NOSTALGIA! Horror movies turning 21 in 2022

21 years old. And you didn’t even see him pass. This year, some of Hollywood’s most beloved and popular productions are celebrating their birthdays. I can not believe it. Take, for example, the first Spider-Man movie on the big screen, directed by Sam Raimi. Another example would be the first Resident Evil, starring Milla Jovovich. Or even the first live Scooby-Doo.

All are pop films, always very popular with the general public. Besides the surprise that each has already completed 21 years of release, another is to realize that they all remain inserted into popular culture, whether through reboots, remakes or new adaptations. Here, however, we are not going to talk about famous blockbusters, but about a specific type of film that we love and that you love too: horror movies!

Check out the genre’s most famous productions now coming of age now – they’ll turn 21 in 2022.

Very important to horror, it was the film that redefined the zombie subgenre for the 2000s – influential to this day in how pop culture portrays the flesh-eating undead. Before that, the reference was the works of George Romero, such as the absolute classic Night of the Living Dead, and even his “parodies”, see The Return of the Living Dead. But it was this little British indie film, which didn’t make as much of a splash in its early days but became an instant cult following, that would kickstart how creatures would be portrayed in the future. . That is to say accelerated as if they had taken ecstasy, instead of being slow as in the classics. From Dawn of the Dead, to Everybody Almost Dead, to The Walking Dead, modern zombie fever owes a lot to this simple but very effective film, which shows a dude (Cillian Murphy) waking up in London to a stark reality. of infected. .

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Based on an American urban legend, or according to many accounts, a true story that took place in West Virginia, Point Pleasant, between 1966 and 1967. At the time, several locals claimed to have glimpsed a creature humanoid, with red eyes, which emit growls and possess bird feathers, being described as a hybrid between a man and a bird. The creature takes on even more supernatural airs in its interpretation in this film, produced by Lakeshore Entertainment and distributed by Sony Pictures. The film stars star Richard Gere in the lead role, as a reporter who loses his wife in a car accident and decides to travel to the small town to investigate the creature’s sightings. Interestingly, in keeping with the tradition of “twin” films, the same year was released The Mystery of the Dragonfly, a thriller that Kevin Costner directed for Universal Pictures, which owns a very similar plot.

A $20 million Warner blockbuster, this horror was one of its big bets at the time – 21 years ago. Produced by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis, through the duo’s label, Dark Castle Entertainment (responsible for releases such as A Casa da Colina, Treze Fantasmas, Na Companhia do Medo and A Casa de Cera, for example), the idea was to to have a kind of The Shining (1980), shot entirely rather than in a hotel, on a boat where really bad things happened. In the plot, Gabriel Byrne and Julianne Marguiles are part of a group of modern pirates, who roam the ships in search of their treasures. Upon encountering the luxury ship where a terrible tragedy occurred, they had to face their greatest demons.

Perhaps the most beloved horror production released 21 years ago, The Ring is also one of the few remakes considered superior to its original. This is the 1998 Japanese horror Ringu – which four years later gained a new Hollywood appearance produced by Dreamworks Pictures. The film was also responsible for starring protagonist Naomi Watts, who plays a journalist encountering a macabre, supernatural story involving teenage deaths and an urban legend on a VHS tape that, upon being viewed, kills its viewer in one a week. And who will ever forget the ghost girl Samara?

Director M. Night Shyamalan entered the film world with both feet in the door, delivering the seminal The Sixth Sense (1999). After a stint in the cult Corpo Fechado (2000) without the same result, the filmmaker returns to the controls of a feature film closer to the content of his first great success. In other words, a film more focused on horror, but without forgetting the human elements that have enriched his works so much. Here, Shyamalan took a break from Bruce Willis and cast Mel Gibson as a pastor, farm-house father who loses faith after the accident that takes his wife’s life. The great Joaquin Phoenix plays an important role as the protagonist’s younger brother, helping him raise his two young children. As little tragedy is nonsense, this family finds itself in the middle of a mystery of interplanetary proportions. Certainly one of Shyamalan’s most heartbreaking films, and also one of his most tense – even if the ending does record one of his famous slip-ups.

Do you remember that shameless movie here? In the early days of the Internet, there was no shortage of hack producers to take advantage of such modernity, turning the famous acronym of the global network that transports anyone to another continent in the blink of an eye, into the title of their work. of horror. Distributed by the same Warner in the United States and Sony in the rest of the world, Medo Ponto Com copies The Ring but does it differently. Instead of a cursed VHS tape, how about a cursed website – after all, tapes were already outdated and DVDs and the internet were all the rage back then. And how about instead of a journalist trying to protect her grandson, two detectives played by Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone. And if you thought Samara was missing, you’d be wrong, because this film has its own version of a character that puts the haunting face to face, with Jeannine, played by German Gesine Cukrowski. Whoever says which of the two films stuck in the minds of fans wins.

Halloween: Resurrection

Who?! 21 years ago we had a copy of the beloved Halloween slasher franchise and I still hadn’t put it on the top list, how could that be? Calm down, dear reader, don’t be surprised. What happens is that we are talking about Halloween Resurrection here, considered by many fans of the Michael Myers saga on the big screen to be one of his worst examples, if not “the worst”! The most heartbreaking thing about the movie is knowing that it continued the fun and success of Halloween H20, a big celebration of the franchise, 20 years after the original. It all seemed to be over by the end of H20, but it’s clear the producers weren’t going to eliminate their golden goose for good. In recent revelations, muse Jamie Lee Curtis even said that she already knew that H20 would have a sequel during filming, as it was in her contract. She wanted H20 to be the final. Anyway, four years after H20 we learn that Michael was not really dead, and it is Laurie (Curtis) who dies when the psychopath finds her in a psychiatric hospital. From there, it’s just a descent for the film, which uses two elements that were new at the time: reality shows and the internet – to create a spectacle set inside Michael’s house. Of course, the host of the house shows up to get the party started.

A rotten cult horror, this film was responsible for revealing to the world (especially the world of terror) the butcher Eli Roth. Quentin Tarantino’s patron made his feature film debut with this film which uses the cabin terror subgenre – consolidated with Evil Dead – and attempts to subvert it by bringing into its story (written by Roth) not a serial killer, but a highly contagious disease and its consequences for a group of university students isolated in the forest. While he’s not exactly a slasher, you can be sure Roth doesn’t spare the dirt gallons and gallons of blood. Apart from that, through a certain humor and insane moments, the filmmaker leaves his mark by transforming this work, which is certainly not for all tastes, into an immediate cult.

Speaking of horror movies that use a lot of humor in their narrative, here we have the biggest example of “terrify” on the list. He might also like to take the horror of giant spiders on the loose in a small American town seriously. As with Attack of the Cursed Worms, the filmmakers of this $30 million Warner-produced feature knew they had to laugh with the film, so the audience would NOT laugh AT the film. The protagonist is David Arquette, then of fame from the Panic trilogy – horror movies that also used a lot of humor. The plot, as you can imagine, shows spiders being exposed to a chemical, growing to enormous size. The surprise in the casting however, at least today, is the presence of the still very young muse Scarlett Johansson in one of her first significant roles in the cinema. She plays the sheriff’s daughter who teaches an abusive suitor a good lesson.

The all-seeing eye

For my last pick on the list, I’m bringing a not-so-well-known movie. Or should I say rather unrecognized. The cool thing about movies is that sometimes you find yourself going to see a movie that’s totally unusual, doesn’t have a massive marketing campaign, or disappears so quickly that when you watch it again for some reason, we say to ourselves: “Oh, it’s true, I saw this film. at the cinema”. A pride for any cinephile. And that was one of my most unusual sessions. Have you ever heard of this terror? The production is not that B, after all it is an output at Universal Pictures, one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. Like Halloween Resurrection, this film rises to the heights of reality shows and their hidden cameras, to tell the story of a show where five young people will have to spend a year in an isolated house in order to fight for the price of a million bucks. . During this time, the bizarre situations accumulate, until they discover that the reality they live is not exactly what they imagined. Ah yes, casting a Bradley Cooper at the start of his career.

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