As 2024 comes to a crashing end on an uncharted shore of outright fascist shititude, I wanted to look back on the movies that were the highlight of the last twelve miserable months. Hi! Welcome back to Stranger with Friction, it’s been a while since I dusted off this old blog and threw something new up. With the demise of the print edition of SWF, I've had an itch to bring it back to life, if for no other reason than to have a venue for talking about music and movies again. So, let's get on with it...
Have I seen Nosferatu or Terrifier 3 yet? I have not. Probably won't get to them until January.
V/H/S Beyond was really good and I'm glad to see that the ongoing series course corrected so well since the lack luster V/H/S Viral. Beyond is science fiction horror that works about 95% of the time. All the recent V/H/S movies have been a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to what they try next.
Caddo Lake was barely keeping my attention until I realized what it was doing and then I was all in and found it to be a very satisfying tale of time fuckery. I never heard a word about it until it was streaming on HBO, so some corporate hack dropped the fucking ball, because Caddo Lake deserves much better than being dumped on a streamer between insipid reality shows.
The Substance from Coralie Fargeat, director of the fantastic Revenge, is so neck and neck for being my favorite movie of the year. A hyper visual, reality bending, science fiction body horror coming off like a super genius weirdo niece of Cronenberg and Hennenlotter, The Substance had the gall to go full rubber monster in a great takedown of Hollywood beauty standards and how the industry routinely rapes and strip mines youth only to abandon women north of forty like a coal town in Kentucky when the company moves on. It is the must-see movie of the year.
My dad showed me Alien when I was five and I've held those movies in high regard since. I'll always show up for new Xeno tales and I enjoyed Alien: Romulus immensely, probably because it appeared to be so highly informed by the game Alien: Isolation, which is one of my top five games of the last twenty years. The AI resurrection of one particular character is a strong red mark against the movie though. It was a stupid and unnecessary addition.
Tilman Singer's 2018 film, Luz, blew me away in its hyper kinetic throwback to a movie like Alucarda with a possession story that swung for the fences, so Cuckoo was second most anticipated movie of the year behind Maxxine. Cuckoo is a delightfully weird and paranoic thriller with veins of sci-fi and horror pulsing like a marathon runner going off a cliff.
Speaking of Maxxxine, Ti West’s X trilogy ended strong, moving the story to 1980s LA, steeped in neon sleaze, Brian DePalma worship, and homages to great LA horror/thrillers of the 80s. The strength of the trilogy is not being a one-trick-pony. Each of the movies is a unique experience and as good as X and Pearl are, Maxxxine was my favorite and my favorite West film since House of the Devil.
Damian McCarthy’s Caveat was a very interesting and entertaining debut, but Oddity was a fantastic paranormal thriller with shades of a classic Fulci giallo from the 70s mixed some Amicus horror. It has a wildly unique device and great lead in Carolyn Bracken who plays double roles as sisters Dani and Darcy.
Oz Perkins already has a few great films under his belt, but Longlegs is his best yet. A mix of Silence of the Lambs, satanic panic, and Lynchian liminal weirdness. Nic Cage delivers yet another performance for the ages, the California Kinski is going to be remembered like Lon Chaney Sr. Then there’s Maika Monroe’s nuanced and pained performance driving the film and Alicia Witt being quietly unhinged. It's made Perkin’s next film, The Monkey, my most anticipated movie of 2025.
In a Violent Nature was the gory art house Friday the 13th no one asked for but was exactly what we needed. The film is polarizing, but I loved the hypnotic way the camera followed the killer.
Infested was exactly what the spider horror subgenre needed, it took Arachnophobia, stripped it of its comedy and infused it with some French Extremity with a bit of Attack the Block’s vibe. Its dark as fuck, violent, and the spiders are effectively creepy.
The First Omen was the last movie I expected to be one of the best of the year. I’m a big fan of the first two films and fond of the remake, but I never thought an out-of-blue prequel would be the best in the franchise. It's an audacious nunsploitation charged with political unrest and an unlikely influence from the classic Possession.
The First Omen wasn’t the only throwback to nunsploitation, though. The Sydney Sweeney led Immaculate followed an almost identical plot to the First Omen, but fortunately their executions were unique and delivered two satisfying, bloody films.
My hero Larry Fessenden followed up his excellent Frankenstein film, Depraved, with a werewolf film that feels like the old Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV series, called Blackout. The werewolf design is a throwback to the Lon Chaney Jr Wolfman, rather than the more animalistic look of The Howling werewolves.
Katherine Newton had two winners this year with the adorable Diablo Cody written Lisa Frankenstein and the half-sized vampire thrill-ride Abigail.
Late Night with the Devil really highlighted what a star David Dastmalchian really is, and the film does a great job of creating an old Johnny Carson show vibe.
Love Lies Bleeding isn't technically a horror movie, but the southwest noir thriller is certainly horror adjacent
I was also a fan of Stopmotion, a film about a descent into madness and giving yourself over to your art, body and soul. Aisling Franciosi gives a great and disturbing performance, and the film overall gives a Censor vibe, another film I really enjoyed.
That’s a pretty stacked year and there are still a few films, like Strange Darling, I haven’t seen and then there are the movies I thought were decent, like The Devil’s Bath, that just missed out making my favorites list for one reason or another.
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Coming in 2025, I’ll be releasing a big collection of essays on movies, music, and writing, as well as personal memoirs, called X-Filed on Main Street: Essays.
