2008 movies... Horror

This is my bread and butter, the meat of my movie watching. Yes it is true that horror as a genre has some really poor formulaic disasters but there is the rear movie that is great movie first, genre redefining second and great movie to boot. In 2008 I got the privilege to see just such a movie.
Let the Right One In - I will not explain the movie here and would have a hard time doing so in a blog post but this movie hit all the right chords. It was based in character with a firm basis in the vampire genre. I counted 11 pieces of vampire characteristic that it showed and redefined in some cases. In one way it was about a relationship between a vampire who looks 12 and a boy of the same age. It was more than that though, it was about bullying and the generational nature of it. It was about manipulation while seeming Innocent. It even did a wonderful job showing the after affects of a vampires desire to feed through the eyes of community members who lose friends as victims. Executed nicely with good performances, the music was a bit over the top but the serious nature was never belittled by the genre. Great Movie.

1. Let the Right One In (96)
2. The Orphanage (88)
3. Cloverfield (75)
4. The Strangers (74)
5. The Signal (68)
6. The Eye (66)
7. Shutter (66)
8. Midnight Meat Train (55)
9. Splinter (54)
10. Quarantine (50)
11. Rogue (45)
12. The Happening (35)
13. Pathology (33)
14. The Ruins (27)
15. George Romero's Diary of the Dead (25)

Comments: The Orphanage was a incredibly sad and touching chiller. Cloverfield for all its faults was based on a really touching love story that I thought carried the film. The Strangers had its predictable parts but overall was scary enough in the "So you thought the suburbs were safe" kind of way. The Signal was a bit of a love hate relationship movie, what I thought its real value was; was the very real depiction of violence, it is not clean and easy and the movie showed it in its ugly true form.