The Best Horror Movie of 2008: Let the Right One In
This post is part of Paste’s Century of Terror project, a countdown of the 100 best horror films of the last 100 years, culminating on Halloween. You can see the full list in the master document, which will collect each year’s individual film entry as it is posted.
The Year
This is an overall decent year, although it’s hard for it to compare to the one that preceded it, which was abnormally packed with quality. Indie and international films are largely leading the way here, with Let the Right One In as the easy, slam-dunk choice for the #1 spot.
On the commercial side of the spectrum, Cloverfield made a divisive splash at the box office, with overblown reports of people experiencing nausea or vomiting because of its jarring, first-person found footage visual style. Suffice to say, the hubbub about the film’s shaky camera has often made viewers look past its surprisingly effective horror sequences in the years that followed, especially when the group is attacked in the subway tunnels by the crab-like creatures that clung to the larger monster as parasites. The most effective thing in Cloverfield is ultimately the way it captures the human perspective that is almost always absent from giant monster movies—the confusion and total lack of information that an average person on the street would possess if a creature suddenly appeared and started wrecking Manhattan. Nor do our protagonists factor into the creature’s arrival or destruction—they’re merely bystanders trying to survive, which likely makes their plight more resonant to the average viewer. This isn’t really a perspective on monster movies you can return to in repeated installments without it losing its effectiveness, but Cloverfield deserves credit for imagining a very different reaction to the presence of a Godzilla-like threat.
The likes of Pontypool, on the other hand, represent the more cerebral side of 2000s indie horror; the type of film that is far too weird to succeed in wide distribution, but now has a place in the world of streaming services, etc. This is a “zombie” film in a sense more thematic than literal—those affected by the condition at the heart of the film become ravenous killers with no sense of self-preservation, but this isn’t your George Romero-style illness, transmitted by bites of the risen dead. Rather, Pontypool is a sly commentary on the shallowness and artificiality of modern discourse, relationships and casual conversation, wherein our fractured language has itself become broken, the carrier for a psychic strain of illness that infects our consciousness rather than our bodies. It’s a film that is still too heady for some, but Stephen McHattie is electric as a radio shock jock who realizes he’s part of the problem, and tries to find a solution over the air.
Other notables for this year include Bryan Bertino’s well-executed home invasion horror The Strangers, which thrives when it’s being patient, as well as the unrelenting brutality of Martyrs and the fairly faithful Clive Barker adaptation in The Midnight Meat Train. One additional film that more people should see is low-budget “horror drama” Lake Mungo, which uses a muted mockumentary style to probe the fallout of a family member’s death, while slowly introducing elements that may or may not be supernatural. Critically acclaimed but still underseen today, it’s a film that proves the post-Paranormal Activity era of low-budget indie horror was not entirely spent in imitation.
2008 Honorable Mentions: Pontypool, Cloverfield, Martyrs, Eden Lake, Lake Mungo, The Children, The Strangers, Splinter, The Midnight Meat Train, The Burrowers
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