Dracula Presents: The Tenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

That is a great poster for Knight of Cups. Still haven't seen it though.

10 Cloverfield Lane for best trailer.

I loathed Hardcore Henry.

I'll beat Neverending and Ian to the punch and say you snubbed the funniest movie of the year.

Wasn't The Nice Guys this year?

Best Horror Film

This has been a pretty good year for horror at the box office, but a kind of uneven year for the genre at the box office, though I’m sure there are some out there who disagree. There were some popular horror films this year I wasn’t a big fan of and some others I didn’t bother with. Most of my choices this year ended up being pretty indie but that’s the way it goes some times. Also worth noting that I’m viewing The Shallows and 10 Cloverfield Lane as being more akin to thrillers than horror movies and I’m viewing The Neon Demon as being more of a… whatever the hell that movie is.

Darling: Darling is one of those movies that wears its influences on its skin (in this case those influences being Repulsion and other movies inspired by Repulsion) but it does manage to feel like it adds on that template though smart execution. The movie is laser focused on being this cacophonous sort of mental portrait of a woman who is truly batshit insane. The film uses some really intense editing choices and sound design choices to make the film this fairly intense if perhaps a bit thin experience.

Hush: Don’t Breath was the preferred home invasion film involving a disabled person by most people this year, my favorite in that very specific sub-genre was the under-seen little movie Hush. In this film the disabled person (a deaf woman) is the victim rather than the villain, which is probably a less daring choice but it’s one they’re actually capable of pulling off. The rest of the movie doesn’t re-invent the wheel but it does build tension at times and it does build believable scenarios about how this sort of situation would play out.

The Invitation: The Invitation is kind of one of those odd cases where you’re not actually sure if what you’re watching is actually a horror movie or if the characters in it are just paranoid. Set over the course of an evening dinner party, the film follows a guy who begins to think the people hosting this party are up to something. The movie does a pretty good job of giving you just enough to think that the guy’s suspicions are valid but also enough to see how it could go the other way. When all is revealed the suspense scenes are nothing too special, but it does recover with a pretty well executed “Twilight Zone”-esque final couple of shots. 

Under the Shadow: Under the Shadow is an entrant in the “the monsters are a manifestation of the protagonist’s psyche” sub-genre of horror. I suppose any horror movie could be interpreted in that way, but some put this sort of reading more front and center than others. Set in Iran not long after the revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war, the film depicts a woman being haunted by Djinn, which may be a manifestation of her society’s restrictive norms entrapping her.

The Witch: There are a lot of people making horror movies who sometimes seem like they haven’t seen a horror movie made before 1974 and live almost entirely in the shadow of John Carpenter. Good movies can certainly be made running off that template but there’s something immensely refreshing about seeing a horror movie made by someone who has dug deep into the roots of horror and macabre literature to make a movie that taps into primal fears while still making a movie that lives up to a lot of the modern standards of what makes good horror.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Under the Shadow would be close for me but yeah The Witch deserves that honor.

Documentary of the Year
Documentaries have been more accessible than ever but this year I had a slightly harder time seeing everything, and frankly not a whole lot of the ones I did see blew my mind. I didn’t manage to see Tickled, Life Animated, or Fire at Sea, but otherwise I do think I got a pretty good sampling of this year’s crop. Also please note I’m considering O.J.: Made in America to be a television show rather than a movie and thus ineligible, much as Making a Murderer was last year.

13th: Ava DuVerney’s 13th is less of a documentary in the traditional sense of vérité filmmaking and something more akin to a video essay or perhaps even a manifesto. Its goal is to make a strong case that the prison system has been methodically built from the ground up as a form of oppression. That is quite a charge, one that very few movies would be able to prove in just 100 minutes but DuVerney certainly gives it a try. There’s not a lot of new information in it and I don’t know that I agree with everything in her argument, which can occasionally come off a bit conspiracy minded, but the film does remain a pretty good summation of a particular worldview and is a great way for people not following the discourse to catch up on this issue.

Tower: I have mixed feelings about the use of re-enactments in documentaries and I have especially mixed feelings about the use of animation to make re-enactments in documentaries, but it works here even if the art style isn’t exactly perfect for the movie. The film uses animation to recreate the happenings on the University of Texas campus the day in 1966 when a crazy person lodged himself on top of the University tower and started indiscriminately murdering people with a sniper rifle. The focus of the movie is entirely on the victims and the survivors and it paints a good portrait of how an incident like this affects people.

Wiener: Weiner is one of those documentaries where you doubt anyone involved were going to have had any idea that they were going to make something that was as interesting as it ended up being when they set out to make it. This thing was supposed to be a pretty straightforward almost campaign commercial about Weiner’s planned comeback but it ended up being a chronicle of exactly how naïve those plans were and the cameras watch like a fly in the wall as every possible thing goes wrong for this campaign.

The Witness: The Kitty Genovese murder is one of those anecdotes you hear about occasionally for its ancillary elements without really knowing all that many of the details around it. James D. Solomon’s film The Witness seeks to rectify this. Like Tower, the film seeks to place the spotlight on the victim by watching her brother track down information on the case and rectify some of the misconceptions about it.

Zero Days: Of the five nominated films here Alex Gibney’s Zero Days is probably the one with the most in the way of new information that I didn’t already know. The documentary sheds a lot of new light on a covert operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and seems to really uncover some behind the scenes information about the whole situation. The movie doesn’t offer a whole lot new from a formal perspective, but it’s certainly an interesting investigation.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Loving your list so far.

You and PG Cooper are the same person.