Here are the 8 best horror films of the 21st century

When Georges Miller directed Le Manoir du Diable, a comedy full of animated skeletons, ghosts and bats, in 1896, he realized that it had revolutionized the film industry. The duration of cinematic works does not allow to convey any kind of deep message.

The directors aimed to evoke a kind of emotion in their audience, sometimes expressing a quick idea without paying attention to the structure of the film and the development of the idea through it (1)(2)(3).

Only time was enough to advance this cinema, which relied in many cases on literary classics from the theater and the novel to release Frankenstein, Dracula and other book graves.

Then came the fifties, when giant monsters rose that filmmakers saw as the embodiment of anger.

After that, Gothic films followed, most of which took place in the ruins of ruined homes, ancient castles and palaces, and misty areas of pitch blackness, with main characters who are unknown and supernatural creatures (4) (5).

Thereafter, various acts of folk tales, myths, magic, ghost stories and legends prevailed over vampires, demons, monsters, individuals on the edge of madness, evil spirits, and werewolves (6), to prove the horror film throughout that long history of its ability to reflect the fears of its time. Clearly without equivocation.

The Conjuring

One of the best-known horror film makers, James Wan, tells us of his tendency to dump all his obsessions on screen as a way to get rid of them.

In The Conjuring, one of the highest-grossing films of the twenty-first century with profits of nearly a billion dollars, it begins in the thick darkness of a dialogue that we speculate is taking place between two opposing characters, one of whom utters the following phrase: “It scares us just thinking about it, when you hear With it you think of us as crazy people,” noting that she drowned in that darkness haunted by mystery, confirms a scene from an upper angle that gives a suggestion of loss of control and the collapse of strength, while the two girls tell their stories.

Wan locates the first visual image we catch in the movie with the glass-eyed Annabelle doll staring up, letting us know it's been possessed by the Devil.

The camera gives her a view and we see red pens in place of blood, and scratches on the pictures of the girls.

This establishes the opening scene to introduce Annabelle and the protagonists Ed and Lorraine Warren, two famous researchers in the paranormal, to be followed by a main tale about the Byron family who have recently moved to the farm, and Wan uses in the montage a lot of jumping at the height of events to give the desired effect, as the girl sits On a chair and then in the next shot we find the seat empty, and he used a lot of close-up shots to show feelings and fear, varying between them and between the medium shots and the long shots due to the presence of a lot of movement in the film, this tool was really effective, and perhaps the reason for putting this film on the list Top View.

The witch

Unlike the Byron family, writer and director Robert Eggers settled to present us with a family mired in misery, with the time line in which the tale runs in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, where the superstitions of witches are widely popular, such as drinking the blood of a young person from It would restore and perpetuate their youth.

The biography of witches at that time was frightening, so that Eggers conveyed that original anxiety, he avoided smoke, mirrors, and all the traditional tools of horror. He was photographed only with natural and available light, and the clothes were made of antique fabric, to match the composer Mark Corvin by adopting musical instruments from that era.

Religion and history penetrate into the heart of the events, in language and dialogue and in the form of direct quotes, and in the heart of the plot itself, from the exile of that family to the borders of the bushes, and from the unknown evil that awaits them, and the wildness of their animals and the withering of their crops, and what awaits each of them in turn to the girl Thomasin, Feminist readings then drown out the film, which begins to point out the marginal presence of women in small, male-dominated colonies, and the harsh conditions that can lead women to self-doubt and secretiveness.

Quiet place

Written by Scott Beck and Brian Woods and directed by John Krasinski, this film is considered one of the most important in the horror world, where silence is involuntarily applied to the world and talk becomes sheer risk.

In a previous interview, the director stated that he began producing the film after his wife gave birth to their second child, and began to think about the sacrifices he might make for his children, to reflect his film, with all the deep horrors it contains, the love of parents for their children and the innocence and happiness that may be on the way to demise, with the intention of narrating Classics and cinematography.

With voice scarcer, Krasinski places more emphasis on the characters, their facial features, and the strategies they put in, helping him develop plot and characters further and see how tightly his heroes bond.

The family unit grows stronger as the film continues because of the obstacles in their tracks, but the suppression of the noise makes them yearn to speak, not just as a form of human expression, but as a scream of anger, horror or despair.

In that context, the actress who played the girl Reagan was actually deaf in real life, which helped her in acting to connect with others and relate to the story, and the director blurred all the voices in the background of the footage that reflected Reagan's perspective to help us identify with him completely.

"The Lighthouse"

Where else can the characters of horror films go except to a beacon like the one that director Robert Eggers built in his movie "Lighthouse"?!

The film has booked a place for it as one of the most exciting psychological horror films ever. The work is limited to two heroes, Robert Pattinson and William Dafoe, as lighthouse keepers, one with a thick beard and a wooden leg and drunk, while the other is lost, a few words.

The film grew out of co-writer Max Eggers' brother's attempt to create a script from the story of the great American author and poet Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart," about a man who seeks to convince the reader of his sanity, detailing his previously planned and committed crime. For the sake of an old man before guilt drives him into hallucinations.

The brothers combined the idea with the story of Thomas Griffith and Thomas Howell, two real-life experts who served in 1801 at Smalls Lighthouse, West Pembrokeshire, Wales.

When Griffith died, Howl placed the decomposing body of his companion in a coffin and tied it outside, the sight of one of Griffith's arms outstretched in the wind is said to have driven Howl crazy.

Illustration of the Tell-Tale Heart by Irish painter Harry Clarke

In the story, Eggers makes you challenge the narrator's credibility as Poe did, suspicious of what's going on and wonder if the two protagonists are delirious or driven to death or madness, Eggers pushes us with dialogue, sound design and frame size to be there where the waves crash violently, the birds scream, the rain falls.

Perhaps Eggers chose black and white and gray photography to provide an atmosphere and a dark tone of uncertainty, and to highlight the contrast between two characters with gradations of colors that make one prominent and the other invisible, to give the illusion that they may in the end be one person or they may not be at all.

 28 Days Later

The movie "The Lighthouse" engages with "28 Days Later" in looking into human nature and the true horror of what humans can do to each other during stressful circumstances, although they are two completely different types of horror, the latter falling under the type of monster horror, He envisioned a future in which an epidemic would spread and everyone would be desperate to find special ways to survive.

The film directed by Danny Boyle was at the forefront of films that used digital imaging techniques on a large scale, to give his film a documentary feel that made it more terrifying, and also to make it more relevant to a post-apocalyptic theme, suggesting as if there was a last survivor turning on the camera while we watched him.

We also note that the injured are different from the zombies in the previous movies with their bloodshot eyes, excessive aggressiveness, bloody vomiting, and rapid movement.

Through the film, Alex Garland developed a scenario in which he was interested in building all the characters and showing their motives, regardless of their role in the story.

Novelist Stephen King was a huge fan of the film's soundtrack, which draws attention to the affinity of the film's plot with King's novel The Stand, in which he told a fictional albeit detailed vision of a pandemic wiping out the vast majority of the world's population.

Train to Busan

"Train to Busan" isn't far behind "28 days" in their apocalyptic visions of the end of the world and the parade of zombies crawling among them, but Korean director Bong Joon-ho, best known for his movie "Parasite"... , dissents from Danny Boyle, by advancing the thesis that in tough times people need to come together or else what makes us human in the first place?

Bong-ho differentiates between his heroes who will do whatever it takes to survive and those who would do what it takes to save others.

In the early stages of preparing for the film, Bong Ho teaches his daughter what occupies his mind, saying: “At a time like this, one should only be careful of himself,” alluding to the fact that panic can make us monsters or mutants, and that moral responsibility requires Overcome this instinct in crises and create a lifeboat so that we may all survive together in the end.

"The Babdook"

In her first directing experience, Jennifer Kent relied on one of the heroes of the scary children's book, a hidden monster called "Papa Doc", to make it the nucleus of her work classified within the framework of psychological horror.

Daddy Doc wears a tall, black hat with sharp claws and lives among the bright red covers of a story in a mourning house in which a widow named Amelia (Issie Davis) and a quick-tempered child named Sam (Noah Wiseman).

Kent does not hesitate to create a mixture of comedy and surrealism and masters the use of her tools from camera angles, sound effects and cinematography, to convey to us a mixture of horror charged with longing, resentment and unhealing pain.

Get Out

As for the author and director, Jordan Peele, he does not struggle to hide his anxiety during his movie "Get Out", but rather casts his personal, political and social concerns about the volatile situation of African Americans in the United States in a terrifying framework, and highlights his view in two opposing colors that express his idea in its opening With a brown man walking in one of the very wealthy neighborhoods, lacking security, wearing dark clothes and looking confused, while the scene slowly breaks into a white car next to him, and the turmoil increases.

Bell addresses his idea by focusing on the body, and attempts to subdue it in the beginning and end sequences, as if suggesting the eternity of the racist view, and its psychological and physical impact.

The film was acclaimed by critics, and was selected by the National Board of Review, the American Film Institute and Time magazine as one of the ten best films of 2017, and Bell won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

In addition to numerous awards, the film has secured a permanent place in the lists of the best films of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Bill, after the fame of his movie "Escape", opened the door for more films that take on horror as a theme but similarly discuss deep issues. The same idea worked with Mike Flanagan in the series "The Haunting of Hill House" and "Middle Requiem." The Midnight Mass, where he discussed in the first the concept of the family, and in the second the issue of religious extremism was a clear basis for the artwork, and the two works received wide approval and interest, which opens the door for similar new works in the future.

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