evil movie journal

hi my name is mari

thjs is my movie journal. i like horror movies. i watch them with the lights on

i’m not a film nerd. i know nothing of film. i just like blabbing about my favorite movies. entries will just be my thoughts. raunchy jokes ahead

below is the list of spooky flicks i’ve watched. i’ll rate them by enjoyment/artistry and by actual fear factor. not all of them may have entries yet, but the ones with links should.

Krampus (2015): Fat Kid eats living gingerbread cookie off of fishing bait, goes to hell for it

Enjoyment: 5/5 🎄| Scariness: 1/5 🔦

Overview: The Irish asshole from Hokum and the mother from Hereditary have a happy family including a violently Christmas-loving kid and a hoard of annoying in-laws. The in-laws are so annoying that the entire family has to be punished by a satanic shadow of Santa Claus.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD):

As we say to each other every day regardless of season, Merry Christmas! This is a fun movie. I wasn't really sure what I was expecting, but pretty much all of it was completely unexpected.

Christmas horror movies tend to be a sort of unique kind of bad wherein they try to take "cozy" aspects of Christmas and turn them scary. It's kind of difficult to accurately merge "festive" and "scary" without being ridiculous. Krampus doesn't have this issue, because it fully leans into being ridiculous - which I massively enjoyed!

This is a really great parody of those Christmas classics in general. It's got all the tropes of a sappy Christmas movie, being snowed in with the family, the extended family visiting who all have weird issues, the completely unlikeable family member, et cetera. I did like how the mother actually stood up to the asshole aunt, because that's something that never happens in holiday movies because they all relent for the purpose of showing us some kind of lesson about love. I liked how they stood up to the asshole aunt, and I also like how the asshole aunt was completely unphased by being dragged to literal hell. I mean, she even threw us a couple one-liners! It was pretty funny.

My favorite part of this movie was definitely the special effects and the monster designs. They're not scary, per se, but they're super fun. The jack-in-the-box worm monster is SUPER well done, and the actual practical build of it is amazing looking. The doll harpy is also wicked. Every monster in this film was super cool looking, right down to the elves. Each one had their own unique mask and costume, which really made them all stand out. Truth be told, it was really cool to see as an artist! I think the only monsters I wasn't a fan of in this aspect were the gingerbread men. The CGI was kind of stupid looking, but at the same time, that's the point. They were real funny otherwise. Krampus himself was a wicked design, and I'm glad we got a lot of scenes at the end where we could see him up close. I like how they lean into him looking like Santa Claus, but then the lightning flashes and you see the goat/ram pupils in his eyes. The recurring images of chains and that hook shape (being his horns, the fish hooks, et cetera) really sell him as a villain and I'm down with it.

The visuals aside from the monsters are also pretty great. A special shoutout needs to go to the animated flashback segment, which took me by surprise with how great it was. It reminded me of those random sort of melancholy animated movies I'd watch as a kid, or like, if you tried to 3d-animate Little Misfortune. It was just really great to watch, and again, another seller on the "Christmas Movie" tropes. The atmosphere is great too. I really like how it has, again, the stereotypical warm tones of a Christmas movie. That contrasts with the cool-toned blizzard outside excellently, and it just looks really awesome when the fire starts to go out. I don't know how to describe it, but the shift from warm to cool tones with the rising tension was neat.

Enjoyment: 5/5 💉 | Spookiness: 2/5 🔦

Overview: A charming children's show takes a dark turn when the host tries to recount his repressed memories.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

This movie is a wonderfully absurd look at the inside of someone's head, and I'm all here for it. Truth be told, I don't think it's the best or the deepest but I empathize a lot with it and it tells the story well.

A lot of horror media centered around children's shows have that same thing where they make the person running it or something about the atmosphere unsettling to throw you off from the start. Monkey doesn't do that - it lulls you with the calm, friendly, Mr. Rogers-esque vibe at first. I think the monkey puppet is a bit ugly, but not to the point of being disturbing. That's the point though, since the "show" is, you know, a figment of James's imagination that he uses to escape from his guilt.

I can't really say I like this as a horror movie, but I can say I love it as an exploration of escapism. It's bright and colorful and happy until the real world seeps in through the cracks, while the puppets all try to distract James from it. I sort of like how they all represented aspects of his psyche and his feelings after the fire. Bird and Beaver being standard mixed emotions, one never without the other, sort of a calling that James has to acknowledge his happy and his sad memories to move on (which is why, in my opinion, he maims and buries them both - that is his low point, being unable to remember anything before the show because killing the bad kills the good as well). I like the Lion too, whos name I forgot, who represents his agency and his "responsibility" to have protected his father and those he loves. I thought it was cool how he killed that responsibility, that ruler, and moved on, which is the point where the rest of the puppets became threats. I think that was because him killing the Lion was him accepting his guilt and sense of responsibility instead of pushing it away, which would then lead him to the unhappy truth they all wanted to hide from him. I don't know. My own experience with this sort of escapism isn't all that sinister, but it was strange and comforting in a weird way to see a "happy internal world where you protect yourself from the worse parts of yourself and your life" represented so well in the way that it was. Especially how he thanks monkey, even after all the maiming and torturing, which I'll get to later.

Anyway, this movie is light on jumpscares and moderate on gore. There's a lot of skin peeling. It kind of makes you cringe. It's not so much a scary thing as it is a gross thing. The whole "mailbox wearing the mom's face" thing was a little tacky to me at first, but I'm now sort of realizing that the mailbox was meant to represent James' fleeting relationship with his mother, how he could only catch glimpses of her, how he wanted to actually talk to her instead of just receiving messages. I change my mind, I like that part! Maybe not for the sheer creepiness of a woman getting trapped and then skinned alive, but for the symbolism.

My other favorite part of this movie was the ending. It's sort of a surreal movie, but once you kind of figure out it's in James's head, you can just go with it. He seriously moves on from having his leg cut off with play scissors insanely fast. Anyway. That's not the point. The point is that his coping and compartmentalizations, his "pals" he made to escape from the real world, tear him apart and put him back together to get rid of the "bad" and make James happy again. James is strung up like a puppet and dances around, but he makes the fatal choice to set the playground and the backyard alight. He sits on the porch and recounts to the viewer his childhood as he cuts the puppet strings, cutting his ties to escapism and finally acknowledging what happened. He makes peace with it and leaves, even as Monkey screams for him to stay in the happy world, he exits.

Enjoyment: 4/5 💉 | Spookiness: 1/5 🔦

Overview: Idiot teenagers have an embalmed hand that, when held, lets them talk to/be possessed by the dead. However, some of the dead are deeply malevolent. Hell, I would be too if people only talked to me for party tricks.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

This one is kind of a fun allegory on drug addiction, in my opinion. Remember how in Hokum, the magic shrooms were good because they let you see the dead? Well, the embalmed hand is bad because it lets you see the dead.

That's the whole point, is it gives you a thrill and also a light floaty feeling so they keep doing it until one of the kids gets seriously possessed and, like every A24 Horror movie to ever exist, bashes his head in. (Seriously, which special effects designer over there keeps doing it? It's like every damn movie they've got somebody slamming their head against something.)

That's not me complaining about the special effects or anything. Actually, I think the injury design and the designs of the dead were really sick. Talk to Me never shies away from grossness or from being weird. That's where I got goo people from, the dead folks in this movie are just really... slimy. That's okay, again, it's good effects. Not good for the squeamish at all.

Anyway, this movie is not so much a scary horror movie as it is a sad horror movie. The main character is dealing with grief over her mother dying to overdose, which leads to her over-using the talking hand. Along the way, it hurts her friends as well, you know, with the whole head-bashing incident incited by her pressuring her friend to keep using the hand so she could talk to her mother. Even though the main character makes a lot of fucked-up decisions, you still sympathize with her because she's in so much pain, which is a delicate balance.

Enjoyment: 3/5 💉 | Spookiness: 2/5 🔦

Overview: Annoying ass kid forces depressed mother to read him a cursed bedtime story. Depressed mother is then haunted by perfectly reasonable murderous urges.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

This movie actually carries a bit of nostalgia for me. I remember being a kid, scared out of my wits at the YouTube clip of the full book. Seriously, it was creepy. It still is. The storybook design for The Babadook is great. The atmosphere is really great too. It's grey and lifeless and oppressive and perfectly symbolic of how utterly hopeless the mother and the son are. The perfect appearances of shadows, the small noises, everything all adds up to make you feel like a kid again sitting in your room in the dead of night waiting for something to jump out at you. The Babadook is, in this aspect, great. It's really great, it's a great movie.

Except, it's sort of really hard to be scared when you are also praying on the downfall of the protagonist.

The protagonist being the little boy, that is. I can accept that children are very annoying; I cannot hate a child for simply being a child. However, the son in this movie is an absolute little devil who saps the life out of everyone around him. I understand that the whole point is that even a completely psyched-out little devil deserves to be loved by his mother, but he was genuinely so insufferable the whole movie that it makes it a little hard to root for his survival.

The other protagonist, on the other hand, is brilliant. I felt for the mother every single minute of this movie. Jesus Christ, dealing with an absolute monster (and also the Babadook threatening to take over your mind) is a power move. And really, her acting is amazing. The complete anguish she shows, the moments when you see her crack, it's all so frightening and distressing. This movie had me distressed and more scared of her at times than the monster. Real good acting.

Enjoyment: 3/5 💉 | Spookiness: 3/5 🔦

Overview: Dude gets a mysterious job offer: $1000 to film a day of this man's life. This man is a strange fellow, or one might even say... a creep!

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

I like Creep not because it's super intensive in terms of jumpscares, or because it's super bloody. Hell, there's nothing paranormal about it either. It's just.. weird. It's uncomfortable. From the minute Aaron meets Joseph, it's weird. The actor who plays Joseph does such a good job at making his character seem awkward and off-putting from the start, even when you're still trying to give this odd dying middle-aged man the benefit of the doubt. Something is just off from the start, and it's great!

I've had this movie spoiled for me about a year before I watched it, which is probably a reason I wasn't as scared by it. Hey, though, I still thought it was pretty great! The progression is natural. It feels like small moments of intensity that sort of build up. The scenes of Joseph showing up at Aaron's house are absolutely suffocating, but nothing actually happens, which lures you into this awful false sense of hope.

The found footage aspect of this movie is actually great, too. It makes sense why Aaron's filming, that's his job, and it makes sense why Joseph's filming, he's a psychopath who likes to keep tapes of his victims. Never once watching this movie did I think it'd be better if they dropped the camera. That's a huge gripe I have with a lot of these sorts of movies, but Creep evades it.

My main complaint is definitely that Aaron just... has no common sense? If I'd been drugged by a dude and got the chance to leave anyway, I'd be out of there in no time. Sure, I can give Aaron some grace in that he called the cops, he tried to play it safe. But seriously, going back to try and "help" Joseph? What is there to help? The guy LARPs being a dad with stage 4 cancer and lures people to a rental cabin to have them film fake scenes before he kills them! Well, I guess Aaron doesn't know the last part, but the drugging and the LARPing should be enough for you to never go back.

Enjoyment: 3/5 💉 | Spookiness: 5/5 🔦

Overview: A group of three goes into the woods to film a documentary about the Blair Witch. They get lost like a couple of idiots.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

I hate this movie. So bad.

Well, okay. I want to hate this movie so bad, but it scared the shit out of me. And I can't watch it again, because it won't scare the shit out of me the next time because nothing happens. No jumpscares, no witch. No nothing.

In fact, right after I watched it, I went and I told my friend how disappointing of a movie it was. All that buildup, and for what! Just a couple of shoddy disappearances? Well, yeah, and then I got to thinking really long and really hard. My heart was pounding during a good half of the movie. Like, I had to take an earbud out, which is what I always do during really scary movies.

That is to say, the buildup and tension of Blair Witch Project is brilliant. It's brilliant, and it makes sense, and it makes your heart pound like it would seeing the sexiest woman alive. Except you're scared this time, or something. At first it's kind of just, okay, they're doing something stupid, then things start to go worse and worse and they're trapped and every night is a spookfest. It's hard to believe how far Blair Witch Project goes using just piles of stones and weird sticks. Like, jeez, I can make one of those things. I wouldn't, though, because the Blair Witch is some kind of terrifying apex predator who will never be seen by those she stalks.

Just about the only real bloody moment in the entire movie is when they find the dude's eyes in a bundle of sticks. It's grainy and awful but it makes you gasp a little. Man, that part's good.

Blair Witch also does the whole found-footage thing great; even up to the end, it still makes sense why they're filming. It's one of the only ways they can see and it's their last way of holding onto hope of getting out. It makes sense every time they film, and it just makes it all the more terrifying how the camera rocks back and forth while they run.

Enjoyment: 1/5 💉 | Spookiness: 1/5 🔦

Overview: A young mother regains custody of her child, only for things to go terribly wrong as a curse based on knowledge and names unravels.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

This is the last time I trust Tiktok comments for movie recommendations. Seriously, this is what scares you guys? Abysmal!

I'll drop in first by saying that I watched this with my father and some family friends, who preferred it to be in the English dub instead of the original Mandarin. I'm almost completely sure that this movie would have been at least a little bit better if we'd watched it in the original language; in English it was just ridiculous. There's also a whole lot of cultural context that I'm missing out on, seeing as I'm a white dude from the suburbs of Texas.

All that aside, this movie is immediately faced with the crucial issue that all found footage films encounter: "How do I keep the cameras on and how do I make it believable that this has been filmed?" This movie faces this issue and buckles at the knees and falls down, which is caught by another random camera which has been conveniently placed somewhere. Seriously, there's random car shots, shots where the cameraperson is blind and shouldn't be able to angle the camera so well, and even shots where it's just stupid to be holding a camera. It was a little agitating to watch, just random cuts to different angles where there's not supposed to be a camera. Seriously, the main character is a single mother just coming out of a mental institution with no mentioned job. She can't be able to afford so many cameras.

Anyway. My main gripe with this movie is just that it doesn't really make sense a lot of the time, there's random cuts to things happening out of order and things happen (like the little girl jumping off the roof only to be carried back up) that are never addressed again. Also, the main characters are just stupid at the beginning. Yeah, carve a penis on your family's temple while they're doing an ancient closed blood ritual. Great idea, jackass. Cut down the sacred talismans in the cave that must not be entered, even! Awesome!

Enjoyment: 3/5 💉 | Spookiness: 3/5 🔦

Overview: A novelist goes to stay alone with his family in a hotel for the winter. He loses his shit, the kid's a weird ass kid, and poor Shelly Duvall just wants everyone to have a nice vacation.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

The Shining does not have any super-intense jumpscares. It's not all that gory compared to other films I've seen. It's not all that dark either. Yet, it's one of the most uncomfortable films I've seen.

It's one of the most uncomfortable films I've ever seen because Jack Nicholson, who plays Jack Torrance, the author, is a frightening-looking man. That is a compliment. He makes such unsettling faces and expressions that every scene with him in it made me incredibly uncomfortable. I couldn't care less for the creepy twins, or the blood elevator, or anything else, just take the damn camera off of Jack because holy shit is he making some scary ass faces.

I really don't know how to get the above across well, so I'll just put it off as good acting. It's real good acting, everyone in this movie is good at acting.

That's kind of the whole deal, it's really tense all the way through. You keep thinking Jack is gonna lose his marbles any minute now, and then he does. It's really great. I thought the random bit with the haunted suite was, as mentioned, random, but it made it all the more tense when that wasn't the reason the little kid had the bruises. The Shining really twists what you think will happen and goes, "nope, just Jack's fault. idiot."

Enjoyment: 4/5 💉 | Spookiness: 2/5 🔦

Overview: American guy goes to bury his parents' ashes in Ireland. Old man in woods tells how shrooms open your mind to the unknown, guy must confront trauma and also the forbidden honeymoon suite where a witch lies.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!):

The witch is like, the least of your problems here. Genuinely. It's almost like you could've had a perfectly fine thriller without the witch, because everyone is just fucking everything up.

The bulging-eyed puppet-thing from the teasers also isn't that significant. Sure, it's creepy, but it really didn't serve much purpose. I guess the whole creepy-rabbit he writes to only to receive a shitty response along with Fiona dying in the rabbit costume serves to symbolize how whatever he seeks out to "save" himself always evades him. Something like that. I don't know, I thought it was kind of unnecessary.

Hokum is kind of a wacked-out movie in that you really don't expect any of it to happen. You see Fiona talking about the chalk to evade the witch and Mr. Hotel Guy Whatshisname so fervently refusing to open up the honeymoon suite cuz there's a witch and it's blah blah blah all about the witch, but the witch genuinely is like, the least of your worries by the end of it.

Actually, I think that's the whole point, and I think it's pretty fantastic. It's nice for a movie to touch on the idea that yeah, the paranormal exists, but human cruelty is far more dangerous. I mean, Mal was just kind of just going at it to keep him murdering Fiona a secret. Seriously. I wish they would've expanded more on Jerry killing his wife, it's kind of weird that he just says "oh she was very ill" and suddenly Ohm stops having questions, but Ohm was a super-ass anyway.

The main character is once again my least favorite part of the film! Yeah, you heard it here, super-ass. Worse than a regular ass. He's rude to just about everyone he meets except for Jerry and Fiona, and by the end of the movie he's still rude; yeah, he agrees to look over the manuscript, but he never even apologizes for just straight up burning a guy's hand out of nowhere. And I get that his writing at first with the conquistador was supposed to be him wishing his mother had killed him out of guilt, then at the end it changes to them hugging each other because he forgives himself, but I think he needs to be a little more guilty about being so awful to everyone around him. Yeah, you feel bad, dude, whatever. I don't feel all that bad for you.

Enjoyment: 3/5 💉 | Spookiness: 3/5 🔦

Overview: Absolute failure of a True Crime writer moves family into murder house to write about recent murder. True crime writer finds creepy ass tapes, discovers occult connection.

Review (SPOILERS AHEAD!)

I can't lie, for how hyped up this movie is, I was just a tad bit disappointed. I saw it recommended as the movie that scientifically raises your heart rate the absolute most, so I was like, yeah, sure, scientifically scary movie. I admit that I did actually have to pull my earplugs out a few times; the sound design is absolutely great at making tension. Seriously, that's the only reason this movie is scary, the atmospheric tension. However, all that fear goes down the drain when you start seeing photos of the demon and it just looks like a die-hard fan of Insane Clown Posse. Really. That's what did it for me.

Besides that, I just couldn't stand the main character. He was self-pitying, first of all, and also just flat out stupid to move into a murder house. That's literally how you get yourself cursed, idiot. He was cursed to begin with because cops didn't like him and his wife didn't like him and his kids weren't doing that great either. Honestly, just kill the guy already! The one thing he had going for him was being smart, and it was really fun to watch him stumble through solving the case. I guess I could root for him, but not so much in wanting him to survive as just wanting him to figure out what was going on.

The tapes of the previous murders are well-done and brutal as well, especially the one with the lawnmower (which, frankly, I did turn away a little for; I'm almost thankful they didn't show it. Yeeeee-ouch!) Really, again, the kids in this movie are scarier than the stupid ass demon. There's a lot of great moments of tension, but they're all with the little girl or her older brother gallivanting around the house. I definitely didn't see the painting thing coming, but it was a great touch.