Looking Ahead To 2012

Normally I’d say it’s too early in December to start looking towards next year’s slate of films. However, since the remainder of the year looks like a shit sandwich when it comes to horror, now seems like as good a time as any to wistfully pine for the last page of this year’s calendar tear itself off and make way for the New Year.

Perhaps Hollywood believes the Mayans are on to something and want one final blowout of good films before the planet is sucked into nothingness. Unlike the first quarter of this year where moviegoers were forced to consume dreck like The Roommate (i.e. the cinematic equivalent of eating a steaming bowl of dog vomit), the early months of 2012 feature a number of films with promise. 

The Devil Inside Maybe there is a little “end of days” fervor in the air, as exorcism films have come back into vogue these past couple years (The Last Exorcism, The Rite, Exorcismus). The latest entry finds a young girl trying to figure out why her mentally unstable mother snapped and murdered three people during her own exorcism two decades prior.  The trailer gives off an effective creepy vibe, kicking off with a 911 call and pressing on with the hall marks of the subgenre of late: demonic voices, bodies contorted in impossible angles and the like. Sure you can cue the inevitable critics saying how the film won’t measure up to The Exorcist, but it’s high time as horror fans we just own up to the fact that no genre film that’s come down the pike since has either.  

The Woman In Black I’ve mentioned this film in passing before. The film marks a return of Hammer Studios to the atmospheric tales that made it famous and Daniel Radcliffe’s first role post-Potter. It’s based on the Susan Hill novel, a chilling and moody modern ghost story. If surprise hits Insidious and the Paranormal Activity proved anything, it’s that current audiences don’t need multiple goregasms to enjoy a horror film. This simple story of a dead woman’s ghost signaling the imminent death of a child and a young lawyer that gets caught up in the mystery looks like it will be the venerable British studio’s return to glory.   

  

Cabin In The Woods I love Joss Whedon and have ever since the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer sucked me into its vortex of awesomeness. No much is known about the Whedon penned and Drew Goddard helmed “Cabin” since it was shelved three years ago amid MGM Studios financial woes. All we have to go on so far is this new poster which leads me to believe a Rubix cube is somehow involved in this story about a bunch of teens that make their way out to a cabin that’s get this…in the woods (holy shit!!!) except that Whedon has promised to turn horror clichés on their ear. I imagine there will be snarky dialogue and girl power. Honestly, you had me at “From the Creator of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Firefly’”.

The Innkeepers Ti West’s long awaited follow up to House of the Devil (my #1 film of 2009) actually gets the pre-theatrical video on demand treatment at the end of the December before getting a limited big screen run in February. I’m going to try and hold out until it hits theaters though something tells me my will power will last all of three days. Sara Paxton has earned raves as one half of a would-be ghost busting team moonlighting as employees in a run down and haunted New England hotel with all the Yankee gothic trimmings.

The Divide Xavier Gans post apocalyptic thriller looks like it might be a glorious mess of a movie. Coming out in limited release in February, it tells the story of a band of survivors that hole themselves up in their buildings basement in an attempt to survive nuclear fallout. Tensions rise, egos get bruised and violence ensues. Gans’ debut, the French torture fest Frontiers put its heroine through a wringer to the extent that viewers wished she’d be offed just to end her misery. To this date it’s the only horror movie I’ve ever seen where its survivor resembles an epileptic sufferer off her mediation for the last third of its runtime. If that’s the type of trauma one family of incestuous Nazi cannibals can inflict, I can only giggle in anticipation what terrors he can concoct for the survivors of an end-of-days cataclysm.