The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

Kicked off the annual horror countdown with this mindf&%$ from Takashi Miike. The film was inspired by the South Korean film The Quiet Family (1998), which is on my list of the top 100 films of all time (currently #44).... But this crazy comedy musical version (with stop motion animation) was not as good. 😆

The Quiet Family (1998)

Kim Jee-woon's directorial debut, The Quiet Family (1998), was awesome! Sarah and I recently watched his film A Tale of Two Sisters (2006), and I liked this much more. What can I say, I'm a sucker for dark comedy! It has a great cast, starring heartthrob Song Kang-ho (of Snowpiercer and Parasite), before he became famous, Na Moon-hee (of My Lovely Sam-Soon), and Choi Min-sik (of Oldboy, etc.), among others. Almost like a National Lampoon film, except if the hijinks always ended in dead bodies. 🤣

Parents (1989)

1980s horror is my favorite kind, and I loved the darkly comedic elements in Parents (1989), but in the end, this film was a little too scattered to be really effective. And it drove Mark crazy that the kid mutters so much that you can't understand him. 🤣 Some good ghoulish close-ups of meat tho... dinner never looked so sinister. 🍖

Society (1989)

Wow... Society (1989) was nuts. One of the horror tropes I really like is the paranoid, everyone's in on it, me-against-the-world conspiracy (cf The Truman Show, Rosemary's Baby), which this explored to good effect. The practical effects were pretty gnarly too, and I loved the tongue-in-cheek visual humor, reminiscent of my all-time-favorite movie, Heathers (1988).

Scream (1996)

 The original teen slasher. This movie terrified me when I first saw it, and it still does. I can never look at a glass sliding door the same way again.