This isn’t exactly new, but the music video for “All Nightmare Long” off of Metallica’s new album is a very cool piece of short horror filmmaking. Shame about the “chemtrails” conspiracy bullshit at the end, but up until then, it’s very cool.

Let the Right One In is a very strange little movie. On one hand, it’s a not too unusual vampire narrative (newcomer arrives in a small town, is only seen at night, people start dying, strange habits, suspicion, innocent is bitten and turns into vampire, friend of the bitten sets out to kill the vampire, confrontation), but that’s not what this movie is really about.

Oskar is 12 years old, his parents are divorced, and he’s bullied at school. He lives in the sort of snow-clogged Scandinavian suburb of brutalist brick buildings and nowhere to go that I remember from growing up in Norway a few years later, and dreams of violent revenge on his tormentors. It’s while he’s stabbing a courtyard tree with a knife, pretending it’s one of the bullies, that Eli shows up, a girl who looks to be about his age. She’s just moved in to the apartment next to his with a man who might be her father, and there’s something strange about her. For instance, she perches in high places and jumps down effortlessly, she can’t feel cold (she says she must have forgotten how to), and she tells him without prompting that she can’t be his friend.

Of course, they become friends, and then boyfriend and girlfriend, as it becomes more and more obvious that Eli isn’t a little girl at all, although, as she says, she is 12 years old, she’s just been 12 years old for a long time. Håkan, the man Eli lives with, is her companion of sorts, and tries to procure blood for her to drink, but he’s a bungling killer, and Eli needs to take things into her own hands.

It’s a very original story, or at least a very original mixing of several familiar and very different stories, and it works surprisingly well, the low-key coming of age love story punctuated by a few bursts of sometimes extreme and shocking violence, and the supernatural elements handled matter-of-factly.

Visually, it’s also well made, although the cinematography is not spectacular, there are plenty of visual details to take note of. The whole thing is largely shot with extremely shallow depth of field, at times it’s extreme enough that Eli’s huge eyes are in focus while everything below the middle of her nose is a blur. Shallow depth of field seems to be a trend in horror movies, possibly coming out of Japan, where bokeh has long been a place to hide the horrors, complimenting the more traditional darkness of American and European horror. Eli’s particularly often treated to being partially out of focus, as well as behind panes of uneven or frosted glass, underlining the insecurity about her slippery true identity.

There’s a lot to be analyzed in this movie, and it deserves it, but more than anything it’s a very well-made and engaging film. Personally, I can identify very strongly with Oskar, and I think most everyone who grew up in the 80s, especially in Scandinavia, at least knew someone like him. In general, the characters are strong and recognizable, from the benign dead-end neighbourhood drunks to the well-meaning teachers and detached parents. I’ve been there, or somewhere very much like it, and I only wish I had found a vampire girlfriend willing to kill for me.

I had fairly high hopes for Mirrors, a semi-remake of a Korean horror movie I haven’t seen, but which seems to not be that amazing. The concept of evil manifesting in mirrors is old and wide-spread in folklore, and it seems it would be fairly easy to do something low-key, creepy, and very effective with it.

I still think that’s the case, but this movie isn’t that. It starts out pretty ok, with a kaleidoscope mirror version of New York buildings, which turns them into chasms and claustrophobic boxes, with no apparent escape route. Kiefer Sutherland is an alcoholic ex-cop looking for work as a security guard, and he starts working the night shift at a burned-out old department store, where the mirrors are inexplicably clean and shiny, despite everything else beeting full of soot and suitably grungy.

There’s evil in the mirrors, of course, and although a few of the early ideas are good (there’s a handprint on the mirror, but it turns out to be on the inside, and be one of many, some of which are far up away from the floor), it soon turns to some standard-issue tortured ghosts stuff. There’s a wasted opportunity when Kiefer Sutherland looks at his face in the mirror and it goes weird and distorted, which could have been creepy (like the bathroom mirror sequence that’s only talked about, but still manages to be very scary, in The Mothman Prophecies), but just looks like a bad digital warp effect.

And then it goes downhill, because since Kiefer’s an ex-cop, he needs to investigate. And when people in mediocre horror movies start investigating, the movie is obligated to come up with explanations, and they are invariably too specific, too facile, and too obvious, and everything’s ruined. This time, it has to do with a nun who might have been schizophrenic, but maybe not, and some sort of psychiatric treatment (the place used to be a hospital, dontcha know), and then Kiefer needs to hold an elderly nun at gunpoint and then everything explodes.

And then, at the end, the movie blatantly rips off the ending of Silent Hill, which was a deeply flawed film, but still superior to this one in almost every way.

I still think there’s a good mirror horror movie to be made. But sadly, Mirrors has probably made that impossible for a few years. A wasted opportunity, especially for Aja, who had shown great promise with the The Hills Have Eyes remake a couple of years ago.

The line “Produced by Michael Bay” isn’t a good sign, but David S. Goyer has done some good stuff, and this trailer is at least chock-full of really disturbing, creepy stuff. It might be that that’s all the movie will have, but at least that’s something. Erratic and weird movements as a horror element is officially very mainstream, at least. Go to The Unborn trailer at the Apple site to check it out.

I had heard good things about [•REC], the somewhat obnoxiously titled second horror feature from Catalonian director Jaume Balagueró. His first film was Darkness, from 2002, which I’ve mentioned on this site before as being generally boring and mediocre. The last 10 or 15 minutes were actually very good, however, (but couldn’t quite redeem the rest of the movie).

While Darkness was supernatural horror with devil worshippers, dark rituals, and opening the gates of hell, [•REC] (I get the feeling I’m going to get very tired of typing that before the end of this review) is a modern zombie movie in the style of 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, with a touch of Blair Witch Project style “this is real footage from people who happened to be filming the event” pretenses.

In short, Barcelona local TV reporter Ángela (slightly annoyingly perky) and her camera man Pablo make a show called “While You Sleep“, basically feature reporting about what goes on in the city at night. This particular night they’re visiting a fire station, and goof around getting bored waiting for some sort of alarm so they can accompany the firemen and film some action.

Of course, that’s what they get, when they get called to an old apartment building whose inhabitants have been hearing screaming from the apartment of an elderly woman. When they break in to the apartment, accompanied by the police, the woman is bloody and behaves erratically, and then suddenly bites one of the police officers. A short time after, when attempting to get out of the building with the wounded guy, they discover that the local health authorities have sealed it off, posting armed guards outside and wrapping it in plastic.

You can probably see where this is going, and you’re right, there are handbaskets involved. It’s not horribly original, but it’s fairly realistic (especially the stuff at the beginning looks very much like what I’ve seen of unedited documentary footage), and while the start is maybe a little slow, it quickly picks up. The last 10-15 minutes in particular are extremely intense, to the point of giving me a good, solid adrenaline rush in the theatre. Also, the direction the plot takes at the end, where things get quiet and brooding and creepy, and you get a sort-of explanation of why all of this is happening (which mixes in just the right amount of supernatural horror and that particularly unsettling Catholic fanaticism), followed by one of the scariest movie monsters I’ve seen in a while, and a scene so tense I could hear people holding their breath in the theater), really, really works.

The whole “real footage” conceit is pretty good, but it fails in a couple of places. First, there’s a scene where Ángela demands that Pablo show her the footage he just shot, to make sure it’s on tape, and we actually see the rewind and then the footage play again, then cut back to “now”. I guess this could be explained that we’re not watching the footage, but the events as they unfold on the monitor of the camera, but it’s sort of unneccessary and weird.

The other thing, which is less of a problem, is that the movie has music. It’s fairly subtle, typical incidental music, but I noticed it a couple of times, and it does distract a little from the documentary feel of the whole thing. Also, if you’re really going to nitpick, people in the movie speak Castilian Spanish, while they’re in Catalan-speaking Barcelona (all signs, uniforms of the firemen, etc. on screen are in Catalan).

But these are minor problems. Once it gets going, [•REC] has you on the edge of your seat, adrenaline pumping, until the very (abrupt) end.

The same guy who made Chainsaw Maid has a lot of claymation horror stuff on YouTube. This one is pretty derivative of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but then at the end, there’s a vagina dentata-mouthed goat demon thing that freaks me the hell out, even though it’s a cute clay figure.

This claymation short is a pretty pitch-perfect take on zombie movies, especially the variety common in the seventies, like Dawn of the Dead. And somehow claymation blood and gore works really well.

You might have seen this video, which is a compilation of the best unintentionally hilarious scenes from the (by all accounts dire) remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage:

As if that wasn’t enough, however, there’s this mixture of the audio of the idiotic final scene from the movie with video from Mega Man, and, well, here’s Mega Wicker Man:

I wish I had the time to watch and blog about 100 movies in 100 days. Luckily, I don’t have to, since Scott Hamilton did it first. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including many horror movies, and the reviews are well-written and witty. And it includes a review of a Korean war/horror movie called R-Point, which I really want to see.

This video, titled “Cell phone in microwave”, starts out as a typical “let’s destroy stuff in wacky ways” YouTube video, but isn’t quite that… Nice work, too.