So far, 2010 has been a curiously slow year for good horror movies. Last year wasn’t great either, but at least there was a varied line-up — Zombieland (funny), Paranormal Activity (inventive), A Haunting in Connecticut (underrated), Orphan (has Vera Farmiga). And, of course, the sublime Let The Right One In, the Swedish vampire movie, which transcended the genre to become one of the year’s best dramas. You could get all of these on DVD by last Halloween.
This year we seem to be getting a lot of monster movies — more specifically, new takes on old monster movie templates. Academic sorts like to map horror movie trends to real societal anxieties, and perhaps there is something happening here regarding the return to horrors of the past. I’m not saying this is specifically about the midterm elections, but I’m also not not saying it.
To wit, here are my top five scary movies (so far) of 2010. As always, the list avoids gore-porn lameness like the Saw franchise and its imitators, or gross-out specimens like 2010’s most talked-about “horror” movie, The Human Centipede. All of mine are rated R, suitable for Halloween creepiness, and currently available on DVD and various video-on-demand services:
Splice
The year’s most daring horror script, Splice stars Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as married geneticists who decant themselves a human-animal hybrid daughter. Kind of. Director Vincenzo Natali takes some serious risks — to the degree that he had a hard time getting the film past squeamish executives and into theaters. Artfully transgressive, Splice shows the other pretenders how it’s done. I’m looking at you, Centipede.
