The 2023 Samhain Awards: From The Grave
2025-07-30 10:23:16.503028
2023 was one long, awkward off beat for the artform. Was that a cultural shift or an economic lurch? It was a tough year for anyone with debts to pay, homes to find, or groceries to buy. It was also hard on the dickface private equity firms that bankroll all of our pale & paltry entertainments. Post-Covid tremors everywhere, just a weird moment in time. The evaporation of easy money is going to make the horror business a very lean, hungry and fucked-up place from here until 2030. That's hardly a bad thing. Such circumstances are exactly what gave us modern horror during the end of the dirty 70's, after all.
This list comes later than ever but it does have the virtue of completion. I truly did manage to watch everything. As always, most of it was wasted life. Behold: the most comprehensively authoritative Samhain Awards of all time...so far.
God is a Bullet. Personally, this one was my favorite, always a red flag: I do not and cannot recommend this to most of you. Get the unrated version if you decide to pursue it at all. This is a tribute to grindhouse cinema that plays it David Fincher straight, and a surprisingly accurate depiction of generational West Coast Satanism networks, too. It is extremely long, bleak, violent and self-induglent. Obviously, I bought a physical copy. I've watched it a couple dozen times now.
When Evil Lurks. Earnest, moralizing, and melodramatic, this is one of most brutally unsettling horror movies of the decade. Nobody involved with promoting or reviewing this has mentioned the comedy angle, but it all would have been a hollow exercise in high-gloss nihilism without the black humor that pervades every single scene. This is Demián Rugna's second home run, after his inventive & twist-filled 2017 film Terrified, which I mistakenly overlooked until 2020. Domestic releases for foreign art used to take a lot longer, but Harvey Weinstein is in prison now.
What Josiah Saw. Almost everyone I've discussed this with disagrees, but I believe this to be a stone cold masterpiece, Gothic Americana on par with the first season of True Detective. They're both wildly different tonally, but fundamentally, they're both literature, novels steeped in Biblical tradition. One single mistake in the casting and this whole house of cards would have collapsed. Fortunately that didn't happen. This is likely the story that Robert Alan Dilts was born to write but I hope to see more from him in the (immediate) future.
The Passenger. I threw this on during a last-minute, weeklong marathon of horror movies, back when I still thought I was publishing this in October 2023. They were a mix of fun, flabby and stupid, but none were remotely equal to this. It was far past midnight and I regretted starting it almost immediately. Not because it was scary, or terrible, but because it was so compelling, so surprising. I was trying to fall asleep and I failed. The entire cast is wu wei, the blocking is endlessly creative, and if this came out in 1980 it would be an all-time genre classic today. I often start thinking that I, myself, could make a great movie on a low budget. It is important to be reminded this is hubris and I am wrong.
A Wounded Faun. I am still surprised by how much I loved this. It's objectively dumb, it's low budget, but yet so committed to the bit that it exceeds itself. The film is extravagantly weird, far past the point of being pretentious, and it never lost my interest for a second. Travis Stevens is both an incredible talent and a monomaniac student of the genre: every shot, every beat is a calculated gamble. This is not for everyone but it is quite probably for you, especially fans of '73 classic Messiah of Evil.
The Menu. Without question, this will go down as a genre classic too, largely thanks to the blockbuster cast & universal acclaim. It is a work of alchemy. If you simply explained this to someone over a dinner table, it would be monumentally asinine, tedious, hard to even sit through. Yet somehow, it's a riveting comedy of errors that evolves into a hilarious nightmare. For those of you who do not partake in NC-17 technicolor gore-fests, take note: this is a bloodless massacre, on par with last year's All My Friend Hate Me but exponentially slicker. The gross-outs are psychological and the twists are exquisite.
Talk to Me. The annual A24 hype train was a cold killer, lean & ugly. Having watched it a few times now, I don't believe there is a single missed step. The mythos is barely explained, the makeup work is truly alarming, and it can get shockingly cruel. It's also an earnestly moralizing story, in a way that only Australians could pull off. If the team of Danny & Michael Philippoun do nothing else for the rest of their careers, they've still achieved something timeless here.
Infinity Pool. Not Mini-Cronenberg's best, but so what? He's building a Carpenter-grade catalog that's all killer, no filler. I was less impressed the first time I saw it, but a second viewing revealed something very different. This is ambiguous, bold visual storytelling that hides a whole other narrative behind the knockout performances. A puzzle box Gordian knot of class anxiety, writers block and pure Canadian body horror fantasia. (Notably, this was shot by cinematographer Karim Hussain, who also gave us the 2000 headfuck Subconscious Cruelty and the gorgeous Bierstadt vistas of 2017's Mohawk.)
Unwelcome. This is a truly, deeply stupid film, the dumbest premise imaginable, I have to be clear about that. Worse yet, it was Irish. Of course, I also loved it. This would not even rate in a stronger year, surely, but it was fun, solid folk horror pastiche with a killer set and cast. Anyone looking for an entertaining date night flick should start here (and carefully avoid everything else I've mentioned so far).
What follows is perhaps more attention than the rest of this trash deserves. Maybe you should just skip to the end? I may not value my own time, but I do care about yours.
First, I must acknowledge No One Will Save You, which gets the Headcount Award for 2023's biggest blown opportunity. A remarkable achievement: a near-perfect alien invasion movie that manages to completely undo itself in the dumbass final act. The closing scene feels like one big, shiny middle finger aimed squarely at the audience. I respect the balls, but that doesn't make it any less of a shipwreck.
Then there's Yorgos Lanthimos, having an off year with Poor Things. Visually compelling but utterly disgusting, this widely praised arthouse fever dream is among the more revolting films I've seen, on par with Salo or Kuso. Precisely because of that inventive excess, I simply cannot neglect it. But I don't have to respect it, either.
Big theatrical releases mostly fell flat this year. There was, of course, an Exorcist remake; piss poor, a bland disappointment. The Nun II fell a million miles short of the first, despite a bigger budget. To my surprise, though, I very much enjoyed the Children of the Corn reboot. It was well done and solid fun, especially for those who have suffered through that entire franchise. More importantly, it was a lineup of perfect casting. The Conference was a beautifully shot and occasionally funny remake of Severance, but not nearly as raw, human or smart. Evil Dead Rise was a remake of nearly five thousand other genre films, neither terrible nor memorable.
The most baffling trend of 2023? The cryptocoin glut of Catholic horror films about exorcisms and convents. Also, exorcisms at convents. Russell Crowe did fine work in The Pope's Exorcist, but it's ultimately nothing much. Prey For The Devil had a promising start but it falls apart into studio bullshit almost immediately. To waste a mythos, a budget, and a set like this is shameful. All of you should rethink your careers and lives. That said, you still did far better than the team behind Deliver Us, a cartoonish exercise in blasphemy that wastes the talents of a lot of earnest actors. The best of the bastard batch was Christopher Smith's powerfully shot Consecration. The film is impossible to take altogether seriously, and it falls apart in the final act in true Horror Hammer fashion, but nobody ripped off Ken Russell's 1971 classic The Devils better. Yet.
Five Nights at Freddies was an acutely pointless film. It is a high-gloss, heavily marketed Jason Blum reboot trying to improve on the Nic Cage perfection of Willy's Wonderland, just like Smile couldn't shake the fact it's an inferior ripoff of It Follows. Parker Finn is a competent craftsman but it just didn't stay with me after the credits, a jumble of microwave dinner jump scares. There will of course be a sequel. More importantly, both of these movies made big money in 2023. Horror is still filling seats in the real world: the Insidious and Saw franchises march on, Scream movies are decent again, and what few cinema critics are left alive got to chew on what genre Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid really "was."
As Nic Cage perfection goes, his Dracula is the beating heart of Renfield, an otherwise featherweight sleepwalk of a comedy. There are two scenes in particular that had me hollering, and one of them involved the best prosthesis makeup work I saw in 2023. To have wasted the comic genius of such an unbearable talent on a story that falls apart every time Cage walks offscreen is ... well, pretty typical. Expecting anything else from the Universal content conveyor belt was a personal failure on my part.
Thankfully, disturbed young men and women are still making fucked up art films. Let us address those in brief. The Outwaters was my favorite batshit insane Hieronymus Bosch found footage joint of 2023, better than anything the V/H/S series has given us in recent years. I also deeply appreciated Skinamarink. I get how & why it bothered people so much, but the visuals and sound design were both proof we will hear more from Kyle Edward Ball. He gets something very primal that few too creators in this space manage to muster.
The team of Benson & Moorhead gave us another late night shaggy dog tale with Something in the Dirt. They never quite miss, but it was definitely a side project as they gear up for something else. I enjoyed Enys Men because it was often surprising and the photography was such a total departure from modern mores, but I have nothing else to say about it. I see that Huesera: The Bone Woman made of lot Top Ten lists in '23, and I would usually be a huge fan of inscrutable transcendent-slow art horror but this one never connected for me. The influences were too obvious, and too superior.
Finally, my top indie pick from 2023? From Black wasn't as great as I wanted it to be, but it delivers strong performances, a smart, powerful mythos, and some wild moments. I don't think any aspiring auteur did it better in '23 than Thomas Marchese. Apparently, ol' boy cut his teeth making documentaries, which makes sense, as both the dialog and the cinematography remains grounded & lived-in, even as the story itself goes clear off the rails.