31. The Best Horror Film Ever Made You Haven’t Seen

Pascal Laugier went through a depressive episode before he made this; it may be one of the most Catholic movies ever made. It’s a movie about pain that so upset audiences that many walked out. It’s not an easy watch; it’s also a movie I’ve resisted, but this challenge finally got me to watch it.

Seriously: Wow.

Lucie Jurin (Mylène Jampanoï) barely escapes an abusive situation; at the orphanage, she bonds with another survivor, Anna Assaoui (Morjana Alaoui). Lucie has continued to abuse herself, seeing her self-mutilation as a demon attacking her. Years later, she decides to get revenge and kill a family she believes was part of her past. After she kills everyone with a shotgun — the movie does not shy from the gore — she calls Anna, who helps her clean up. The demon woman has also attacked Lucie, who needs to be stitched up. Some of the family survive, but Lucie follows them with a hammer and mutilates them; she runs outside and slashes her own throat.

The next morning, Anna learns that Lucie was right. The basement of the house contains photos of the abuse delivered there, as well as another captive. Soon, a group arrives, led by Mademoiselle (Catherine Bégin), who murders the other girl and explains that she has been seeking to create martyrs who will offer insight into the next world as they transcend due to the pain they have endured. None of their victims has ever been able to give them this insight.

As Anna is skinned while still alive, she enters an ecstatic state akin to that said to be created by saints. Mademoiselle asks her for the secrets of the next life; whatever she hears causes her to kill herself. The film ends with Anna staring into space, between life and death.

Laugier said of this movie, “Martyrs is almost a work of prospective fiction that shows a dying world, almost like a pre-apocalypse. It’s a world where evil triumphed a long time ago, where consciences have died out under the reign of money and where people spend their time hurting one another. It’s a metaphor, of course, but the film describes things that are not that far from what we’re experiencing today.”

As for the remake, directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz and written by Mark L. Smith, the original creator said, “I had a bad contract, I didn’t even get paid for it! That’s really the only thing I regret in my career: That my name is now associated with such a junk film, and I didn’t even get a cent for it! I tried to watch it, but only got through 20 minutes. It was like watching my mother get raped! Then I stopped. Life is too short. In the American system, a movie like Martyrs is just not possible – they saw my movie and then turned it into something completely uninteresting.”

I really don’t want to see that.

As someone who sat through church and heard about all the ways the martyrs died, the pain they endured and being told that this was a goal of worshippers, this movie truly hit me. It’s terrifying not for its gore but because it feels like this could happen.

You can watch this on Tubi.

30. A Horror Film Where the Killer Murders with his Bare Hands

Tom (Iain De Caestecker) and Lucy (Alice Englert) haven’t been dating long, but on their way to a concert, they get caught in a loop, continually ending back at the same place, while Lucy is sure that she sees a man in a white mask. They pick up a man named Max (Allen Leech), who claims to be hunted by the same masked person, but turns out to be that maniac and can manipulate reality. They barely escape him, as he breaks Tom’s wrist.

Lucy and Tom try to hide in the woods after their car runs out of gas. However, Tom is taken by Max, and Lucy barely makes it back. When she flees, she stops to check the trunk. Tom is inside, dead, bound with a hose in his mouth so that he’s been breathing the car’s fumes. The next morning, Lucy sees Max on the road and drives directly toward him.

The leads were not told what would happen to their characters during filming, as it was shot in sequence. Their reactions are real.

This was directed and written by Jeremy Lovering (with Jon Croker co-writing), who was second unit director on Hot Fuzz and Last Night In Soho. This is a fine film, one mostly inside a car, with actors improving so much of their parts. It’s one that needs to be seen by a wider audience.

You can watch this on Tubi.

29. A Horror Film Without a North American, UK or Australian DVD or Blu-ray release, but that’s on the Internet Archive

Directed by Constantino Magnatta (The Dark Side) and written by Steve Surgik and Bob Farmer, who also wrote the song in the film, “There’s A Ghoul In School.”

A Canuxsploitation portmanteau, Freakshow starts with a massacre in a movie theater by a maniac with a gun — what is this, America and not Canada? — and Audrey Landers, playing a reporter named Shan Nichols, checks in before hiding out at a Freakshow Museum. There she’s told four stories: a poodle getting revenge for her owner, a pizza delivery turned music video that becomes a vampire orgy, a woman being alive for her own autopsy, and finally, zombies wanting the dirt from their graveyard returned from a golf course. Once Shan is added to the museum’s collection, we see that it’s all been a movie, and it starts over again.

This was mostly a cable release, and I’m unsure if it ever played theaters or made it on video in the U.S. It did play in Toronto, however. I’d like to tell you that it’s a great find, but really, it’s a precursor to the boring direct-to-streaming anthologies that litter our world today.

At least it has lots of late 80s Canadian metal like The Nylons, Clean Slate and The Wankers.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

28. A Post-2000s Hong Kong Horror Film

Chin Siu-ho, the star of Mr. Vampire, is suicidal after his wife divorces him and takes his son. Moving into a run-down apartment, he soon tries to hang himself, which brings twin ghosts his way, possessing him. He’s soon saved by Yau (Anthony Chan, who was also in Mr. Vampire), a vampire hunter who has begun using rice to fight them.

Meanwhile, Uncle Tung (Richard Ng) falls down the steps and dies. His wife, Meiyi (Paw Hee-ching), asks a magician named Gau (Chung Fat) to resurrect him. She must keep a mask on his face for several days to allow him to come back to the land of the living. However, when she removes the mask — and also seeks virgin blood to speed up the rebirth — her now monstrous husband murders a child while she listens.

But it gets worse: Gau is attacked, and as he dies, he tells everyone that Tung has risen as a jiangshi to haunt the building. Worse still? The warlock was responsible for Tung’s original death. That’s because Gau is terminally ill and had planned to bind the twin ghosts’ souls in Tung’s soulless body to gain power and extend his own life. Meiyi ruined everything by removing the warding mask.

The child the reanimated old man killed, Pak (Morris Ho), is also a ghost. As for that hopping monster, a mace and a moatov cocktail barely slow him down. You know what stops him? Rice. Well, he’s stopped long enough to be possessed by the twin ghosts.

Despite saving the day, this all ends up being an O. Henry story. Chin really did hang himself, and everyone he met on his last day appears in his story. Yang and Pak are neighbors. Meiyi is a widow, and Yau is a neighbor who fails to save him. At the morgue, Chin’s adult son identifies his body for the medical examiner, who is Dr. Gau.

Directed by Juno Mak, who wrote it with Philip Yung and Jill Leung, this features multiple Chinese ghosts and grim reapers, as well as tons of cultural magic, such as the unlucky number four. And while it’s a tribute to Mr. Vampire, it’s not as light as those films. Chin Siu-ho, Anthony Chan, Billy Lau (who plays a cook) and Richard Ng were all in installments of the series.

You can watch this on Tubi.

27. A Horror Film That’s a Metaphor for Puberty

Directed by John Fawcett and written by Karen Walton, from a story they jointly developed, Ginger Snaps is the most puberty-referencing horror that I can think of. Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle) are death-obsessed teenagers who promise to run away before they turn 16. One night, Ginger’s period attracts a werewolf, which is soon run over by drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche). As her wounds heal, she refuses to go to the hospital and starts to grow angry, beating up her bully, Trina (Danielle Hampton), and aggressively having sex with classmate Jason (Jesse Moss). Even when she gets a silver piercing, her wolf side keeps getting stronger.

When Ginger kills Trina accidentally, her sister helps her hide the body, but is shocked to learn that she’s killed a counselor and a janitor. However, the cure of monksblood has been created by Sam and is successful at turning Jason back into a human. However, is the bond between sisters stronger than the need to be human?

I’ve watched this several times and am always struck by how different it is than so many wolf movies, which are so often white men dealing with being infected. Fawcett would go on to create Orphan Black.

The strong performances by Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins are a major highlight of Ginger Snaps. Their chemistry is palpable, and their dedication to their roles is evident. It’s fascinating to learn that they auditioned on the same day, were born in the same hospital, attended the same schools, and were hired through the same talent agency. It’s almost as if they were destined to be in this film.

By the way, the PA voice that pages the Raimi brothers? That’s Lucy Lawless.

26. A Horror Film That Features Edwige Fenech

I may have run out of Edwige Fenech horror films, but this is the next best thing.

Directed and written by Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia, who together directed 20 films and wrote 70, this stars Edwige as Silvia, who has just married her longtime lover, Asso (Adriano Celentano). An expert card player, he has promised to give up gambling for her, but has one last game in him. He wins, but is killed by Sicario (Gianni Magni). 

However, because of how much he loves Silvia, he can come back to Earth and wants to find a man to take care of her so he can go to Heaven. He decides on an old banker named Luigi Morgan (Pippo Santonastaso), but a rival, Bretella (Renato Salvatori), the man who had Asso killed, is trying to take Silvia for himself. However, this caper leads the old man to realize how much he misses his dead wife, Enrichetta (Sylva Koscina). 

Alone again, Silvia finally meets a card player who looks just like Asso, who finally does make it to Heaven, where God defeats him in a card game.

This feels a lot like Heaven Can Wait, and it also seems like Ghost took some elements from it. 

I took the Lord’s name in vain several times during this movie, including a moment when we see the outline of Ms. Fenech through a stained-glass window. As this movie teaches us that God gambles, I feel that the Supreme Being is fine with me ogling one of His or Her’s finest creations. 

25. A Horror Film That Has a Good Review on The Schlock Pit Website

I love The Schlock Pit so much, and if a movie is good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

1974: Special ops soldier Donald Butler (John Marzilli) is inside an island castle where he finds a werewolf, which he soon kills with silver bullets, then takes some blood to create super soldiers along with Colonel Miller (Barry Bostwick). Nothing seems to work, so he injects himself with what’s left of the blood and soon goes crazy, murdering and sexually assaulting everyone in his path. Only three silver bullets to the heart from Miller stop him, and he’s frozen, stuck between life and death. 

Twenty years later, Anna De Carlo (Kim Delaney) and her team — Larry (Lance Slaughter), Roger (Tim Duquette) and Philip (Dean Scofield) — are working on ways to add metal allos to human skin. Miller offers them the bodies of his dead soldiers, and as you can guess, they operate on Butler. When they remove the bullets from his heart, he comes to life as an unstoppable metal werewolf.

How do you stop a metal wolf? With a silver bazooka.

Directed by Alessandro De Gaetano (UFO: Target Earth), who co-wrote it with Timothy E. Sabo (later director of the AVN Awards) and Roger Steinmann, this is the kind of movie I would get obsessed with when I rented it. It played a lot of cable and look out, Kane Hodder is the Metal Beast.

You can watch this on Tubi.

24. A Horror Film Directed by Charles Roxburgh

At the end of Heard She Got Married, Mitch Owens (Matt Farley) has returned home from Nashville, and all his old friends have become enemies; the girls he once loved have married his friends. And to watch this — it’s streaming and doesn’t say that it’s a sequel, so some could be lost — you have to know that Mitch has lost it and done something horrible.

Unlike everyone else in the world, when people tell Mitch something, he believes it if it lives up to his dream of playing music. Just those moments when he is on stage and it works make it all worthwhile, even if he’s now a big fish in a small pond. But for a little while, he was the only person in Tritown to get away.

With Tara gone — which you need to see the last movie, and I don’t want to spoil it, but maybe she isn’t gone — Mitch starts to rebuild his life, starting a new band, even if people want to call them The Barricades. The promoter wants them to be beefy. The band might not be able to handle the nonstop creativity that Mitch needs. And the promoter cuts their sound, just as Detective Mayo (Jay Mayo) is convinced that Mitch couldn’t have done the crimes he’s been accused of. Promoters never want to pay and always look for ways out. Mitch might even have a new love interest (Theresa Peterson), or he’s always looking for ways to get his music played.

Every Moturn movie that Roxburgh and Farley make gets stuck in my head because they feel real. I’ve actually spoken with Matt, and his unbridled need to make things is real. I always wonder how much is true and how much is the movie; I don’t want to know, I just want to see everything they make.

I take it personally when people leave negative reviews of these. Seriously, it’s like someone talking shit on one of my friends’ bands.

There are teasers for three different sequels: Heard He Got Multiplied, Evil DJ and Sinister Siesta. I’m ready for all of them. The Moturn Cinematic Universe is a real thing. This ties in several of the films and feels like it goes full mad science, just like Magic Spot. Again: here for all of it.

You can watch this on Fawesome.