The movies listed in my Mood Board belong to the horror genre of film, where the objective is to frighten and thrill the audiences. The films listed in my mood board are all legendary horror films that define the term horror completely. Whether it be a rampaging murderer, a deadly shark, a supernatural phenomenon, or a horrifying disaster, these films tell a shocking and suspenseful story throughout. Through the utilization of horror techniques such as jump scares, dark lighting, suspenseful music, and angled cinematography, these films are capable of imbuing a sense of danger and fear into the audience.
Movies within the mood board are:
1.Goodnight Mommy: Stories where the monster and the victim are family make up a good chunk of the horror canon: The Shining, The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, A Tale of Two Sisters. And so despite the crowded cinematic field, the family at the center of Goodnight Mommy is, if nothing else, unhappy in its own way—a way that involves inhumanly large insects, a formaldehyde-soaked cat, and an inexplicably large pile of bones buried beneath the house. But something seems off about her to the boys—she’s more distant, she’s forgetful, she’s sleeping a lot, not to mention she cuts a terrifying figure with her bony frame and a head swathed in bandages. The three move like leashed animals throughout the house, tiptoeing around each other as the boys try to unmask her, both literally and figuratively.
2. The Lighthouse: Waves crash, birds scream, and rain pounds. Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” wants to drive you a little mad. It’s not just a film about two people on the edge of sanity, it uses sound design and filmmaking tools to push you there too. While it’s ultimately a bit too self-conscious to provoke the existential dread and true terror of the best films like it, it’s still an impressive accomplishment thanks to Eggers fearlessness and a pair of completely committed performances.
3. The Exorcist: “The Exorcist” may not be a great film. It is, however, a brilliantly successful horror movie. It does not matter if you have read William Peter Blatty’s original novel and know what to expect. One still recoils from those scenes in total shock and revulsion. It is quite another thing to see it; to see the furniture fly across a frigid room, to see the ugly sores erupt on the victim’s face, to see the eyes turn fiendish with hate, and to see a snarling beast assert itself in the body of a child.
4. A Quiet Place: John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place”, is a nerve-shredder. It’s a movie designed to make you an active participant in a game of tension, not just a passive observer in an unfolding horror. Most of the great horror movies are so because we become actively invested in the fate of the characters and involved in the cinematic exercise playing out before us. In other words, it’s a really good horror movie.
5: Us: The movie’s imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the “sunken place” from Jordan Peele’s other film, “Get Out” a physical embodiment. “Us” is nothing short of a colossal achievement.
6: The Shining: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is another chance to savour, first of all, those magnificent interior sets. Instead of the cramped darkness and panicky quick editing of the standard-issue scary movie, Kubrick gives us the eerie, colossal, brilliantly lit spaces of the Overlook Hotel , shot with amplitude and calm. And this is before he sees the strange little girls. Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall play Danny’s parents, Jack and Wendy, who have the live-in job of caretaking a gigantic resort hotel while it is closed for the winter. Nicholson’s performance as the abusive father who is tipped over the edge is a thrillingly scabrous, black-comic turn, and the final shot of his face in daylight is a masterstroke.
7: Jaws: In addition to scaring the living daylights out of millions of movie-goers and putting a cramp in the revenue stream of nearly every North American beach resort, two significant developments can be attributed to Jaws. Jaws was the first summer mega-hit, but, because Hollywood learns from its success stories, it has not been the last one.
8: The Cabin in the Woods: You’re not going to see this one coming. You might think you do, because the TV ads and shots at the top reveal what looks like the big surprise — and it certainly comes as a surprise to the characters. But let’s just say there’s a lot more to it than that. “The Cabin in the Woods” sets off with an ancient and familiar story plan. Five college students pile into a van and drive deep into the woods for a weekend in a borrowed cabin. Their last stop is of course a decrepit gas station populated by a demented creep who giggles at the fate in store for them.
9: It Follows: It Follows is from the American director David Robert Mitchell, whose 2010 debut movie, The Myth of the American Sleepover, was a gentle, unthreatening drama about teens and platonic crushes. That was Dr Jekyll to the snarling Mr Hyde of this new one. It genuinely is disturbing. The sex act means that she will be followed, at a zombie’s walking-pace, by a demon that only she can see, and which will kill her. The only way she can get rid of her pursuer before this happens is to have consenting sex with someone else, and so pass the curse on to them. Her agonies of horror and indecision are compounded by the presence of Paul, punningly ready to protect the person he loves.
10: Train to Busan: Yeon Sang-ho’s “Train to Busan”, is the most purely entertaining zombie film in some time, finding echoes of George Romero’s and Danny Boyle’s work, but delivering something unique for an era in which kindness to others seems more essential than ever. Social commentary aside, it’s also just a wildly fun action movie, beautifully paced and constructed, with just the right amount of character and horror.
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