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Blair Witch (2016)

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In 1993, two film students at the University of Central Florida, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, after realizing they shared a mutual preference for documentaries exploring paranormal phenomena over traditional horror films, conspired to produce their own horror film that combined the styles of both. They developed a 35-page screenplay while leaving dialogue to be improvised, placing a casting call advertisement in Backstage requesting actors with strong improvisational abilities. The end result was The Blair Witch Project , a supernatural horror phenomenon that utilized the most basic of ingredients -- a trio of young unknown actors and the classically nightmarish setting of a forest -- to tell a terrifying story about the fear of becoming lost in the woods and hunted by an invisible but implacable force of otherworldly evil.   With the complete absence of special effects or even a glimpse of the titular witch, Myrick and Sanchez relied exclusively on the evocative power of nat...
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Creep 2 (2017)

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The opening sequence of Creep 2 , a sequel to Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass' found-footage psychological horror hit that lives on Netflix, plays like the opening of your standard horror sequel, suggesting a rehash that treats its predecessor like an understood iconic phenomenon. A young Indian man named Dave (Karan Soni) is alone in his home one night when he receives a mysterious package in the mail from a recent stalker. Clearly, Dave is assuming the role of Aaron Franklin, Brice's ill-fated protagonist from the inaugural Creep . Having become the latest unsuspecting target of prolific serial killer Josef (Duplass), Dave opens the package, which, unbeknownst to him, is equipped with a camera hidden inside a stuffed baby wolf. Straight out of the gate, Brice and Duplass, both resuming their capacities from their original creation (Brice as director, co-writer, and co-cinematographer, Duplass as co-writer), load this cold open with clever callbacks for fans, transporting us r...
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Creep (2015)

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While not the first horror film to utilize the documentarian format, The Blair Witch Project is undoubtedly responsible for ushering in the era of the found-footage subgenre. The reason is as simple as the storyline: it's cost-effective to assemble a trio of unknown actors rife with improvisational ability, deposit them in the woods, nature's most organically nightmarish setting, and observe them as they gradually lose their sanity to the paranoia of being hunted by a legendary witch. A decade later, Paranormal Activity reignited horror fans' obsession with found footage, placing a long-term couple in a similar environment. Only instead of the woods, the couple is stripped of their sense of safety in the supposed comfort of their own home, where the natural darkness of the night takes on a sinister ambience as a demonic presence from one of their pasts re-latches itself onto them.  From that point onward, so began a long-running franchise whose first three installments wer...
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Gerald's Game (2017)

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Mike Flanagan is both one of the most beloved filmmakers working in the horror genre today and the most prolific modern adapter of Stephen King's novels. In terms of the former qualification, he is also the most frustratingly uneven. Here is a man who made Oculus , a marginally above-average haunted-mirror haunter that ultimately cribbed too liberally from Stanley Kubrick's  The Shining . Then three years later, he put a thrillingly cerebral and disability-empowering spin on the home-invasion subgenre with Hush . That same year, he produced a vastly superior prequel to the atrocious Ouija  which nonetheless fell short of being genuinely good . With Gerald's Game , his first Stephen King adaptation, co-written by Jeff Howard, based on the 1992 novel of the same name, Flanagan has concocted his psychological horror masterpiece.  Harrowing, heart-wrenching, contemplative, and ultimately inspiring, Flanagan uses the claustrophobically terrifying, high-concept premise and conf...
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