The 2000s were a strange decade to love horror. The remake machine ran nonstop, J-horror imports arrived by the crate, Saw and Hostel kicked off years of arguing about torture porn, and found footage crept in underneath all of it. It was also the last decade when discovery was physical. You walked down a shelf, picked something up because the box looked cool, and took your chances.
With that much product moving, good stuff got flattened. Some movies caught reviews they did not earn. Some got dumped by studios that had stopped caring. Some opened next to something bigger and vanished.
None of these are secret masterpieces. A few are genuinely great, several are a mess, and every one of them deserves to be judged on its own terms instead of against whatever trend it happened to land in. You will disagree with at least three. Good.
4 Comments
calliope@retrolemmy.com · 4 pts · 15d
This article was really fun!
I only disagreed with one, Dead Silence, which I absolutely hated when I saw it in 2008-2009. I’m actually shocked it cost $20 million, until now I kinda thought it was comedy horror slop like Birdemic, which cost $10,000.
I will recommend in its place Thirteen Ghosts (2001), which is not good, but I always thought the ghost designs and lore were kind of cool and the design of the futuristic house worth seeing. Plus it’s got Matthew Lillard in it and I’m a big fan of his weirdness.
EddieEpoxy@piefed.social · 2 pts · 15d
My favorites from that era were all horror-comedies. Leslie Vernon and Slither are good picks from this.
Have you seen Fido (2006)? Billy Connolly, Carrie-Anne Moss, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson, it's a mashup of the old Lassie TV series and Night of the Living Dead, where zombies are domesticated and turned into free labor. I don't think I've ever seen it brought up on horror forums so maybe it slipped through the cracks, idk.
Riverview_Legal@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 14d
I remember watching Fido and thinking this is a weird, Canadian film. Watched back to back when we rented it from the video store.
I wouldn't really say it's a horror film. Definitely a weird, early 2000 comedy film.
buttmasterflex@piefed.social · 1 pts · 15d
I remember watching Midnight Meat Train with my dad for one of our weekend Blockbuster rental nights. The premise and execution were so unintentionally funny, that we were cracking up watching it together. I'll have to revisit it, along with some others on the list. Nice find, thanks for sharing!