Movies that make you work.
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00:00 Horror movies are notoriously easy in just about every which way possible. Cobbled-together
00:05 films that see a bunch of teenagers hunted down by a dastardly ghost are a dime a dozen,
00:10 and do their job admirably at providing lowbrow entertainment with a dash of blood and boobs
00:15 to really spice things up. Whether it's an ancient burial ground, a disturbed Ouija
00:20 board, or a stupid dare gone wrong, cheap and cheerful horror comes in distinct and
00:25 classic flavors that define the bread and butter of the genre.
00:29 And whilst these movies are excellent fun, real terror doesn't come from jump scares
00:34 and CGI shadows. Real terror is born in the depths of the unknown, crafted by filmmakers
00:40 into an overbearing presence in a movie that never quite explains itself or its intentions
00:45 as long as the runtime plays out.
00:47 Like the exceptional it follows, films that don't give away their reasoning and remain
00:51 shrouded in questions are some of the most impressive in the canon, making for endless
00:56 theories as our imaginations do far more work than a straight-laced narrative ever could.
01:02 Not knowing what the f*** is going on when the credits roll is half the joy of a really
01:06 great film, after all. I am the unknowable entity of Ash from What Culture, and these
01:12 are 8 Mysterious Horror Movies That Give Nothing Away.
01:17 8. Raw
01:19 What starts as a strange dive into the world of hazing at university soon spirals out
01:24 of control in Raw, which prides itself on portraying a visceral, stomach-churning fresh
01:29 as weak that changes Justine's life forever. A devout vegetarian that is disgusted by meat,
01:36 Justine is a talented student who aims to become a talented vet, and will take part
01:40 in all manner of degrading rituals in order to be accepted into the wider school community.
01:45 An integral part of this ritual is to eat raw rabbit kidney, which is unpleasant enough
01:50 for poor Justine's moral compass, but becomes a far bigger problem when it breaks her out
01:54 in a rash and sets off an uncontrollable craving for flesh wherever she can get her hands on
02:00 it. You know, just the usual food poisoning. As the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that
02:04 her family have all been cursed with the same weakness to meat, but the how, the why, and
02:09 the what are never touched upon. Is it a genetic disease? An actual curse? A weakness? Has
02:16 it been in their family forever, or did it just start with their mother?
02:19 Is it just the women of the family that want nothing more than to chow down on barbeque
02:23 human ribs with a side of literal bloody mairies? Raw is an intimate look at Justine's struggle
02:29 above all else, and its tantalizing mystery is just as impenetrable to us as it is to
02:34 her.
02:35 7. The Borderlands
02:38 When it comes to found footage movies, there is always going to be some mystery involved.
02:42 How the hell someone found the death tapes of a bunch of people making a fake documentary
02:46 never fails to be an unanswerable question. But in The Borderlands, it is the ending that
02:51 makes for a compelling mystery.
02:54 Set in the English countryside, a religious brother, a tech expert, and a priest are sent
02:58 by the Vatican to investigate a local church that has been reopened and brought up reports
03:03 of supernatural activity. Getting into their research and discovering that all is not as
03:08 it seems at the religious institution, the men discover that the site used to be used
03:12 for worshipping an ancient pagan deity. With the final moment seeing two of the men to
03:17 a hidden stairwell that leads to a labyrinth under the church. The walls then close on
03:21 them and begin to digest them out of nowhere. Wait, what?
03:25 It seems to suggest that the deity is a part of the site itself rather than an obscure
03:29 being. But exactly how it came to be, or what has really been going on under its influence,
03:34 is as mysterious as to how it got a whole human-sized digestive tract set up there
03:38 in the first place. That the film gives no clue to this bizarre ending only makes it
03:43 that much more intriguing, since a giant, person-consuming monster seems like something
03:47 you would mention before it gets to, well, you know, consuming people on screen.
03:53 6. Suspiria 1977 and 2018
03:57 The two Suspiria movies we have been gifted from the cinematic overlords are very different.
04:02 But they both draw from the same pool of weirdness that is Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi's
04:07 original screenplay.
04:09 When 1977 is a vivid, jangling puzzle to be pieced together with witchcraft brewing at
04:14 the edges, the 2018 version takes a little time to hide its magical trappings, with each
04:20 building a world where a coven are channeling power through a dance school and have Susie
04:24 Banyan in their sights for their grand, wicked schemes.
04:28 Whilst both films do outright tell a story, they don't make sense without some grasp on
04:33 the source material. Argento's story is born from Thomas De Quincey's essay titled Suspiria
04:37 De Profundis, released in 1845, that describes there are three sorrows that curse humanity
04:43 with depression, grief, and despair, envisioned as Our Lady of Tears, Our Lady of Sighs, and
04:48 Our Lady of Darkness.
04:50 The original Suspiria, in particular, feels like an audiovisual experience to define witchcraft
04:55 rather than an outright exploration of the coven that live in the dance school. With
04:59 De Quincey's work looming over the project, yet never been dissected in any detail, As
05:04 Our Lady of Sighs attempts to come back to her full potential.
05:07 The Three Mothers trilogy does go into more detail on this, but even in the new remake,
05:12 there's far more power, ritualistic practice, and hidden secrets that are never explored
05:17 in any detail. Darkness lurks under the surface as to Banyan's true intentions, but the how
05:22 and why of her getting to her final form is as much a mystery as to how the witches came
05:27 about in the first place.
05:29 5. The Neon Demon
05:31 Nicholas Winding Refn's arthouse breakdown of the horrors of the fashion industry is
05:35 as intoxicating as it is symbolic, with Elle Fanning's rise and fall as a model prodigy
05:40 serving up mesmerizing visuals and dreamy atmosphere without really distilling the truth
05:45 of what happens throughout the runtime.
05:47 Fanning's Jessie moves to LA to pursue a career as a model, befriending a makeup artist and
05:52 two other models that slowly become both infatuated and jealous of Jessie's beauty. As the film
05:58 goes on, Jessie's youth and aesthetics provoke her friends to murder and consume her, attempting
06:03 to take her essence for their own gain as they continue on with their lives.
06:08 However, Jessie seemingly poisons two of the trio from the inside, with the last remaining
06:13 model ending the film taking advantage of her newfound success, born from the same infatuation
06:18 that Jessie enjoyed earlier in the movie.
06:21 It makes sense that a film about fashion is style over substance, but there's a hidden
06:25 narrative picked apart from theorists that sees the entire thing as a ritualistic practice,
06:30 one continually enacted by the makeup artist and her friends in a coven to retain their
06:34 status and power. A subtle undercurrent of witchcraft that takes time to pick apart,
06:40 the neon demon feels like the spiritual successor to Zespiria, and just as mysterious in its
06:45 true intentions to boot.
06:47 4. Videodrome
06:49 Blurring fiction and reality always results in some of the most mind-boggling movies to
06:53 attempt to get into, and nothing is more mind-boggling and literal in its getting into than Videodrome.
07:00 A swirling body horror nightmare that melts flesh and machinery into one big amorphous
07:05 mess, Videodrome is the descent into a hallucinatory hellscape by TV station president Max Renn.
07:12 Renn is on the hunt for the most outrageous footage he can get his hands on, everything
07:15 from gratuitous violence to softcore porn, wanting to broadcast only the most sensational
07:20 clips to his depraved audience at home.
07:23 And then Videodrome, the most sensationalist show of them all, lands in his lap.
07:28 The series depicts violent acts that end in murder, alongside inducing hallucinations
07:32 in viewers from an errant signal that induces malignant brain tumors.
07:36 Renn is slowly brainwashed from his exposure to Videodrome and programmed to take out low
07:41 lives and engage with his content, before being turned to the other side again and encouraged
07:45 to kill himself to ascend and destroy Videodrome once and for all.
07:50 If that doesn't make sense, then don't worry.
07:52 That's why it's on this list.
07:54 Being a Cronenberg film, you can count on VCR tapes being shoved into body cavities
07:58 and humans being mangled into unrecognizable heaps of writhing flesh to entertain you if
08:03 the convoluted plot doesn't appeal the first time around.
08:06 A few rewatches later, though, and we all get there in the end.
08:10 Long live the new flesh.
08:13 3.
08:14 Midsommar
08:15 What most of these mysterious horror movies have at their heart is an ulterior motive
08:19 played out by their antagonists, never quite revealing the whats and whys of their actions
08:24 in a parallel to their clueless central characters.
08:28 Midsommar thrives with this subjective viewpoint in particular from Dani, who travels to Sweden
08:32 for a Midsommar celebration with her boyfriend and his pals to learn about the Haga commune's
08:37 customs as the group spend time with the locals.
08:41 Director Ari Aster has created his own iteration of what this celebration would be, throwing
08:45 in a bit of ritual sacrifice, a whole load of hallucinogenics, and a dead bear in for
08:50 good measure.
08:51 Hey, that's what I call a good time.
08:54 Just as he previously did with his work on Hereditary, Aster slowly ekes out a larger
08:58 plan for his characters that isn't clear to much anyone until the very end.
09:02 In both cases, revealing cult shenanigans enveloping ignorant bystanders who don't
09:06 catch on until it is far too late.
09:09 Aster is an expert at keeping his cards close to his chest, crafting a dark underbelly to
09:14 a story that unravels slowly but surely as an experience rather than it does a fully
09:19 formed narrative for unwitting audiences.
09:22 2.
09:23 Audition
09:24 Those familiar with Takashi Miike's particular brand of horror will know Audition well, a
09:29 film that appears on the surface as something of a light-hearted drama before devolving
09:33 completely into a sadistic nightmare.
09:36 Ayama wants to begin dating again after the death of his wife, and decides that the best
09:40 way to do this is to build a lovely foundation on lies and deceit in a TV casting that doubles
09:45 up as a speed dating round for his perfect woman.
09:49 When the captivating Asami attends and seems to be the ideal fit for his particular tastes,
09:54 he thinks he has won the jackpot.
09:56 That is, until both come clean about their true natures.
10:00 Asami is a dab hand with a set of needles, as it turns out, and very accurately, very
10:05 painfully sticks them into Ayama's paralysed body at the close of the film in a torturously
10:10 long revenge sequence that comes largely out of nowhere.
10:13 Audition seeds clues in flashbacks and hazy scenes of Asami's past, and also a strange
10:18 man that she keeps in a bag and sometimes feeds with vomit, making for a confusing,
10:23 disturbing finale that is as repellent as it is harrowing.
10:26 The true motives of Asami aren't ever spelled out for an audience, instead falling back
10:30 on visuals that evoke pain in all of its forms.
10:34 You have to work to piece together this film by the end, but it is entirely worth it.
10:39 1.
10:40 Perfect Blue
10:41 Satoshi Kon's masterwork of an anime is as confusing as it is beautiful, depicting some
10:47 of the most mentally exhausting and downright disturbing scenes put to animation that never
10:51 once pull together in any discernible way.
10:54 That is not to say the film isn't excellent.
10:57 It's just such an involved depiction of a fractured mind that trying to catch all of
11:01 the threads of what is really happening is an almost impossible task.
11:05 The impenetrable narrative is all a part of Perfect Blue's charm, though.
11:08 As pop idol Mima decides to break away from her sweet image into acting by taking on a
11:13 gnarly TV character.
11:16 In the role, she is coerced into playing a rape victim, which sours her squeaky clean
11:20 image and sets an obsessed fan after her who won't abide by the change in her persona.
11:25 The scene marks a defining point where Mima's life cracks down the middle, with both the
11:29 world's perception of her and her own perception of herself branching into separate entities
11:33 that plague her life as she tries to pull back control.
11:37 Different versions of Mima roam free as she tries to get a hold on reality, moving through
11:41 time incoherently, which makes for a mixed up mess of a narrative that requires patience
11:46 and re-watching to interpret as you see fit.
11:49 Whether it has got something to do with her manager's interference, a strange dream, or
11:54 something else entirely, Mima's story is not one that reveals itself easily.