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Footage At The Borderlands: Horror Writer Adam Nevill's Cinematic Baker's Dozen
Sean Kitching , November 28th, 2015 07:33

With his new novel 'Lost Girl' out now, horror author Adam Nevill recommends his favourite recent horror films to Sean Kitching. You are going to want to work through this list.

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Absentia (Mike Flanagan, 2011)

A first rate horror film for me. Compelling, tense and mysterious with a slow accumulation of the hideous. A story concerned with the after effects of the loss of a loved one who has, inexplicably, gone missing - was it abduction, murder, someone who walked-out-of-a-life, a depression-suicide with no body?

A great script and minimal, well chosen sets, and what really stood out, and made the horror element more affecting, was the realism achieved through the dialogue and characterisation of the two sisters (the lead actors). The not knowing and the hoping is so vivid that there is a possibility of the horror being a projection of grief and depression (also done well in The Babadook). This naturalism is offset by the utterly weird but horribly believable mystery that forms the horror, the monster, at the heart of the film. Is this thing supernatural or extra terrestrial in its subversion of natural law? I don't really want to know; I like it just how it is. The uncanny tone is pitch perfect.

Smaller budgets and a more intense focus on a story seems to be going claw-in-glove of late with the horror I'm watching.

"It fixates."