Easily my favorite movie of Fantastic Fest so far, Apostle is the type of movie that will stay with you hours after watching it. Gareth Evans wrote and directed this disturbing tale of Thomas (Dan Stevens) who infiltrates a religious cult on a remote island in order to rescue his kidnapped sister. Any further descent into the plot would ruin surprises that were a joy to discover during the movie. Evans’ ability to depict brutality and rage is second to none. What’s that? You haven’t seen The Raid or its sequel? Go watch those then come back to this review.

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Jeremy Saulnier has now made three movies about the darkness at the fringes of civilization. In Blue Ruin it was a revenge tale where a man rejected societal expectations to get his pound of flesh. In Green Room, we follow the journey of a punk rock band trapped by neo-Nazis in a woods far from help. In Hold the Dark, he explores the darkness of remote Alaska to make one of the bleakest movies in recent memory.

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Murder Me, Monster is a horror film out of Argentina that turned out to be absolutely bonkers. In the remote regions of Argentina, a woman’s body is found with no head. Cruz, an officer assigned to the crime, begins to investigate what is going on. While Cruz is looking into the death, he is also having an affair with a married woman. The woman’s husband is named David and he has gone missing again and Cruz sets off to find him. Cruz finds David in an abandoned village in the mountains.

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Fantastic Fest’s Secret Screening this year was the remake of Suspiria starring Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton. Everyone in the theater loved it and the buzz in the Drafthouse afterward was fever pitch. Every review I have seen so far has praised it up and down. Unfortunately, this is not going to be one of those reviews. I recently rewatched the original Suspiria because to say this movie is very hyped in the horror community would be an understatement so I was prepared to see it next month. As the festival got closer and Suspiria wasn’t announced as an opening or closing film it slowly became the odds-on favorite for the secret screening. As I sat down to watch, I was truly excited.

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The original Halloween is barred none the best of the slasher genre. It is a simple story, a young boy kills his sister and is put in a mental institution, 16 years later he breaks out and goes on a rampage murdering people on Halloween. Michael Myers is terrifying in a way that Jason or Freddy isn’t. He feels more “realistic” in his behaviors in the first movie. Michael is just an unstoppable force of death who Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) runs in to. All of the sequels to Halloween try too hard to explain things or add significance. Sure, there are some fun entries that with the right amount of inebriation are quick fun. But ultimately they all abandon what was so great about the first, its simplicity. Halloween, 2018, erases all of the sequels in just 3-4 lines of dialogue and goes right back to the roots of what made the original such a groundbreaking horror film.

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