First off, let me just say this: I am not encouraging or challenging you to watch any of these films. This list is not some contest to see who can endure the most brutal cinema and still have the capacity to sleep at night. No, I am simply writing this list because it needs to exist somewhere. There are certain horror movies from certain foreign countries that just take horror and the concept of terror to whole new levels.
If I were to bring up the devil to you, how would you envision it? Would you imagine a creature, bent at the spine and fiery red with a forked tongue? Would you imagine some massive, hulking beast, dwelling in a boiling pit of human souls, gorging himself on them and shitting them out only to eat them again? Or maybe you would see Satan as the scariest thing of all: human. Maybe you just imagine the devil as one of us, walking among us, laughing that we don't know he or she is there. Or maybe you are one of those people who just laugh at the thought of imaginary deities that are created to keep us in line.
I like messed up movies. I do my best to let the world know that and hope that an audience who likes similar material finds my writing. There is just something exceptional about taking a dark ride, willingly. Going to the places most choose to avoid (whether in the medium of art or just in the subject of the taboo in general). As much as we get to enjoy some forays into the absurd and twisted and bizarre, can you imagine what it must be like to direct such a film?
Disney does not f*ck around when it comes to its villains. They want the bad guys to look, act, and be evil. They want to send the kids home clearly knowing that the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black.
If you are going to make a movie trilogy, wouldn't you want the opus of that trilogy to be the final instalment? Wouldn't you make it your goal that the finale blew people's minds and had them walking away with their jaws agape? Of course you would.
I've always had an issue with the term torture porn. I didn't like the idea of the word "porn" being added to the torture aspects of these movies because I felt that it implied some level of sexual gratification was taken from them, and I don't think that is accurate. Yet now, years later, you watch a show on the Food Network and people call it food porn. That is when the term starts to make sense, though. Some of these films really are torture porn, if you think about it.
Allow me to take a moment to point out how absurd romantic comedies are as a genre. I don't care if I sound old and jaded and bitter. I know why the genre exists. It exists to give women some fleeting hope that some dickless fool will stand in the rain and monologue to her about how life is pointless without her. It is a genre specifically catered to lonely women, meant to make it so they can fill their sorry lives with a millimetre worth of hope that they might not die alone in their apartment some night while eating Cheetos and watching The Bachelorette.
It's going to happen every year. There is no way around it. No matter who you are, or what film genre you appreciate most, some movies are going to disappoint you. The problem is, film is art in the sense that it is subjective, and means different things to different people. So who are we to say one movie is bad and another is good?
Christmas is a very interesting time of year for an adult. No matter what do you or how you best try to recreate the holiday, it just feels like it can never live up the way your mind remembers it from your childhood. The fuzz of nostalgia can cast a beautiful glow on anything in hindsight, but there are things we can do to get ourselves back to those moments, like watching Christmas movies. The right ones can flash us right back to when we were wearing warm pyjamas and shaking the boxes underneath the tree, trying to figure out what might be inside.
