Top 5 Favorite Fright Flicks of 2015: Shade Rupe’s List

In the waning days of 2015, we’ll be polling SHOCK’s stable of fantastic freelancers to see what horror flicks made them tick the loudest.

We continue with the inimitable, esoteric Shade Rupe…

HARD TO BE A GOD (Dir: Aleksei German)

Unending brutal reality pounds the viewer in almost every frame of Aleksei German’s (pronounced Gher-man) final film, completed posthumously by his wife and filmmaker son. The damp and drearily picturesque camerawork glides through dense layer upon layer of human and earthen filth. Mirroring a long-standing problem with American ‘culture,’ the inhabitants of the planet Arkanar have murdered anyone deemed to be an intellectual, forever keeping the planet stuck in a pig-mucked Middle Ages. Unable to advance, thirty scientists from Earth are sent to help Arkanar ascend to civilization though they are expressly forbidden from meddling with their technology or cultural ways, hence performing acts of god without causing change. Hard to be a god, indeed. Grimed, laden with flatulence, feces, snot, and almost anything else that can erupt from a human being’s innards, the world of Arkanar is an unceasing procession of hangings, beheadings, belches, screams, disemboweling in its wallow in the lower forms of human behavior. Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko camera glides through this Hieronymous Bosch–like world, rarely stopping to take in the various frame edges punctuated by loose limbs, chains, flames, and other horrors. One of the darkest films, in all sense of the word, ever made. And one it appears we will always live in.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (Dir: Peter Strickland)

Peter Strickland continues to delve between the frames, eliciting reactions that others can’t seem to find. Beginning with this first feature Katalin Varga and accelerating through BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, Strickland measures sound, image, and sensation to concoct films that are more organisms than narratives, each having its own individual stamp of life. Here two women heavily, thickly, and deeply in love, or at least the psychological approximation of that emotion, find that bond faltering as excitement falls to routine, and the pathology of their particular bond gathers enough dust to add a cough to the proceedings. When a local erotic constructionist stops by to measure for a new bed, that will keep the younger of the two women trapped under the other, their bond is tested, and nearly dies. Watching the performances of these two actors is like watching two people fall into and out of love, and their pain is palpably felt. Toss in a sampling of rare moths and fantastic sound-work and you have a fantastique horreur film that always strays into less familiar territory.

SON OF SAUL (Dir: László Nemes)

It’s nearly impossible to cover the Holocaust without some form of horror coming forth, though most filmmakers concentrate on heroes and heroines, stories of redemption and faith. Not so sentimental, Son of Saul instead focuses on a man who is already dead, and aware of it, mechanically going through the motions of ‘life’ without even hope to carry him forward, until a young boy lives through a gassing, and he attaches himself as the man’s father, or at least post-life guardian, finding humanity in hell by doing all he can to give the boy a proper burial while thousands daily are merely torn apart by ‘barbers’ and ‘dentists,’ reliving the corpses of anything of any possible value before being reduced to ash. Nemes and his crew opt to focus solely on the chiseled face of the film’s star and leave the horrors of extermination camp ‘life’ outside the frame, resulting in screams, cries, barked orders, crackling fire, gunshots, and more to live in the mind’s eye. Harrowing is an understatement in this lovingly crafted epic, sculpted from 35mm film and projected as same. Dark, brooding, and unforgettable.

MACBETH (Dir: Justin Kurzel)

Immersed in horror identity, complete with witches, cauldrons, beheadings, and blood blood blood, William Shakespeare’s MACBETH is a constant draw for intense filmmakers. While Roman Polanski’s 1971 version stands tall among many, especially for its thickly laid gory violence, other attempts are welcome, and Justin Kurzel’s tempering of the material as a dark western opens anew the door to explorations of the bard’s work. Mixing Polanski’s approach of realism with more modern stylized delivery and digital coloring, Kurzel hoists music into the paranoiac realm and adds a bass unease throughout the annunciations of “his silver skin laced with his golden blood” and “gash’d stabs.” Polanski also chose a somewhat occultish and macabre portrayal while Kurzel’s appears even more of the mind in its visceral approach. His witches seem like east village teenagers over otherworldly beings, and the cold mist of Scotland’s air, the tactile viscosity of the constant bloodletting, and the eternal dirtiness of the king’s men drench the film in an overarching dread. All hail Macbeth!

BONE TOMAHAWK (Dir: S. Craig Zahler)

A later contender with light theatrical, S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk deserves a much wider audience. A Western, mystery, and horror film completely enmeshed together, Bone Tomahawk is well cared for by a grizzled and gifted Kurt Russell giving us a man to root for in a grim world. ‘The Searchers in the Underworld,’BONE TOMAHAWK’s story of men on a rescue mission who end up in a completely unexplained bizarre hell under the Earth, and are party to actions unlike anyone has ever witnessed, notches the genre up in hammering this story of otherworldly supernatural cannibalism. The straight-on violence of the film is a perfect kontrapunkt to the mainly dialogue-based film until this point. BONE TOMAHAWK is a savory experience, offering deep treasures buried even lower than six feet deep.