Kangaroo Jack

Which one ? The 2012 one with the 4.1 score and the angry reviews on imdb ?

Being trapped alone with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney for two whole hours sounds traumatizing enough.

Anyway, I made myself a list of movies, so, thanks to all the contributors to that thread so far. I've let aside the pure torture porn and slasher plots, as it's a genre that tires me a bit, and of course the films I've already seen. And I have all these films ahead :

"Kairo", "Sauna", "Sennentuntschi", "The Possession", "The Possession of Michael King in particular", "The New Daughter", "Deadgirl", "Dead souls", "Oculus", "The devil inside", "The quiet ones", "Ils", "Three extremes 1&2", "The conjuring", "Sinister", "The fourth kind", "Atrocious", "A tale of two sisters", "Reincarnation" and "The pact". Probably starting with "Kairo". I also hope to find a way to check "Silk" some time, but this seems to be difficult...

To think that this year I didn't even step at the NIFFF because I wasn't in the mood for genre movies... :-/

Cannibal Holocaust with true animals killed in the film !

i hesitate to mention melacholie der engel but since nobody else did

its 165 minutes of uncomfortable bizarre horror that will make your skin crawl

there is no story no rhyme nor reason to it
just 165 minutes fo awfull people doing awfull things its nhillistic and awfull and horrific

I don't read IMDB reviews. The one I saw last night was shot in North Las Vegas. It was effective. You just knew that attempting to fix the problem only made it worse. I could almost see Sam and Dean Winchester getting involved with this one.

Just trying to make sure of which one you mean, cause there is a bunch of movies with that title (or slight variations : "the apparition", "apparitions", etc).

A Supernatural fan!! Best show on tv IMO

I don't really get why people think The Conjuring is so scary... to me it is a fairly ordinary haunted-house/exorcism movie. Are there scary moments... yes definitely. But for me, the story feels like just a series of incidents and doesn't quite build up in a satisfying way.

Also, I had just read the original book of The Amityville Horror, to which it is basically identical.

I have seen the conjuring 3 times now, and the best one was the first. Watched it with my daughter the first time in the theater surrounded by a bunch of teenagers screaming. Me and my daughter were more entertained by the audience at times ;)
I also think the atmosphere in the theater (dark and lots of scared people) made the movie more memorable too. Next two times I saw it was on a tv, and it was for sure not as intense. Still a really good movie though :)

Arachnophobia might just be different enough, especially if you invite a bunch of friends over & watch it in the dark. Seriously, I saw that movie in a theater packed with teenagers & young adults when it came out (1990 or 1991), and while it wasn't your traditional horror movie...it was enough to give everyone the worst case of the heebie-jeebies you can imagine.

Most movies are better in the theater, yeah. I'm very glad I saw The Ring and The Others in dark theaters full of silent people.

But these horror movies are almost always very formulaic. Very codified. And thus very predictible, both in terms of general plots, and in tems of effects. At best, they surprise us by subverting some of these codified expectations ("Darkness" works well if you expect "Shining", "The pact" has a suspense mostly based on anticipation and toys a lot with not requiring anything to actually happen, "The ring" has a last twist that functions by turning around the usual role of the ghost), but still the general structures stay the same, and the clichés underlie it all. They are not creative movies, and occasional inversions don't suffice to make them so. Nor does the self-satisfaction of the amateur film maker so proud of his effect ("look at my zombie head ! what story ? i mean, i'm the first one filming a drill through a nail in subjective view, aren't i groundbreaking").

You can escape it for some time by jumping into other national cinemas, with refreshingly different styles, whether as a spectator exploring foreign movies or as a producer hunting for remakes material, hence the asian or spanish trends, but these also have their own codes that end up running dry after a while ("yes, japan: hair. we got it"). When you step in this filming universe, even more than any other, you know you're not after originality. At least not after having seen a couple of movies...

"Repulsion", which isn't recent by any means, but all the more terrifying.

Even George Romero agrees with me: "Many wouldn't place Repulsion in this category, but I do. Is Jaws a horror film? Is The Silence of the Lambs? Yes. And they've elevated the genre. But hey, man, we're talkin' Roman here! You want scary. Take it from a scary guy. Go watch Repulsion."

There's also "The Tenant", which interestingly enough is Bruce Campbell's favourite scary film.

I heard about it and judging by your tone it's a special recommendation, thx :D