I've been binge-watching horror movies again as a way to distract my brain from being horrible, so it's time for a recap of some of the more memorable ones I've seen in the past couple of weeks.

Night Swim

This movie has such Stephen King vibes, between the haunted swimming pool, the middle-class family with working-class roots, the fact that the main character is a baseball player fercrissakes. The side character who's a racist stereotype, albeit not the most offensive racist stereotype she could be; the way it alllllmost has something to say about learning to live with a disability but chickens out at the end. All of which is to say that how you feel about this movie will depend entirely on how you feel about early 90s Stephen King adaptations: if you have enjoyed not just Misery and Children of the Corn but Christine and The Running Man, you'll probably have as much fun with this as I did. It's not great but it made me feel like I was a thirteen year old renting the scariest movies the clerk would let me get away with for a summer weekend.

Noroi: The Curse

This was one of those movies I knew was going to be so much my jam that I put off watching it for a long time and fortunately I was right and it was terrific. I love a good mockumentary and this one was great, just the right degree of cheesy shock editing, lots of creepiness, and nothing that ever felt out of bounds for found footage (which, I have realized, is much easier to do with mockumentary than with Blair Witch-style found footage, which is probably why I prefer the former to the latter). (I've been on a found footage kick lately, by which I mean for the past year somehow.)

Wilderness

One of my other favorite subgenres of horror is "people lost in the wilderness," so naturally this one cropped up several times, but I'd put off watching it because it didn't seem to be exactly what I prefer (more on the accidental/animal attack side of disaster than the Most Dangerous Game side). I was right, but it was enjoyable anyway - kind of a spinoff of the concept of Lord of the Flies, a group of boys from a youth detention centre in England are taken out for a weekend of camping after they've bullied one boy into killing himself (it's implied they're all city kids so this is a punishment); shit goes haywire. One of those British movies filmed on tape so it looks much, much older than 2006, and featuring Sean Pertwee as the detention officer! (I love a surprise Pertwee.)

Infinity Pool

I remember seeing trailers for this on YouTube and being mildly offended that they were running a three-minute trailer as a YouTube ad, so even though it looked interesting I was trying not to be interested. This was pretty solid: not groundbreaking, but a good use of the doppelganger trope, a good use of obnoxious entitled rich people, and plenty of identity horror that edges into body horror with how graphic some of the violence gets. Good call on the totally fictional southeast Asian island nation (although it would have to be, given the mechanism the movie hinges on). (I'd go into more detail but actually having the mechanism be a total surprise did a lot for the pacing of the first half, and this is a long movie, so I'd hate to deprive you of that.)

The Bay

Another high-quality mockumentary, this one about an environmental disaster that manifests as a truly disgusting plague and also features what has turned out to be the most accurate depiction of how the government handles a plague that I've seen in a movie. It's essentially Jaws with parasites, complete with a mayor you can't wait to see get eaten. There's the full range of horror in this one: the creepy abandoned hospital with the one doctor's increasingly frantic calls to the CDC; the chaos of mass panic in the middle of a public event; body horror from the parasites; psychological horror from the subplot with the cops (which...damn, that is going to live with me for a while). Strong recommendation, I'm really not sure why this one is so obscure.

Would You Rather

Yeah, yeah, look I was browsing Tubi and I wanted something mindless. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this, actually; 90% of that is probably down to Jeffrey Combs having the time of his life as Discount Jigsaw. The acting overall is surprisingly good for this genre of early 2010s horror, actually; I also enjoyed all the main characters and was genuinely disappointed to lose everyone who died after the first forty minutes. The ending is pointlessly mean and not even in a way that's designed to maximize guilt, which is kind of a letdown after an entire movie that is 100% about making people do horrible things to themselves and other people.

....I've made the mistake of working backwards again, and now I've gotten to a good stretch, so I'll leave off there. This feels like a pretty poor return on investment for how many movies I've watched in the past two weeks, but to be fair most of those were whatever Tubi decided to autoplay, which is...certainly a selection.