Pop quiz, hotshot: what’s the biggest independent movie of the year so far? Unlikely sleepers “Eye In The Sky,” starring Helen Mirren, or “Hello My Name Is Doris” with Sally Field? Tom Hanks vehicle “A Hologram For The King?” Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” followup “Everybody Wants Some?” Jeff Nichols’ sci-fi “Midnight Special?”
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The answer is: none of the above. In fact, the answer is “The Witch,” the Kubrickian arthouse period horror. The film’s biggest star is Finchy from the BBC‘s “The Office,” and it’s sold mostly on the image of a goat. A24’s bold move to release the film wide a year after its Sundance premiere has paid off in style, as it has emerged as a talking point among cinephiles and has earned $25 million ahead of its home video release this week.
It’s the first major crossover hit for the arthouse horror movement, which has seen indie and foreign filmmakers who’ve taken a genre that has mostly done poorly in the mainstream in recent years, and have consequently made strikingly original, soulful, thoughtful pictures that also scare the living crap out of filmgoers. Some have been grouped under the phrase “mumblegore,” but that only hints at a small proportion of the breadth of talent as such that has emerged in the last few years.
Robert Eggers, a former production designer who makes an incredibly striking debut with “The Witch,” is just one of those filmmakers, and to mark the home video release of his terrific film (here’s our review), we’ve picked out another twelve arthouse horror helmers who are currently turning the horror genre on its head. Take a look below and let us know who else you’re tipping in the comments.
Jennifer Kent
Outside of yielding a handful of grindhouse-ish cult classics in the 1970s and 1980s, Australia doesn’t have much of a reputation for great horror, but interesting Aussie filmmakers like Sean Byrne and Greg McLean have emerged in the last decade to make it seem like something like a movement. Easily the best of the group, and the director behind one of the great recent horror movies from anywhere in the world, is Kent, the helmer of “The Babadook.” Kent began as an actor (she briefly turns up in George Miller’s “Babe: Pig In The City”) before training under Lars Von Trier on the set of “Dogville.” The link between the two elder directors might not be immediately apparent —“The Babadook,” about a grief-stricken mother, her behaviorally-troubled son and the monster from a storybook who might be real, is an aesthetically very different affair from a Von Trier picture. But their shared interest in psychology soon becomes apparent, and the metaphorical rigor of Kent’s film adds an extra layer of terror on top of the director’s immaculate craft. William Friedkin called the film the most terrifying he’d ever seen —he directed the goddamn “Exorcist,” so he knows what he’s talking about. Next up: “Heavenly Creatures”-ish real-life murder story “Alice & Freda Forever.”
Ti West
West is perhaps the most prominent, or at least among the earliest, exponent of the noticeable upswing in independent horror this decade. His “House of the Devil” fused haunted house and slasher tropes in 2009 to create a horror experience with classic pacing and modern shocks. Horror of the last decade was often oriented towards remakes and excessive “torture porn,” so the slow creep of West’s film was a breath of fresh air. He’s acted for other indie directors in films such as Joe Swanberg‘s “Silver Bullets” and Adam Wingard‘s “You’re Next,” but his directorial output, which also includes “The Sacrament” and high-water mark “The Innkeepers,” is where he shows off a command of tone and character that distinguish his films from other entries in the current wave of independent horror. His forthcoming “In a Valley of Violence” is a revenge western rather than a horror outing, but with West at the helm, you should expect a film that features enough gut-wrenching moments to keep horror audiences happy.
S. Craig Zahler
If you found Zahler’s directorial debut “Bone Tomahawk”while flipping cable channels a few minutes after it started and only watched the first half, you would think we’re crazy to put its director on this list. The film might have an ominous tone, but you’d understand it as a lyrical, wryly funny Western with surprisingly strong performances from Patrick Wilson, Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins and Matthew Fox as a quartet of men who form a makeshift posse when Wilson’s wife is kidnapped by cave folk. But the implicit dread pays off with a second half that lunges into splattery horror, with the cave folk turning out to be near-prehistoric cannibals who look like Predators and kill in the most brutal manner imaginable. The film’s an absolute joy for genre fans and a long-awaited payoff for Zahler, a novelist whose scripts have almost never actually reached the screen but who has been hotly tipped for a long time now. His work spans genres, but horror looks to be where he’s sticking for a while: he’s currently writing a reboot of the “Puppet Master” franchise, while Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard are teaming for an adaptation of another of his Western/horror books, “Wraiths Of The Broken Land.”
Ana Lily Amirpour
Horror has long been a home for new breakout directors, and Amirpour had one of the most promising feature debuts we’ve seen in a long time with her 2014 Sundance entry “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Shot in Santa Barbara, the black and white vampire film hums with the cool vibe of early Jim Jarmusch films, even as it creates its own vision of a small Iranian town to provide new context for familiar genre stories of women dealing with oppressive situations. Amirpour swirls together a wide spectrum of ideas, from Spaghetti Western and rock and roll influences to aspects of Iranian culture, creating a dreamlike atmosphere that is made all the more unsettling by its vague familiarity. Her monochrome world is violent and unstable, but seductive enough to pull us deep into its shadowy corners. Amirpour will follow her debut this year with “The Bad Batch,” a bloody Texas-set love story featuring cannibals and a cast including Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa and Keanu Reeves.