It’s the beginning of the spookiest month of the year, so it’s no accident that this week will see the release of one of the best horror films of the year, Babak Anvari‘s “Under the Shadow” (our review). It was well received at Sundance and throughout the year at its various festival berths, but if you haven’t heard as much about it as you did about, say, “The Babadook” or “The Witch,” there’s a simple reason: although it’s a U.K. co-production, the dialogue is spoken in Farsi (and indeed has been selected as the U.K.’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar as a result). In honor of the film (and also Julia Ducournau’s “Raw,” which hasn’t yet got a release date but which we saw in Cannes and is our pick of the crop of 2016’s horror debuts), we’re kicking off our October horror coverage this year by curating a list of our all-time favorite foreign-language horror films.
READ MORE: The 50 Best Foreign Language Movies Of The 21st Century So Far
What makes you laugh is subjective, but that’s also true for what frightens, haunts or just generally creeps you out, and so we know there’s little chance this list will be uncontroversial. That said, there are a few guidelines that we kept in mind when compiling it: firstly, we limited it to one entry per director, and since we often focus on the 21st century in genre features (and you can check out our Best Horror Films of the 21st Century here), we felt that it’s only fair to feature as many pre-2000 films this time out as possible, and were swayed by a film’s legacy and influence in some cases. And since this list is concerned with foreign language films, we leaned a little heavier on the arthouse aspect, as that’s where we tend to see a lot of these films crop up.
But probably more fundamentally, we make no bones about not being horror specialists —there are plenty of websites (and indeed nightclubs and 1-800 numbers) that cater to those who are. Instead, as with every genre we look at, we come at it as film enthusiasts first, and so the following list is by no means our take on the “scariest” horror films, the most extreme or even the most pioneering. It’s the foreign language films that we feel work best as films and that happen to roughly fit into the horror mold.
25. “[REC]” (2007)
Three sequels and a U.S. remake (“Quarantine”) later, it’s possible that the initial impact of Spanish found-footage zombie horror “[REC]” has been blunted, but that only lasts until you watch it again. Directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza take inspiration from live-news TV, as a reporter follows a Barcelona firefighter crew into an apartment complex where an old woman bites a police officer and which turns out to be ground zero of a contamination. By its nature as a found-footage piece, the characters aren’t particularly well drawn, but that’s only because this genre is as close to a first-person shooter game as a film can get, and really the main character is you, placed right in the very center of this hyper intense and extraordinarily unrestful experience. Somehow, the deeply familiar, even oversaturated tropes —like found-footage, zombies, apartment-block claustrophobia and reportage framework— feel new, and newly terrifying, in combination.
24. “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980)
The granddaddy of the found-footage horror, Ruggero Deodato’s “Cannibal Holocaust” tracks the efforts of an American anthropologist (Robert Kerman) to recover reels of film shot by an American documentary crew of cannibalistic American tribes before their brutal deaths, which we get to see in all their excruciating detail. Extreme in its violence and cruelty even by contemporary standards, but especially for its time, this film proved to be convincing enough that Deodato was briefly charged with murder, until he could prove that the actors were still alive. It’s a deeply unpleasant film, over-reliant on sexual violence, featuring the death of real animals and is spectacularly racist —the acting is pretty ropey throughout. But to dismiss it entirely would be a mistake: for all its flaws, it’s innovative, impressively made in many respects, and not without thought: its post-colonial points might be made with a sledgehammer (or more accurately, a sharp wooden pole), but they’re undeniably there.
23. “Kuroneko” (1968)
1968 was an important year for horror. In America, “Rosemary’s Baby” rattled the country with its portrayal of genteel Satan worship on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and in Japan, director Kaneto Shindo (who helmed the similarly unsettling “Onibaba” four years earlier) unleashed “Kuroneko” aka “Black Cat.” The movie, which got the deluxe Criterion treatment a few years ago, is the tale of a band of marauding samurai who rape and kill two women in the countryside. Awoken by the titular feline, the spirit women vow their revenge on the samurai. Things get complicated when one of their intended victims turns out to be the son of one of the women and the husband of the other, long thought lost in battle. Very much a thematic companion piece with “Onibaba,” “Kuroneko” is perhaps the eerier of the two and is weirdly riveting, particularly towards the end, in which a twinge of psychosexual suspense enters the picture. It’s also gorgeously photographed in black and white, with the ghostly cat-women gliding through the bamboo forests, thirsty for bloody vengeance.
22. “Ju-On: The Grudge” (2002)
The other truly famous J-horror (and now subject to a crossover with its rival “Ring” series with this year’s “Sadako Vs. Kayako”), “Ju-On” isn’t as wildly original as Hideo Nakata’s film and was remade much more poorly, but it remains an effective horror pic, tapping more into tradition and the classic ghost story. Almost anthology-like in structure (and technically the third in a series, after the little seen “Ju-On: The Curse” and its 2000 sequel), it showcases the various ill-fated inhabitants of a Tokyo house haunted by Kayako, a woman murdered by her jealous husband. Intriguingly riffing on the same ghosts-as-virus idea as “Ring” and with a few clever conceits to go with it, it isn’t wildly original, but director Takashi Shimizu wrings a ton of scares out of the various hauntings, the non-linear structure is effective, and it’s proved highly influential, with the likes of “American Horror Story” and David Mitchell’s “Slade House” among those borrowing from it.
21. “We Are What We Are” (2010)
Alongside the higher profile Spanish-language genre films of Guillermo del Toro, JA Bayona and others, Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau’s gripping, rich and beautifully made “We Are What We Are” got unjustly lost in the shuffle. A humble watchmaker dies on the street, and the police discover that he had a human finger in his stomach while the man’s children are left to wonder who’ll provide for them now their father’s gone. And not just financially: the family eats humans in a strange quasi-spiritual ritual that only adds to the air of menace and unease. Devilishly plotted, made with real flair and unusually animated by an unmistakably angry vein of social awareness, it was inevitable that a U.S. remake would come along. But the surprise was that Jim Mickle’s redo was a solid, respectful reimagining of the film, rather than a pale xerox, which credits Mickle, but also the originality and artfulness of the picture that inspired him.