Number 5's Surreal Creepy Film Collection

[zwanzig]

Have you ever read 366 Weird movies? It’s a blog that collects films in that very vein. I used to read it religiously, at least until they reached the 366 mark and they took longer to certify movies as sufficiently weird for the Apocrypha round. I even helped pester them into putting The Butcher Boy on The List, because there’s no way a movie where the main character goes to Juvey for crapping someone’s floor, survives a nuclear apocalypse, becomes best buds with the Virgin Mary (played by Sinead O’Connor], and brutally murders a friend’s mother Manson-style doesn’t belong on a list of the weirdest movies ever made (even if it is broad enough that comparatively sane films like Night of the Hunter and movies as terrifying as Eraserhead both made the list.) I’ve seen a sizable portion of them. And, furthermore, the Deep Hurting Project, as seen on the Last Movie You’Ve Watched thread, was inspired by the fact that my favorite movie of all time and the worst movie I had ever seen at that point (if it even counted as one, anyway), were both on the list. That said, I have since seen worse than Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and even in movies I’m less hesitant to call movies.

I have seen that list before! Yes. It has a lot on that list in the "hard to watch" category and yet others like Fight Club and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World that I wouldn't put on my own list. So, it doesn't quite line up with the same tastes.

For instance, another couple that are weird in the way I mean are The Signal (2007) and The Ritual (2017) (both directed by David Bruckner, by the by). The Signal is about a city that gets affected by this television and radio broadcast that distorts people's perceptions and unleashes their paranoid, delusional, murderous impulses. It is fantastical, almost sci-fi but also grounded. And the scenes where the main characters struggle to survive amidst those who have been affected by the signal, while also doubting their own minds because they too have been exposed, is an exciting trip for the anxiety it inspires.

And The Ritual was a wonderful take on the "lost in the woods and prayed upon by sinister forces" story. The unsettling circumstances that the men keep finding themselves in each time they wake are just that side of disturbing where you wonder why and what is wanted. What is happening to them? you know? And this is probably the one film that I use to refute my own bias "horror films are only good when they don't show you the monster/creature directly". Because they do and it does nothing to diminish the impact of that imagery.