Board 8 > All Purpose Horror Topic 2018: Apparently the new Halloween is pretty good

(+) Yeah! (+)

19 days to Halloween!
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Horror movie catch-up from this week:

Scream 4 (big ending spoilers):

I'm a big fan of the first two Screams. Wes Craven was the original master of meta horror, and you can see that return here, only in pieces.

Things like the live Stab screening and the film-within-a-film scenes really show that this series has creativity left in it, but by the end, Wes Craven just gets in his own way and falls too deeply into the tropes the series tries to satirize.

It's never worse than in the ending, which was sadly predictable. Scream 4 was the chance to revitalize the series and send it in a new direction, but unfortunately, Craven put a little too much stock into the previous "final girls" Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers. The problem is, Gale and Sidney are no, say, Laurie Strode or Sarah Connors. They're not interesting-enough characters to center a franchise on. The audience feels no reason to root for or even against them.

Because of this, every single character introduced in the film is expendable, while anyone from earlier in the series is automatically invincible. As good as some aspects of the film are, by the end, there's ultimately no reason for it to exist.

The Host (2006):

I've got much less to say here, but really just a solid monster movie the whole way through. Bonus points for Doona Bae being amazing in everything she's in
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General Horror Films guide:
http://www.listal.com/list/horror-films-guide

General Horror Games Guide:
http://www.listal.com/list/survival-horror-video-game-guide

and

#bump#
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Also The Host is absolutely top notch
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Snowpiercer is the last left to complete the Bong Joon-ho thriller trifecta

Okja and The Host were both excellent
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I was genuinely impressed by the ending of Scream 4 until it kept going past the point where the bad guy won. Just end there with her strolling off having beaten everyone and that's a great sendoff
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Yeah Scream 4 would've been considerably better if the killer finally succeeding in killing Sidney and got away with it

for a series that centers around playing with horror movie tropes it's frustrating that it refuses to end with anything except "Sidney and Gale get lucky and beat the killer and nothing changes"
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Haunting of Hill House is so good so far. Episode 2 in particular is one of the most nuanced tellings of death I think I've ever seen in fiction.
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