at their farmhouse. Soon they uncover the vicious entity of a malevolent witch. The movie is based on the “true story” of demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were among the first paranormal investigators in the Amityville haunting (although this takes place prior to that) and pioneered ‘ghost hunting’. The studio hopes to launch a ‘Warren Files’ franchise off this, akin to a horror version of the ‘X-Files’. James Wan (‘Insidious’, ‘Saw’), who’s one of the top horror directors working today, says he’s aiming for slightly more realism than with ‘Insidious’. He’s also reunited with its star here, Patrick Wilson. Expect ‘The Conjuring’ to be loaded with quality jump scares at the very least, even if it does sound disappointingly similar to his previous project.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
Starring: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Portia Doubleday, Judy Greer
Director: Kimberly Peirce
IMDB: 6.4/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 46%
Carrie White (Moretz) is a lonely and awkward teen who is constantly bullied at school by her peers, and beaten at home at the hands of her religious mother (Moore). But Carrie has a secret: She’s been blessed with the terrifying power of telekinesis; and when her peers decide to pull a prank on her at prom they learn a deadly lesson. This will be a more faithful adaption of Stephen King’s novel than Brian De Palma’s 1976 version, which deviated a fair bit. Having the director of ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and ‘Stop Loss’ will mean there’s some quality character work, but can she direct scares? The teaser trailer showcased a long sweeping shot of the burning town moving right down into Carrie’s face that was an example of cgi at its most distancing. Moretz is a good actress but will she have that unsettling, frightening ‘look’ that Sissy Spacek had when she went on the rampage, or just seem like an angry girl covered in blood? And does she look too normal to be outcast in the first place? I hope it works, there’s nothing quite like a good Stephen King movie.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
Starring: Will Rogers, Kristen Connolly, Kether Donohue
Director: Barry Levinson
IMDB: 5.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 77%
Barry Levinson isn’t a natural fit for the horror genre, but with “The Bay,” he dips his toes in the eco-thriller genre to curiously provocative effect. Although technically a found footage assemblage of incidents replete with shaky cam effects, “The Bay” contains a more advanced collage of media than one usually finds in this overdone style, coupled with a cogent basis in reality that often makes it closer to a documentary than an appropriation of the form. The story tracks a 24-hour period on July 4, 2009 when a parasitic infiltration of the water in Claridge, Maryland threatened to infect the entire town. While the rash of deaths and close encounters with the leech-like parasites borrow liberally from the traditions of zombie and alien invasion movies, the source of the chills never strays too far from the real world.
Horror Movies 2013: Click to view trailer[/caption]
