Honorable Mention

Harrowing and timeless 1983 realist family drama of postnuclear survival. Among my faves of this narrow genre (that being realist postapocaliptic films that are worth watching), along with the equally rough and moving "Threads" and the extremely-bleak-for-the-1950s "On The Beach". No sci-fi elements, no action, it's just a straight drama. Did I mention it's harrowing? It's harrowing.

The fact that this, "Threads", and "The Day After" came out around the same time, and all anyone ever talked about or remembers was the soap operatic, TV-ified "The Day After" (although all three were originally produced for TV), is a grim statement about our society's desire to appear to be confronting the potential horrors we've spawned while simultaneously, to the greatest extent possible, avoiding looking at all at the potential horrors we've spawned.

Note: due to a wordpress plugin glitch, this movie's title may be truncated. It's "The Girl With All The Gifts"

Kind of a new take on some tired old zombie tropes. This starts off reeeeeeally dull for a while but eventually picks up nicely. It's one of those British horror films that tries to actually be a good movie rather than just going for scares, and by and large it works. It's got pretty much the first new ideas of any sort in the genre since "28 Days Later", which it builds on thematically with its infected-humans-standing-in-for-living-dead trope.

If "Night Of The Living Dead" is the Beatles of zombie movies, and "28 Days Later" is the Rolling Stones, this is the Faces at their best. (And, by the way, continuing the metaphor, "Dawn Of The Dead" is Paul McCartney & Wings at their peak, and the obscure 1964 Vincent…

Holy cow. Highly original and typically British take on the zombie genre — but played as completely as a drama, not horror or action. Takes place after a cure has been found, as the first to be cured try to reintegrate into their families in a small English village. Very well done. Leave it to the BBC to find a way to bend the tropes of the zombie genre into a completely serious, adult, well-acted drama. If anything at all about that sentence sounds interesting to you, it's worth checking out.

Somewhere in the great purgatory of "also-rans" and "very near misses", "Mom And Dad" surely occupies a place of honor. A somewhat spectacular role-reversal play on how kids become strangers to their parents as they grow up, as an unexplained epidemic of madness (biological warfare is name-dropped as a possibility, but it never gets clearer than that) drives parents to begin trying to murder their kids. One observation that speaks well of this film is that the lack of a reason for the events it depicts almost immediately ceases to matter. The explanation isn't missed, a la "Night Of The Living Dead".

This, I must say, is my kind of movie: just things going *awry*, to the most perverse extreme, yet without stretching credulity so far past the point of believability that you can't empathize. Numerous passing notes provide depth, such as a briefly-seen news interview clip showing a parent…

Compilation of three short tales, revolving around a broadcast signal driving people insane. I like this one a lot, very well done. (Note: there's another 2014 horror movie called "The Signal" that isn't nearly as good.)

Seriously tense drama turns thriller as a new age dinner party gets weird, after old friends suddenly make contact several years after disappearing to join a cult.

This is one of those movies that seems like it was originally written as a play, which is something that I always tend to like, when it's done competently. Here, it works really well, although if I have any complaint it's that the story builds emotional unease so capably and steadily, that by the time it turns from emotional to physical brutality, it almost breaks the tension. It feels very emotionally authentic as the unease builds. Fucking creepy new agers. (I do have mixed feelings about transplanting the "no cellphone reception out here" trope to the city, although they do pretty much pull it off.)

It's seriously well cast, fairly original, well done all around. Good ending, too. And the closing song rips…

Leave it to Joss Whedon to take a horror movie, with the standard tropes, in a direction nobody ever has before. Ultimately it's a Joss Whedon movie first, ie a fantasy like everything he does, and a horror movie second. Fun and deserves its status as a classic. (Except for the Sigourney Weaver cameo, which totally breaks suspension of disbelief, because the movie is, like, 80% over, and suddenly you're like, "Hey, that's Sigourney Weaver.") The attention to detail in this movie is unparalleled, there's a lot here for pop culture geeks to scrutinize at extreme length, and if you type the movie's name into a search engine, you'll find they have.

Also, I believe, it has the most monsters in it of any movie: in one of many examples of aforementioned geekery, Screen Rant has listed 81 of them. Not to be outgeeked, the

Interesting sci-fi entry about a dinner party suddenly caught in a vortex of parallel universes. It's so embarrassing when you can't tell if your dinner guests are still the same people from your own dimension that you invited.

Low-key but thought-provoking enough to be a fun view. Nobody will ever call this a great movie, but the story is pretty different, and it's kind of a low-key personal favorite of mine, for sure.

Captivity werewolf flick, but sort of a cut above, a little. People trapped on a derailed train in the English countryside in a new take on the werewolf tale from the creator of The Descent.

As might be suggested by that last bit, good direction makes it overall slightly better than it might have been... Actually very decent for what it is, fairly well-done and original for a monster movie, I liked it.

Not an A, definitely a 'B' picture, but kind of a 'B+' one. Pretty grisly, but a movie like this kind of needs to be.

Wow. This ludicrous horror spoof, set in 1989, about a young black woman attempting to climb the ladder in the music video industry just as white kids are once again starting to spend money on R&B, starts off as a pretty hip social satire on selling out and the commodification of race, in which the cultural evil of needing to get a weave to have "good hair" is transformed into the supernatural evil of having to feed it fresh blood to keep it. Eventually it settles down into an action/horror satire, and actually remains pretty entertaining throughout, considering the silliness of the basic material and how straight-faced they play it. Along the way it touches on racial tensions inside of black society, and probably ultimately could have had a lot more to say. But what it said, it said well, and it was kind of nice to see a movie…

Unfortunate title aside, this little gem is "Frankenstein" retold as a modern hipster indie film, in the best possible way, without the least bit of irony, as a brilliant medic returns from the Iraq war with the medical secret to bringing the dead back to life, partnered with the amoral scion of a pharmaceutical fortune looking to market the dream drug, if he can just find a brain for his experiment...

If I had to forgot every single indie film I've ever seen except one, this might be the one to keep. A little campy, but for this story, it kinda has to be.

I don't know where they found the guy who played the monster, he was perfectly cast, in what should probably be remembered as one of the great monster movie performances, if only because he does a perfect job of what so few movie monsters…