The first wave of films categorized under the “folk horror” niche arguably crested in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, though movies the label applies to existed prior to this span of time, à la Finland’s “The White Reindeer.” But the label was used in print for the first time by Rod Cooper, then later disseminated through pop culture by Mark Gatiss in 2010. What we know now as folk horror today wasn’t quite thought of as such during its nascent days.

Continue reading The Best Folk Horror Films You Need To Know at The Playlist.

Horror films, like most art, can’t really be ranked in any sort of subject way to test how “good” they are. Dubbing a film a “good” movie is so beholden to personal taste and other outside factors, it would be almost foolish to say that any sort of film ranking system is fundamentally objective. But the UK-based BroadbandChoices has created a scientific study that claims to have found a way to definitively rank the scariest films of all time.

Continue reading New Scientific Study Crowns Scott Derrickson’s ‘Sinister’ As The “Ultimate Horror Movie” at The Playlist.

The 2010s felt like a banner decade for the horror genre. It’s difficult to say that definitively as time is the only thing that can really make that distinction, but as the decade comes to a close, it feels like one that is going to be held up as a “golden era.”

READ MORE: The 25 Best Foreign Language Horror Movies Of All Time

It’s easy to understand why. After a decade filled with remakes, cheap, careless gunk from the likes of Dark Castle and Platinum Dunes, and the “torture porn” movement that metastasized from taking the extreme violence out of the “French New Extremity” (at least in mainstream horror), audiences were yearning for something more adventurous, and filmmakers were more than happy to oblige.

Continue reading The Best Horror Movies Of The Decade [2010s] at The Playlist.

When you’re an indie film distributor and you don’t have the market foothold or advertising budget of Disney, you have to get creative. So, when A24 approached filmmaker Robert Eggers with an outside-the-box marketing “stunt,” it was with the best of intentions. However, as the filmmaker describes to his directing peer Ari Aster in the new A24 podcast, Deep Cuts, sometimes these sorts of stunts have a way of getting out of control.

Continue reading A24 Marketing Stunt Got ‘The Witch’ Director Robert Eggers Labeled A “Satanist” & Almost Banned From Poland at The Playlist.

For a while, A24 had been teasing a new project that seemed like it could be a streaming service. The indie distributor seemed like it was poised to have a go at the Streaming Wars with its own brand of critically-acclaimed low-budget films. However, today the plan was officially announced and A24 Public Access isn’t a streaming service, in the most traditional sense at least.

A24 has announced a new Public Access promotion where the company will stream a curated selection of films in specific cities across the US on specific days.

Continue reading A24 Public Access Will Screen “Moonlight,” “Lady Bird,” & Other Films On Billboards Across The Country at The Playlist.

The season is upon us. As the leaves fall off their trees, the weather whooshes in a welcomed cold breeze, the accustomed costumes come out of their storage, and the pumpkins, along with the scented candles, beers, lattes and what-have-you, make their way into the public’s affection, it swiftly becomes none other than the season of the witch. And what a glorious time of the year that can be — particularly for us horror fans.

Continue reading 20 Of The Best, Most Spellbinding Witch Movies at The Playlist.

One of last year’s very best films was Robert Eggers‘ “The VVitch,” which we called a haunting and chilling film more in line with Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman than your average horror movie. It was more artsy than gory, more interested in building up dread within its atmosphere than conveying up any easy jump scares. It’s astonishing that this was Eggers’ debut picture. Directed with such assured, effective, veteran-like clarity that you’d think it was envisioned by someone twice his age.

Continue reading Anya Taylor-Joy Rejoins Her ‘Witch’ Director For ‘Nosferatu’ at The Playlist.

The 2017 Independent Spirit Awards kicked off with a hilarious opening monologue from “Oh, Hello” duo Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, and from there the evening was handed over to “Moonlight.”

READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2016

Barry Jenkins‘ celebrated film dominated the show, taking some six prizes, including Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and the Robert Altman award for best ensemble.

Continue reading ‘Moonlight’ Wins Big At The 2017 Independent Spirit Awards at The Playlist.

Ok, we’re done looking back on 2016, but if you have an appetite for more and or missed it, here’s all our Best Of 2016 coverage.

OK, I know, I know. We’re waaaaaay past the sell by date on Top 10 lists, I’m all too painfully aware. My tombstone will read, “Life got in the way,” and life is, again, the reason I’m woefully (embarrassingly?) behind.

Continue reading The Best Movies Of 2016: Rodrigo Perez’s Picks at The Playlist.

I will spare everyone by not starting this list with reasons why 2016 sucked. However, one thing that has to be called into question are these “Film is Dead,” “TV is Winning the Culture War,” and “Why 2016 is the Worst Year in Film” clickbait headlines. If film is truly dead, and 2016 is truly the worst year in cinema, I ask you this: why was it so damn difficult to whittle this list down to just ten picks?

Continue reading Ryan Oliver’s Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

Maybe it was just because it provided a respite from the year’s most terrifying drama, “American Horror Story: The 2016 Presidential Election,” but the past 12 months have been unusually good for the horror movie. In a year where franchise after franchise underperformed, horror films remained a consistent draw in multiplexes, and for the most part with new original movies rather than the umpteenth sequel or reboot of “Friday The 13th,” “Saw” or “Paranormal Activity.”

Away from mainstream theaters, there was great stuff too, whether it was Netflix getting into the scary game with a pair of excellent low-key chillers, A24 having their biggest hit ever with a Sundance fave, a couple of inventive Korean pics, or arthouse crossovers drawing on fears from Iran and Portugal.

Continue reading The 15 Best Horror Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

As we slowly and eagerly await the end of a year that history will squint back on forever, we can take some solace in knowing that it hasn’t been completely devoid of good things. And if you’ve been following our marathon year-end coverage from the beginning of December, which course you have been, you know of what we speak. Today we finally zero in on the element that best illuminates the unassailable power of the silver screen — cinematography.

Continue reading The Best Cinematography Of 2016 at The Playlist.

We compiled an aggregated Playlist Best Films Of 2015 which you can find here. However, regular contributors were also given the chance to submit personal lists.

I think we can all agree that 2016 has been a dumpster fire on top of a pile of burning kittens and puppies kind of a year. We lost some of the greatest artists and immeasurably important pop culture icons, and got rewarded with a last minute kick in the nuts after one of the ugliest and enraging election campaigns the U.S.

Continue reading Oktay Ege Kozak’s Top 10 Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

It’s been something of a mixed year for movies in some ways — a fairly sparse first half of the year, including the worst blockbuster season in living memory, followed by an absolutely rammed fall season that, even more than most, has seen a wealth of pleasures in movie theaters. But one thing for sure is that it’s been a really great year for music and the movies (and yes, .)

READ MORE: 11-Minute Video Essay Listens To The Power Of A Film’s Score

Perhaps appropriately for a year where a musical looks to be the Oscar front-runner, we’ve had all kinds of wonderful scores and soundtracks, from a young composer turning the biopic on its head to an instantly iconic Netflix synthpop score, from a blast of original hip-hop from a little-seen indie to some unusually convincing comedy songs from some ex-SNLers.

Continue reading The 30 Best Film Scores & Soundtracks Of 2016 at The Playlist.

It’s too bad that who dismissively write off 2016 as “a bad movie year” couldn’t find more than a few films to treasure across the last twelve months. Sure, blockbuster movies were pretty terrible all around, but even a glimpse of indie cinema and foreign films this year (South Korea alone yielded the excellent likes of “The Handmaiden,” “The Wailing” and “Age Of Shadows“) reveals some tremendous work.

Continue reading Celebrating The Films Of 2016 at The Playlist.

It’s the witching hour, and we’re just in time to serve you our final frightening dish in our Halloween-themed horror banquet. We’ve discussed the best of the genre from the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and this century, the best foreign-language horrors, and some of the most visually stunning on-screen nightmares we’ve ever seen. Now it’s time to shine a spooky light on 25 riveting performances in horror films. Ranging from as early as the 1930s all the way to the present, the men and women who populate this article have kept us awake on many nights, sent currents of chill down our spine, and, in a few cases, made us laugh just as readily as they made us scamper to the nearest blanket.

Continue reading The 25 Best Performances In Horror Movies at The Playlist.

Jump scares kinda suck, don’t they? Well, it depends on who you ask. For YouTube’s Now You See It, it’s like a magic trick: it’s all about the build-up, the 30 seconds before you reveal your hand. But in most horror films these days, it’s used as a lazy, uninspired and cheap trick, a way to provoke a quick bit of fear from the unsuspecting viewer. When done correctly, however, a good jump scare can keep the audience off balance, elicit tension and establish fear of the unknown, which can carry throughout the duration of the running time.

Continue reading The Pros & Cons Of Jump Scares at The Playlist.

We’ve been having a bit of a horror-fest at The Playlist this month (terrifying Halloween party costumes of choice at Playlist Towers include: Mike Pence, the ghost of the never-made second season of “Vinyl” and Vin Diesel in the high-frame-rate sequences from “Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk”), with the last few weeks serving as something of a potted history of the last half-century or so.

Continue reading The 50 Best Horror Movies Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

Horror generally doesn’t get the respect it deserves at the Academy Awards, which makes it all the more remarkable that the U.K. selected Babak Anvari‘s “Under The Shadow” as its entry for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards this year. This speaks not only to the film’s quality, but also how deeply its themes resonate, ringing out far beyond its expected genre borders.

Starring Narges Rashidi, Bobby Naderi, Avin Manshadi, Ray Haratian, Hamidreza Djavdan, and Soussan Farrokhnia, “Under The Shadow” tells a tightly-wound, increasingly nerve-jangling story that revolves around heroine Shideh and her family living in Tehran during the escalating tensions of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Continue reading The Movies That Changed My Life: ‘Under The Shadow’ Director Babak Anvari at The Playlist.

The horror genre has had something of a boom lately. In the past few years a handful of arthouse directors have managed to reinvigorate the rote and familiar genre script (though, Hollywood, like always, is lagging behind, fixated only on churning out sequels to anything that makes a buck). One noteworthy aspect of these new films is their attempt to scare not through gore or shaky cam or the thousand other cliched genre tropes, but through mind games (“Goodnight Mommy”), atmosphere (“The Babadook”), and completely new imaginings of monsters (“It Follows”).

Continue reading Exploring The Horrific Depths Of ‘The Witch’ at The Playlist.

June is here, and with Sundance, Berlin, SXSW and Cannes over, and the summer blockbuster season well underway, the year in the film world is starting to take shape. And while superhero clashes and fairy-tale remakes have dominated the mainstream talk, there’s been a lot more variety and depth to be found for anyone digging a little deeper, either in the mainstream or the arthouse worlds.

Continue reading The 20 Best Films Of 2016 So Far at The Playlist.

Pop quiz, hotshot: what’s the biggest independent movie of the year so far? Unlikely sleepers “Eye In The Sky,” starring Helen Mirren, or “Hello My Name Is Doris” with Sally Field? Tom Hanks vehicle “A Hologram For The King?” Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” followup “Everybody Wants Some?” Jeff Nichols’ sci-fi “Midnight Special?”

READ MORE: The 25 Best Horror Films Of The 21St Century So Far

The answer is: none of the above.

Continue reading 12 Arthouse Horror Directors Who Are Reinventing The Genre at The Playlist.

Black Phillip Is Back In Re-Release Trailer For Horror Sensation 'The Witch'

Continue reading Black Phillip Is Back In Re-Release Trailer For Horror Sensation ‘The Witch’ at The Playlist.

The Movies That Changed My Life: ‘The Witch’ Director Robert Eggers

Continue reading The Movies That Changed My Life: ‘The Witch’ Director Robert Eggers at The Playlist.

Box Office: 'Deadpool' Closing In On $500 Million Worldwide, 'The Witch' Scores A24's Biggest Opening Ever

Continue reading Box Office: ‘Deadpool’ Closing In On $500 Million Worldwide, ‘The Witch’ Scores A24’s Biggest Opening Ever at The Playlist.