10 Bone-Chilling Horror Movies from the 2000s You Totally Forgot Existed | Wealth of Geeks

Horror is one of our favorite genres here at Wealth of Geeks.

From the classic thrills of the best horror movies from the 1980s and 1990s to the laughably bad horror films that we love to hate. We even love reading horror books and comics filled with over-the-top ghoulish hosts and post-apocalyptic zombies.

Horror films have always been an extremely self-referential genre, but they reached new heights of recursiveness in the 2000s. The found-footage genre was obsessed with making horror films about horror films.

The biggest new franchise of the decade, Saw, featured a villain who was essentially a horror movie director constructing sets to trap his victims/viewers. Reflexivity pushed the genre to new extremes of arch humor and mannerist excess; it’s a decade that includes some of the funniest horror films, and some of the most repulsive.

The films are listed in order from best to less best, but still great.

1. Paranormal Activity (2007)

Image Credit: Paramount Pictures.

The Paranormal Activity Blumhouse found footage franchise quickly plunged into the mediocre sequel abyss, but the first entry remains a masterpiece.

Oily, subtly controlling boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) decides to film the odd phenomenon occurring around his girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherstone.) Director Oren Peli is a master of squeezing horror out of non-effects: a chandelier swinging or a door opening. The actors deliver their bickering is delivered with such small-as-life querulousness you can barely believe it’s acting.

The Blair Witch Project inaugurated the found footage genre, but this may be its most perfect form: just two people filming each other, and the demon taking shape between them.

2. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Best Zombie Movies to Stream Right Now
Image Credit: Universal Pictures.

Edgar Wright’s best film is both a send-up of the zombie genre and a loving example of it. Wright takes George Romero’s core metaphor—the zombies are us!—and pushes it to its logical extreme; Shaun (Simon Pegg) and Ed (Nick Frost) are stuck in such pointless dead-end shuffling lives that they don’t even notice when the dead start rising and devouring around them. The brilliant set-pieces in which Shaun wanders on his daily rounds while carnage shuffles quietly around him are juxtaposed with jump scares created out of nothing but genre cues, brilliant camera work, and lower-middle-class ennui.

It’s also one of those rare horror movies, and rare comedies, in which the final twist ending is one of the absolute best gags in the film, and just in general.

3. Death Proof (2007)

Death Proof
Image Credit: Dimension Films.

Quentin Tarantino’s sole foray into horror is probably his least discussed movie. Which is unfortunate, because Death Proof, originally part of the Grindhouse double feature, is fantastic.

Kurt Russell plays a Kurt Russell parody tough guy who gets his kicks by crashing into women’s cars and killing them. It’s basically a slasher on wheels. But where most films in the genre show you little of the victims except for their fear, Death Proof spends the bulk of its run time exploring the nuances of women’s friendships and relationships. Every death is someone you know. It’s a horror film that will break your heart—which only adds velocity as the second act speeds towards revenge.

4. Dark Water (2002)

Dark Water
Image Credit: Toho.

The Ring is the most famous Hideo Nakata-directed J-horror based on the writing of Koji Suzuki. But the little-known Dark Water has a deeper and clammier chill. Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is a single mother trying to retain custody of her six-year-old daughter. The two move into an apartment haunted by a perpetually leaky ceiling and a sodden ghost.

Initially, in horror film tradition, it looks like some evil something is coming for the child. But this isn’t the Exorcist, with its theatrical demons. There’s no real antagonist or evil in the run-down building; just love thwarted and the steady, agonizing drip, drip, drip of anxiety, grief, and loss. The film’s rhythms are as mesmerizingly ominous, and as inevitable, as water rising.

5. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Pans Labyrinth 1
Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Horror often plays with the line between fantasy and reality, but rarely with such grace or cruelty as in Guillermo del Toro’s breakthrough film. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a lost princess who must complete three tasks to return to her father’s kingdom. Or else she imagines she’s a princess to escape a miserable reality in which her mother has died and left her in Franco’s Spain with a fascist father who hates her. Every time Ofelia steps through the chalk-drawn doorway, you want to yell at her not to come back. But when she doesn’t, it’s worse.

The effects—including a bloated mud-spewing toad and a flesh-eating Pale Man with eyes in his hands—are amazingly imaginative and tactile. All the more so because the movie never lets you forget for long that the real child-eaters are less wondrous, and colder.

6. American Psycho (2000)

American Psycho
Image Credit: Lionsgate Films.

Silence of the Lambs presented serial killers as super-cool super-genius. “Pfft to that!” said director Mary Harron,  and gave us Patrick Bateman—serial killer as a bland corporate social climber with atrocious musical taste.

Christian Bale wears his good looks like an empty shell as he brutalizes women, tries to place dinner reservations and praises Huey Lewis with the same mix of bland insecurity and teetering rage. The horror isn’t so much in the blood and murder, which, given Bateman’s tenuous hold on reality, may or may not even actually happen. Rather, the movie is unsettling because of its portrait of a life and a culture so empty even the super-cool super-evil super-geniuses have nothing on their minds but their own business cards.

7. Hostel (2005)

Hostel
Image Credit: Lionsgate Films.

Slashers like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are often built on urban/rural anxieties and resentments. Eli Roth switches up the formula to east/west, so you get to delight as Europeans take their bloody revenge on misogynist entitled American backpackers, and then delight further as the Americans get their revenge in turn. The film is notoriously gore-filled, but the most disturbing bit involves a creepy German who eats salad with his fingers. He says he wants to get closer to the guts of life…which is the ugly motive of tourists, and of horror film watchers too.

Hostel II is the rare sequel that rivals its prototype, so if you like this, you should watch that. But not, for pity’s sake, Hostel III.

8. The Human Centipede (2009)

The Human Centipede
Image Credit: Bounty Films.

Dutch director Tom Six’s nightmare surgical hybrid of body horror and slasher is often dismissed as a crass exercise in self-indulgent depravity. Treating crass exercises in self-indulgent depravity as art is one reasonable definition of horror, though. Six really has managed to create a carefully, bloodily constructed new creature from the bits and pieces of Dr. Frankenstein, David Cronenberg, and his own grotesque, self-loathing vision of humankind as a suffering, crawling thing.

German Siamese twin specialist Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser) kidnaps two American tourists and a Japanese man and surgically connects their mouth to the anus with a single digestive tract. The film is as viscerally repulsive, degrading, and cruel as that description suggests. It’s an atrocity and a triumph, and it will make you despair. What more can you ask from a horror movie?

9. Teeth (2007)

Teeth
Image Credit: Roadside Attractions.

There are a fair number of female vampire films, and a lot of revenge films, but there is nothing quite like Mitchell Lichtenstein’s teen coming-of-age castration romp Teeth. Dawn (Jess Wexler) is an abstinence-touting purity-culture devotee trying to make sense of her growing attraction to boys.

When the nice Christian youth she’s been fantasizing about tries to rape her, though, she and he discover that the local nuclear plant has somehow given her a vagina dentata, which enacts bloody vengeance when her consent is violated.

The inevitable scenes of unpleasantness (enacted upon skeevy step-brothers and condescending gynecologists alike) are uniformly flinch-worthy. But what really makes the movie is Wexler’s performance. Dawn starts out afraid of her sexuality and her power, and gradually recognizes the pleasures both of saying “yes” and of being able to say “no” with teeth.

10. Martyrs (2008)

Martyrs
Image Credit: Wild Bunch.

The most infamous movie of the infamous New French Extremity movement, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs both depicts and embraces torture for its own sake. Young girls Lucie Jurin (Mylène Jampanoï) and Anna Assaoui (Morjana Alaoui) are brutalized pointlessly by a cult that seeks to create martyrs through extended suffering. The second half of the film is little but Anna being force-fed, struck, and tormented with mundane cruelty as gentle music plays and she wastes away before our eyes.

Laugier tempts viewers to embrace violence as grotesque revenge, violence as genre payoff, and/or violence as formal aesthetic beauty, even as he continually reminds you that violence is pointless and exists only for its own consummation. It’s a frustratingly gratuitous and gratuitously frustrating film, which leaves you unsure whether to be angry at the director, yourself, or the world.

Final Thoughts

I only wanted one film per director, but I thought about picking Hostel II or Cabin Fever instead of Hostel, and The Devil’s Backbone instead of Pan’s Labyrinth. Other films that were on and off the list were Ginger Snaps and Battle Royale. And I seriously considered Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day, which is supposed to be great. But I ended up not being able to stream it. The best horror has to be a horror you’ve seen—though there are always other horrors out there.

This article was produced and syndicated by Wealth of Geeks.


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How ‘Skinamarink’ made $1.5 million on a $15,000 budget

A still promo for the film Skinamarink.

Coutesy: Bayview Entertainment

Experimental horror film “Skinamarink” has been all the buzz on social media for months — and now it’s a sleeper hit at the box office.

“Skinamarink,” the first feature from Canadian director Kyle Edward Ball, has pulled in over $1.5 million at the box office in just over a week of release, according to Comscore.

Some film enthusiasts have compared the experimental movie, with its $15,000 budget, to found-footage horror classic “The Blair Witch Project” and David Lynch’s surrealistic 1977 midnight movie “Eraserhead.”

To be sure, “The Blair Witch Project,” which was a trendsetter for movies propelled by internet buzz, grossed $140 million in 1999 on a budget of less than $100,000, but the success of “Skinamarink” is helping define the current era of lucrative scare flicks.

According to data from Comscore, the horror genre generated about $700 million in domestic ticket sales in 2022, less than 10% of the $7.5 billion in total domestic box office sales. Much of these sales come from the most wide-released horror films that had budgets between $16 million and $35 million.

Shudder, a horror-focused streaming service owned and operated by AMC Networks, picked up exclusive rights to the film. The movie will premiere on the platform Feb. 2. “Skinamarink” currently has a “fresh” rating of 71% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.

“Skinamarink” centers on two children who discover their father has disappeared, along with all the doors and windows of the home. The film makes use of grainy, hard-to-decipher shots of walls, furniture, television screens and ceilings to depict the eeriness of the abandoned, liminal home. It doesn’t show the characters’ faces. Ball told Vulture he intended the film to feel “as if Satan directed a movie and got an AI to edit it. An AI would make weird choices, like, ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna hold on this hallway of nothing for a while.'”

Some observers in the indie film industry saw it as a potential hit early on. Co-executive producer Jonathan Barkan, head of acquisitions at Mutiny Pictures, found the “Skinamarink” trailer on Reddit in late 2021 and took a gamble it would outperform many of its competitors and resonate with viewers.

While horror is seen by some as being a tried and true film genre that will return a profit, Barkan said making money with scary movies isn’t that easy. Independent horror films are released every week, and it’s very difficult to stand out among these releases, he said.

“For being a genre that is already typically a lower-budget genre, you have filmmakers who need to be very creative,” Barkan said. “They need to think, how can we stretch our budget? How can we do something really creative and still get across what we’re trying to convey, which is a sense of fear?”

Going viral with $15,000

Ball previously created and released short films based on people’s childhood nightmares for his Bitesized Nightmares YouTube channel. The channel, with over 11,400 subscribers, has pulled in a few thousand views for three- to five-minute horror shorts, as well as for his half-hour film “Heck.”

Ball used his childhood home in Edmonton, Alberta, as the film’s setting and his childhood toys for props. Ball stretched the $15,000 across equipment, lighting and film-editing software, in addition to film festival costs and legal documentation. He called in favors for casting and equipment, as well, according to Barkan.

There is “really no way to skirt around a certain budget” in all genres, though Ball took some creative alternatives to high-cost filming conventions, according to Josh Doke, an executive producer of “Skinamarink” and creative director at BayView Entertainment, which acquired Mutiny Pictures.

“A lot of filmmakers who are making a film, either for the first time or with a really low budget, they are trying to emulate … a Hollywood style with people in front of the camera who are talking and acting, and they maybe don’t have access to the best actors or the best lighting or the best equipment,” Doke said. “It comes off not looking quite like how they had in their head.”

Still shot from the film “Skinamarink”.

Courtesy: Bayview Entertainment

Ball avoided some costs by not shooting characters head on and instead having them speak off-screen or showing only their backs or feet. “You don’t need George Clooney in front of the camera,” Doke said. Lighting in many shots came only from television sets or a night light.

After acquiring the film, Barkan worked to get it into the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, where he previously served as a jury member. This was the “first domino” in propelling its success, he said.

“It’s a stretch to say that there’s anything new under the sun or really original in our industry, but this really does feel like it’s not only experimental horror but experiential horror,” Doke said. “I think that what it does for people is it puts you right in the middle of a nightmare that you can’t wake up from.”

The world premiere attracted 22 reviews from critics, and it caught the attention of Shudder. This notice led it to film festivals in Europe, one of which saw its entire slate of films leaked.

While the production team tried to keep a lid on the film after it was pirated and file takedowns on illegal sites, clips of the film went viral on TikTok. #Skinamarink now has over 27 million views on the platform.

The film was originally intended for theatrical release around Halloween 2023, but plans were thrown out the window as demand to see the film grew rapidly.

“[Shudder] adapted it to embrace what was happening because there was no way to stop it,” Barkan said. “Rather than try to fight it, they worked with it.”

Snowball effect

With internet buzz and illegal downloads surging around Thanksgiving, Doke said the film could not wait another 10 months to release. The movie opened Jan. 13 in North American theaters.

“Initially, we were talking about a fairly limited theatrical release through Shudder and IFC just because with a film of his size, you never know the interest, and getting a big theatrical release is always a challenge,” Doke said. “But the snowball just kept rolling down the hill.”

Still shot from the film “Skinamarink”.

Courtesy: Bayview Entertainment

Shudder and the film’s production team agreed to an all-rights deal, meaning Shudder had not only streaming rights but also exclusives on subscription video and pay-per-view video services. Next, IFC Midnight, also owned by AMC Networks, was brought in to do theatrical showings prior to its exclusive release on Shudder.

“Once we saw the incredible response online, we knew we had to bring this film to as many theaters as possible nationwide,” Arianna Bocco, president of IFC Films and IFC Midnight, said in a statement. “Kyle has made a film for a new generation and has proved yet again what horror films and its community are capable of even with the smallest of budgets.”

What was expected to be 10 to 20 screenings led to 692 theaters predominantly in urban areas. Its first weekend “Skinamarink” grossed nearly $900,000. Last weekend, the film reached over 800 theaters and brought gross box office sales to more than $1.5 million — over 100 times its budget.

“To make a film for $15,000 and then to release it and get this level of attention and this wide of a theatrical release, and to reach this level of box office returns, is an incredibly rare feat,” Doke said.

–CNBC’s Sarah Whitten contributed to this report.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal, CNBC’s parent company, owns Rotten Tomatoes.

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