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jean-does-not-have-a-horseface · 4 years

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our newborn child has been really ill for a couple weeks and you’ve been really worried. luckily, we took them to the doctors and everything’s fine. yet despite it being nearly a week since we went to the doctors, you’ve slept beside the crib every night.- with kuchel shes the youngest and imagine levi and the rest of the ackerbabies sleeping with her cause they're worried

LOOK. THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A DRABBLE ALRIGHT? BUT I GOT REALLY CARRIED AWAY AND UHM.... Imma break loads of hearts with this....don't tell me I didn't warn you.

Pairing: Levi/ Reader

Warnings: mentions of death

Tags: a n g s t, pure angst, everyone's suffering, Wanna get in the mood I was while writing? Listen to this

A matress for five

For the first time in a long while, Levi's eyes stung feverously with exhaustion and insomnia. It was a silent beg, the first sign of his body giving in to the fatigue of taking care of four children but for all he knew, given the situation things would have to be worse before they got better.

His feet couldn't hold himself up in that late hour; not that even dared to move to check on the clock on the nightstand, his perception of time was more of an assumption. He had spend endless nights wide awake, clinging onto Kuchel's crib for dear life, interwinning her little hand with his, as his sorrows would bathe him in cold sweat.

The small hand that faintly clung onto his intex finger and wouldn't let loose of the steady grip sent earth shattering rashes of pain inside his heart as his eyes batted to its owner. His very own, crucially small and excessively faint daughter, that desperately needed him to simply survive. His eyes batted as he took in her small form for the upteenth time this evening. He loathed to be in that place again, to watch another beloved Kuchel in his life suffer with illness.

He had brought it to himself, he figured. By agreeing that she looked like him enough to be honored to share a name with his mother. Yet, after the recent events of having watched her suffer with whatever was that had gotten her down, he kept on wondering if luck was playing games with him for chosing his ill-fated mother's name. Was it really that much of a coincidence that he had to be stripped off another Kuchel, in a much similar situation?

And how on earth was he supposed to deal with another death brought onto his own little family.

The image of you leaving your last breath while you begged for him to protect your children was a fresh addition of the annihilating pain of grief that clung into his chest as if it was it's safe place. His eyes couldn't help batting erratically to prevent new waves of tears from running cold on his temples as he mentally clung onto the fondest memories of yours. He knew, with the way things were now, he shouldn't allow himself to be weak. There were four children that were completely depended on him, in despairate need to be helped, fed and be stood by for.

He had figured that by allowing himself to be egoistic with his grief he would only manage to repeat Kenny's behavior towards him. Naturally, no decent parent figure would ever chose to treat their children in such way and he didn't wish upon his own babies to feel most of the overwhelming emotions of abandonment he had felt before.

Had you still been here though, no one would have to be forced to deal with your loss in the first place. And as for Kuchel, she wouldn't have to fall sick and fight for her survival since day one.

He still could recall days where you would have fun with your sons, still very pregnant, resting assured that you'd always protect everyone in your own way.

In his memories, you held him tight, arm lingering on his as he cooked a healthy meal for your sons, rubbing one hand over your belly and begging him not to get you pregnant for a long time. Your boys, curious as ever would ask a trillion questions concerning your baby bum to which Kurt would jump to answer before you, taking the role of the experienced older brother, making you giggle at his quick wits and smart mouth.

You would simply bat your eyes in awe and pride as you'd look at him go and take responsibility for his brother at such a young age and in turn, Kurt would promise you he'd always take care of Kuchel as well. Then you would look at Levi, orbs glistering with with plastered happiness only to mouth a silent i love you to him.

The sudden forced halt to your everyday affections was probably what hurt him the most.

In his head, he imagined, you laid beside him as he placed Kuchel to sleep on his chest, smiling at the tenderly profound affection. You hand would graze the surface of his stomach, sliding across the baby's tiny body, only for your fingers to rest on his chin, so tenderly and faintly that he could barely feel them. Your expression would be serene, hues glimmering golden as they'd mirror the warm tingerine flicker of the candlelight.

He would spare you a smile, the most effortessly sincere one he could put on and he'd watch as your eyes would widen. When you'd realise the nature of his expression you would crash your lips against his, noses bumping feverishly into eachother as you'd try to freeze the smile on his face, afraid that it would disappear never to be seen again.

And to that, you would have probably been right. He wasn't going to smile again, not without you at least. Your departure from his life had ripped his heart like an old rotten rag and there was no way for him to manage to pick the pieces of his heart and stitch them back together. He had done it one too many times, just to push forward with being a soldier.

With a heart that was broken one too many times, he should have felt numb when he was ripped off another beloved person.

But he couldn't say the same would ever apply to his children.

As he laid there, staring at Kuchel's chest falling and rising with each little breath she took, he felt like the world threatened to rip him way from his younglings as well. His heart ached at the thought that they would ever have to share a fate with him.

The looks on their confused faces on the day of Kuchel's birth still crushed him. Little by little, day by day, he'd watch as everyone would fall into melancholy from your sudden departure. Kuchel was the first one to suffer from your loss, perhaps, even more fundamentally in comparison to the others.

It had been weeks since Kuchel had fallen ill.

Levi had strained himself physically and mentally trying to figure out what was going on, how could he help or how could he ever even feed her. All the previous experience he had with his sons was nothing compared to not being able to feed his daughter property; what he had suspected of being a mild case of colics, as often as it was on infants, had turned out to be a painful experience for every member in the house just as much as it had been for the newborn girl.

The doctor he had consulted with a little more than a week ago had assured him what Kuchel was going through was normal for children that were forced to receive substitute for their mother's milk. Perhaps, he had suggested, if Levi could find a wet nurse for her she wouldn't have to go through such horrific colics and suffer.

He was only shaken from his thoughts at the creaking sound of the heavy door to your once shared bedroom opening slightly. His eyes immediately fell on the source of sound, only to be welcomed by a small flashing of the dark corridor. With all willpower to move strained from his body though, he couldn't yet manage to utter a single word.

"Kurt, will Kuchel die?"

"Can we go see her?"

The tiny, barely audible voices grazed Levi's eardrums softly, always tenderly allowing him to process the spoken words that left his children's mouths. His nose twitched as anxiety rushed through him, causing him to slightly raise a hand to scratch it in an attempt to shake it's newfound numbness away. The thought of having to force himself to get up from Kuchel's bedside even for a mere moment drowned him in worry and despair.

"No, stupid, she won't die dad's taking care of her. And no, see they're asleep." Kurt whispered as a response, looking at his two brothers after his hand shot on the door to prevent them from opening it further.

Despite the door creaking ever more in response to them pressing their weight on it, the three boys ignored the sound as if it fell deaf to their ears. John and Tony batted their eyes in Kurt's hand, struggling to fit their heads in the slight opening to peek inside the room.

"Mommy wee come and hep her." John tried to whisper, mustering out his best composed words. Kurt threw the younger boy a dangerous glare as the words fell of his mouth, ready to scold him for speaking his nonsense so loud.

"Mom's not coming back," Tony managed to speak, confused as ever, before Kurt ever had a chance to open his mouth. "I think."

Kurt sighed, a loud, angered scoff of air escaping his small nostrils. "Mom's dead, we're never seeing her again. Get it brats?" His grip on the door tightened as he spoke, his feet that had been pushing forward to stop himself from bursting, finally giving in to the pain on the fresh wound in his little chest.

"Kuwt is mean!"John mumbled with a tied tongue "Towy, awe we going to see Kuchel again?"

"In the morning, John!"

"I wan to sweep next to dad!"

"Shut your shitty mouths! Dad is sleeping and we'll wake him and Kuchel up!"

On the other side of the door, Levi laid on the bed in a haze, listening carefully to his children lashing out on their inner thoughts to each other. Originally, he would simply ignore the late night stomping of curiosity his sons were engaged in but an itch to his chest prompted him to get up, to open the door and welcome them into the room.

Hange had spoken to him about the significance of bonding time between him and his children now that they had to come to terms with the significant deat of a parental figure; each one of them them was in a crucial stage of their development, meaning they wouldn't take their mother's death in easily, or even similarly. The psychosynthesis of each child was fragile in its own way and right now Hange's theories were turning out to be correct.

Before he knew it he had walked the distance to the door, opening it slowly to let the three children in."Oi, what have I told you about being vulgar?"

The three siblings froze, chubby cheeks puffing at the sides of their puckered lips as they averted their eyes away from their father's gaze in shame. Kurt took a step forward making sure to force his gray eyes to stare into his father's identical ones, only to speak up the words that were threatening to spill from the tip of his tongue as his heartbeat went through the roof.

"I'm sorry dad!"

Levi's hand automatically shot to the boys direction only to come and ruffle tenderly through his dark chocolate locks. His expression softened and his heart sped up at the slight change of demeanor coming from the boy; Kurt immediately wrapped his arms around his legs, pulling him closer to his smaller body. He melted under the touch. It seemed like his sorrows couldn't bear to get worse at the presence of his children.

In less that a second, Tony and John had nuzzled their way to his legs, in turn, hugging him absurdly tight close to them. Hums and soft giggles escaped them as they cheered for the acceptance of their affections. Almost as if they commanded him to, Levi squatted down, allowing them to wrap their arms around his neck and torso. His own hands came to engulf them in the warmth of his chest, pressing their little heads against it.

"John said he wants to sleep with you! I will watch over Kuchel!" Kurt spoke with the most stern tone he could muster, only to deem himself serious enough for his father to take him seriously.

"Hey I don't want to sleep alone!" Tony exhaled.

Levi couldn't help but let out a huff of amusement through his nose. "How about you all hop onto the bed with me?" He questioned, orbs darting around to all three the pairs of eyes that stared back at him "That way no one has to sleep alone!"

Normally, he knew they would cheer in excitement when you'd allow them to sleep in between you, but the heartbreaking contrast to their current reaction served as another reminder that things were never going to be the same.

Their heads were darting down, eyes burning holes at the floor beneath them as they reluctantly agreed to follow him into the room. He could tell John simply mimicked his brothers' reactions by a mere glance at him. The mellow indicator of his anxiety was served in the form of his teeny fingers mingling with the trims of his sleeves. A silent yawn escaped him, causing his chest to swell and fall in tiredness as he refused to rub any sleep away from his eyes. Noticing it, Levi knew he couldn't waste any more time, he quickly ordered them to secure their grips onto him before he picked them up, entering the bedroom once again.

With curiosity written in their faces, once they were securely set onto the matress, the boys silently crawled to the direction of Kuchel's crib, probing themselves at the edge of the wooden railing. Soon enough, Levi joined them; his hands gripped the railing as he rested his head against them, purposely mimicking his sons.

"Dad, will Kuchel die?" Kurt questioned with dark eyes probing in the direction of the newborn baby. The gulp that went down his throat didn't escape Levi's gaze.

"No, she just has stomach aches from the milk she's been drinking."

With skeptically forrowed brows Tony puckered his lips to the side of his cheek as he proceeded his father's words. "So she will stop drinking milk?"

"Not quite," Levi clicked his tongue "We'll find someone to feed her."

"Mommy wee feed her!"

A heavy sigh escaped Levi's lips as John spoke with enthusiasm. His inability to comprehend death was only natural, Levi reminded himself, but that didn't make it any easier for him to cope up with. It would months even years before Levi could explain to him the concept of death in a way that he could understand and come to terms with. For now, he had to settle with his his heartstrings pulling at him as he spoke the familiar indicators to remind John you were no more of "Mommy can't come back to feed her, so we are going to find a wet nurse."

"What's that?" Tony inquired.

"She is someone who will provide milk for Kuchel like I'm providing food for you."

"Oh!" Tony brought a finger at the side of lip as the profound realisation hit him "Like a new mommy? But why does Kuchel get to have a new mommy, doesn't she like our mommy?"

Levi wasn't given a chance to speak his mind, to educate them on the subject of death once again. Their voices were overlapping each others in a panicked state. It wasn't an uncommon thing for them to do in stressful situations; crying in sync as they stuck with each other as a lunatic team when they cried was something he had grown used to in the past few years. He knew how to handle them, but frankly, in this very moment he mentally couldn't.

"D-did Kuchel kill mommy?"

"Can babies kill?"

"Will Kuchel kill us as well? Daddy don't let Kuchel kill you!"

"Kuchel loved mommy" Levi cleared his throat, finally putting an halt to the synchronized silly assumptions that were being spoken "It's not her fault she had complications in birth."

"Then I don't want to give birth either!" A small cry escaped the group of siblings, causing Levi to bring a palm to his forehead. Sometimes, he wished he could explain things to them as you could, because how the hell was he supposed to explain to Tony that he couldn't physically give birth to someone, at this late hour in the night with his head throbbing in worry for the sickling in the crib.

"You really don't have to worry about that!" He spoke, voice flickering in the air as anxiety rushed through him for the upteenth time. "We should sleep, alright?"

The boys reluctantly bobbed their heads up and down in silently nods of agreement to their father's words. Almost in synch, they detached their hands from the crib's railing only to turn around on their knees to sprawl themselves into the vastness of the double sized bed they had always adorned.

Carefully, Levi laid on his side with his head facing Kuchel's crib, just like a few minutes ago. His hand darted inside the crib, his finger wiggling its way to Kuchel's little palm for her to grab onto. As welcoming as ever, the little palm wrapped around his index finger before a flickered breath exited his daughter's small body. Once he had secured that she wasn't going to be awaken by his actions, with his other hand, Levi plopped himself on his back and motioned to the boys to lay around him in the bed.

First John came to rest under his armpit, shifting himself to his liking onto his father's chest, that much until his ebony hair tickled Levi's chin. Levi recognised it as his perfect comfort sleeping position, the one he'd always go for when he'd sleep in your shared bed.

From that point on it only took seconds for the boy to fall asleep to his father's chest falling up and down as he breathed in a steady manner. Tony had managed to nuzzle his way next to John, fast asleep as well as he cuddled up to both his brother and his father.

"You should sleep bratty." Levi shot to Kurt's direction's as he watched him plop himself on his stomach, his head coming to rest above his hands on Levi's hipbone. Although Levi was unsure if Kurt's face seemed to lit up for a fragment of a second at the beloved petname that escaped his lips, he rested positive that he could at least convince the sever year old to give in to sleep.

"No thanks dad" He yawned "I'll watch over Kuchel! You sleep"

"Kuchel is asleep as well, why don't you come lay on my right side and close your eyes."

Kurt seemed puzzled as he examined the choices he was given. The primary instinct to step in father's shoes in order to protect his sister seemed to slowly give in to his need for some well deserved sleep. It would soon take over him completely, he figured as he stared back at his father, so he opted to comply to his father's prompt for sleep.

Besides, having the chance to sleep tight like a baby on his father's chest like his brothers was as important to his childish antics.

Thus, with a shift in his movements he found himself carefully positioned on the right side of his father's body, nose nuzzling just on the underside of Levi's muscled ribs. The question he wanted to shoot at his father remained at the tip of his tongue as sleep mellowy engulfed him.

Levi's stinging eyes felt heavy as his boys cooed peacefully in his embrace. Maybe, just for tonight, he could let himself rest in the presence of his spawns because unbeknownst to them, they had managed to temporarily put his mind and grief at ease.

Maybe just for tonight, he could let you visit him in his sleep and make things perfect again even for as long as a dream lasted. And maybe when he'd wake up Kuchel would be perfectly fine again and his sons wouldn't be drowning in melancholy and confusion and maybe he wouldn't have to spend the rest of his days wishing your bed could hold six sleeping bodies instead of five.

Tags: @levisbrat25 @alrightberries (that's also a special birthday gift to you I'm sorry it's so sad don't kill me 💀👉🏻👈🏻) @ladyofpandemonium @nobody-knows-anymore @miss-consulting-timelord

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clcwedking · 5 years

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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s DAKEN AKIHIRO/DAKEN, a VILLAIN from MARVEL! HE is SEVENTY THREE years old and look an awful lot like IAN ANTHONY DALE. I hear that they work as a MENACE TO LOGAN’S LIFE. Rumor has it they were AGAINST the Accords and ARE NOT registered under the new laws. I wonder what they’ll find with their new beginning! (luna, she/her, 27, aest)

This is so long i’m so sorry

KEY TO KNOW - THIS DAKEN IS FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE

THIS UNIVERSE’S DAKEN ;;

(For anyone who has read What If? Wolverine: Father you will know this story - if not, read on)

The boy had the same origin - his mother was assassinated in an attempt to get to Logan. The key difference here: when Logan discovered Itsu’s body, he heard the baby’s heartbeat and was able to save him

Logan took the baby to a monastery in Japan to raise him in hopes that the discipline would raise him to be a better man

He named the baby John

John grew up and learned the ways of the monks at the monastery, but his nature - Logan’s nature - couldn’t be denied. He grew more violent, more angry, more disgruntled and unsettled as he got older

One day when he was around 12, Logan left for a few days to handle a few things. While he was gone, Sabertooth picked up on John’s scent, recognising it as being that of Logan and wanting to track him down. After killing a girl John had feelings for he threatened John’s life, holding him over the edge of a cliff while telling him the truth about his father

The emotion, anger, and fear in the moment kick started John’s mutation and his bone claws came out, stabbing straight into Sabertooth’s neck - of course his healing factor made this irrelevant, and he threw John off a cliff to punish Logan, and to test if he had the same healing factor as the rest of the family

John healed from the fall and returned to the monastery, and in his anger and rage he killed all the monks to leave Logan a message, before disappearing

He went to Tokyo and, as a result of his skill and instincts, he joined the Yakuza, quickly moving up the ranks, renaming himself Daken - meaning mongrel

By the time he reached the top he wanted more, wanted control of everything, and killed the head of the Yakuza, taking over himself at 22 years old

Then, Logan found him. They fought, Daken with his claws, Logan with his Muramasa blade, and Logan won. As a result of the blade used he couldn’t heal, and Logan was left to watch his son die.

Logan doesn’t remember any of this - because he’s lost his memories of his past he has no idea this happened. As a result, unless your character was alive and around in Japan from like 1960-1968 when he would’ve been in the Yakuza, they won’t know him either.

I am 100% up for characters feeling some kind of like multiverse weird vibe of maybe kind of knowing but not really knowing who this guy is!

THIS DAKEN’S HISTORY ;;

daken has a very tragic life i hope you’re ready. this is all taken from 616 Daken - unless your character is from that universe too, anyone mentioned here is from another verse!

Daken is the son of Logan and Itsu - a woman Logan fell in love with when he lived in Japan

Unfortunately that happy life he was hoping for was never meant to be - Itsu was heavily pregnant when she was killed, shot by the Winter Soldier in an attempt to draw Logan out

Logan returned to find her dead and, upon not being able to hear any heartbeats, assumed his baby was dead along with the woman he loved

Romulus appeared when Logan had left and removed the baby from Itsu’s womb - the baby had inherited Logan’s regenerative healing and had somehow survived the ordeal

Romulus left the baby with a wealthy Japanese couple who believed at the time that they could not conceive, and were happy to raise him as their own

Unfortunately his heritage was clear and, despite being given the name Akihiro by his adoptive parents, many in their village would use the slur “Daken”, meaning bastard dog

With so many treating him so poorly because of his heritage he grew up with a cold nature towards all but his father.

Unbeknownst to him at this point in his life, his pheromone control was beginning to kick in and was well outside of his control, largely focused on his mother and making her feel negatively towards him. With no idea what was causing it, Daken assumed his mother didn’t love him - something that only escalated when they were able to conceive, and Daken overheard her telling his father that she didn’t love Daken, and that they would soon be having their own child

When the baby was born Daken, wildly jealous, killed the baby and confronted his mother. His father was furious and disowned him, and his mother tried to kill him with a bayonet - this kicked off the rest of his mutant abilities and while trying to wave her away his bone claws came out and he killed her by accident

Unable to cope with the death of his wife and child, and unable to kill Daken, his adoptive father killed himself, leaving Daken alone

It was then that Romulus appeared and took him to the training camp in Canada Logan had been at decades earlier, to be cruelly trained by Silas Burr

He trained there for two years before being egged on by Romulus to attempt to kill his teacher, and in the process began learning to control his pheromone control

At this point Romulus began feeding Daken lies, telling him that Logan killed his mother and abandoned him, and as a result Daken grew with a need for vengeance on his father, wanting nothing more than to kill Logan for what he’d supposedly done to Itsu

He grew up adopting the nickname he’d hated as a child - Daken, over Akihiro - and began moving into a life of crime, stealing and murdering and doing his best to take over whatever criminal underworld he could

When he was given a tip as to where his father could be found he confronted him, resulting in a bloody fight where it was obvious Daken’s fighting abilities and prowess was very similar to Logan’s

The fight was interrupted by a hell of a lot of horrible stuff including more fighting and torture

He was later confronted by Logan and shot in the head by a carbonadium bullet - ironically by the Winter Soldier - to temporarily disable his healing factor so Logan could speak with him and tell him the truth

Lots more awful stuff happened in the mean time, Daken lost his memories for a bit and then got them back with some trauma added

Eventually he was recruited to join Norman Osborn’s Dark Avengers and agreed to join in hopes that he could lure out Cyclops and gain the Muramasa blade he had

He worked with the team for a time but he was never really loyal to Norman, always operating with ulterior motives

During this time he also made friends with Johnny Storm - by shooting him in the leg with an arrow in an attempt to frame Bullseye and lure the F4 in to work with him. He helped them break into Avengers Tower to steal info about Norman’s less than savoury ways but the plan failed thanks to Bullseye - evidence of Daken’s true nature was leaked online instead

Norman tried to push to improve Daken’s image which failed miserably, and when the Dark Avengers were later captured and arrested during the Siege of Asgard, he was the only one who escaped

Further fights with Logan ensued over time, not to mention he returned to his life of crime and working alone

He faked his death at some point and appeared in the F4 tower to ask Reed for help - his healing factor was having issues and he needed their help to fashion a claw-like weapon for himself before going off to work more in the criminal underworld

During this stint he met Laura who he thought of as nothing more than a clone of the man he’s hated his whole life - though they did end up working together

He then shifted to LA to try and take over the criminal underworld there, only to fail thanks to the effects of a drug called Heat which disabled his healing factor again, and LA ended disasterously

He then set his sights on Logan again, heading for NYC and planting bombs in Avengers Tower, the F4 tower, and the Jean Grey School before finding Logan and asking him to forgive him before blowing himself up. His goal had been to leave Logan with nothing.

Eventually he returned to life and formed a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, targeting Logan via Evan, wanting to turn him into Apocalypse. The ensuing mess resulted in Daken’s death at his father’s hands

He was brought back again by the Apocalypse twins as one of the Horsemen of Death

When Logan died he struggled to come to terms with the loss and how to deal with it, not having gotten his own revenge and struggling to reconcile the feelings of loss for a man he’d hated for so many decades. During this time he and Laura got closer, eventually developing more of a familiar relationship of a brother and sister

His life has swing between questionably noble for selfish reasons, and downright selfish and criminal depending on what suited him. He’s also died a couple more times, and has lost his left arm twice

Good to know/TLDR ;;

Daken absolutely hates Logan, believing that he was responsible for Itsu’s death and Daken’s horrific life full of torture and misery

Even so he has a propensity for the negative - his natural instincts are to be selfish and self preserving, something he’ll only ever ignore for a few select people like Laura and Gabby and Johnny

For someone who’s so selfish and will usually attempt to go for self-preservation, he’s really not good at being kind to himself. A life of torture and misery and confusion has made it hard to really bother taking care of himself

His healing factor seems to be linked to his mental and emotional state - his unsettled nature when Logan was killed made it hard for him to heal, especially to regenerate his arm when lost both times. Meditation to come to terms with his emotional state helped him recover

As much as he has a propensity for going back to criminal behaviour, he has expressed a desire to try and aim for better - unfortunately a life that’s been lived largely alone sees him return to more harmful and negative ways and leads back to a criminal life, or he’s pulled that way by his need for vengeance against Logan

He is very intelligent and strategically minded

Most recently Daken died again, but was only accompanied by Sabertooth and lady Deathstrike so there was no way for anyone to know what happened to him. when he was revived he was somehow brought back in this universe

Daken has the capacity to be good. He wants to, and has wanted to at numerous times in his life. At the very least he’s wanted to be better - but being in a universe where all anyone’s known him as is a bad guy, a violent man who does nothing but crime and murder and wreak havoc. Being in a whole new universe where no one knows him, what he is, what he’s done, definitely offers and opportunity to start with a completely clean slate, but Daken finds it difficult to ignore his natural instinct for bloodlust and violence so there’s a chance for him to be influenced either way!

Main Powers/Abilities ;;

Regenerative healing - the same as all other Wolverines, he has the ability to heal from injuries and loss of limbs

Superhuman factors - strength, speed, stamina, durability, agility, senses, and reflexes

Longevity

Weather adaption

Retractable bone claws - two from his knuckles and one from his wrist, pure bone rather than adamantium

Pheromone control - Daken has the ability to control people’s pheromones and emotional reactions as a result. He has demonstrated the ability to manipulate his pheromones for the purpose of suppressing his own scent to such a degree that even Wolverine's senses are unable to detect him. He can also use his pheromones to manipulate the emotional state and sensory perceptions of other beings. He has been known to use this power to instil intense fear, happiness, depression, sexual arousal, and a false sense of security to other beings. This allows him to seemingly appear where enemies can't see him, enabling him to inflect damage before an opponent realises it.

#beginagainintro #death tw #torture tw #suicide tw #drug use tw #bombs tw #guns tw #he's worse than noah lmao #if you read all of this you deserve a medal

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Best Modern Horror Movies

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Every once in a while, someone likes to declare that the horror genre is dead, and so far, every one of those predictions has been wrong.

Horror movies have been around almost as long as filmmaking itself, and while the genre has always been cyclical in nature –dipping, sometimes drastically, in both quality and quantity from time to time — all it usually takes is a well-timed box office hit, a fresh new angle or a hot young filmmaker to reanimate it again.

The 21st century has been, overall, an extremely healthy one for horror. There’s been the usual amount of dross, of course, but the genre has branched out in a number of interesting new directions as well. We had absolutely no problem tallying the initial batch of movies for this article, and have just continued to update it ever since, starting with the newest and going back in time from there.

So here are over 50 terrifying favorites that you can use for your own personal Halloween film festival — and we promise that this lineup delivers. Brace yourselves for a look at the best horror movies of the 21st century.

These are the very best modern horror movies…

Saint Maud (2020)

As our own Rosie Fletcher said in her review, Saint Maud is “a strange, gorgeous, and deeply disturbing chiller which mixes psychological, religious, and body horror to form something that feels utterly original.” She added that the film “messes with your perceptions of what’s real and what isn’t and comes with an ending that’s so simultaneously euphoric and horrific it feels like a punch in the heart.”

She’s right on the money. Morfydd Clark is outstanding in the title role, a private nurse who believes she can speak directly with God and decides it’s her mission to save the soul of the dying, debauched professional dancer (Jennifer Ehle) she is caring for. Maud lives right on the knife’s edge between spiritual ecstasy and mental illness, and director Rose Glass’ debut feature captures the surreal, horrific netherworld that is this tormented young woman’s life.

Saint Maud is out in theaters in the UK now.

Relic (2020)

The horror film at its best allows us to experience our deepest real-life fears in metaphorical terms, which is what the excellent Relic does with specificity, empathy, and atmosphere to spare. Emily Mortimer plays Kay, a workaholic single mom who gets a call from the police that her elderly mother Edna is missing from her home in the Australian countryside. When Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) drive out from Melbourne to the house, Edna (Robyn Nevin) reappears after two days–but cannot recall where she’s been.

Edna’s house–untidy, dark, and littered with odd notes and markings–and behavior lead Kay and a local doctor to surmise that the headstrong Edna is slowly sinking into the grip of dementia. But something else is at hand — an unseen presence that can seemingly bend reality — and the feature debut of director Natalie Erika James works so well because of its complete cohesion between characters, theme and imagery. Grief and loss ooze from every frame of the film, along with an impending sense of dread and claustrophobia.

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SpectreVision

Color Out of Space (2020)

Color Out of Space adapts what legendary horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered his personal favorite short story, “The Colour Out of Space.” Although the film is set in the present, it is faithful to the original 1927 narrative, in which a family is both driven to madness and altered physically by the presence of an alien entity that has landed on their farm in a meteorite.

Starring a typically unpredictable Nicolas Cage, Color Out of Space is flawed in many ways, but is distinguished by three things: the return of director Richard Stanley (Hardware) after too many years away from features, a plethora of eerie and downright disturbing imagery, and an overall atmosphere that comes damn close to that of Lovecraft himself.

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Neon

The Lodge (2020)

The Lodge stars an excellent Riley Keough as Grace, a troubled young woman in love with Richard (Richard Madden) a journalist who wrote a book about the suicide cult she is the only survivor of. Their relationship triggers Richard’s estranged wife (Alicia Silverstone) to commit suicide, leaving the former couple’s two children devastated.

Six months later, Richard, Grace and the children head up to Richard’s remote winter lodge in an effort for all of them to heal. But a series of unexplained events occur that may be tied to Grace’s past or the death of the children’s mother — or both. Directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (the harrowing Goodnight Mommy), The Lodge reeks with dread and leads to a thoroughly unsettling finish.

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Wounds (2019)

This Hulu original stars Armie Hammer as Will, a New Orleans bartender whose discovery of an abandoned mobile phone in his place of business portends the arrival of an unspeakable evil, a malevolence that infects him, his girlfriend (Dakota Johnson) and almost everything in his life.

British-Iranian director Babek Anvari (2016’s supremely eerie Under the Shadow), creates an atmosphere of extreme dread and rot here, from the cockroaches Will is constantly killing behind the bar to the frightening images and sounds that keep appearing on that damn phone. Based on a novella called The Visible Filth by acclaimed horror writer Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds leaves much unexplained but that’s kind of the point: horror is often most effective when it can’t be rationalized.

Watch Wounds on Hulu

Tigers Are Not Afraid (2019)

There’s a reason why no less a maestro than Guillermo Del Toro is a fan of this deeply felt and moving film: it covers much of the same territory that he has explored in some of his greatest works like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth — the place where imagination, childhood innocence and real world corruption intersect in a surreal, dangerous yet fantastical landscape.

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After her mother goes missing in the latest cartel rampage through an unnamed and anarchy-plagued Mexican city, a young girl (Paola Lara) finds herself living on rooftops with a small band of little boys and haunted by an apparition that may or may not be her mother. Director and writer Issa Lopez wrings emotion, humor and even minor triumphs out of this dark scenario, while not shying away from its more disturbing implications.

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Ready or Not (2019)

Darkly funny and subversive, Ready or Not is an out-of-nowhere surprise that deftly weds (pun intended) an acidic black comedy about income inequality and the politics of marriage to a more gruesome thriller about being chased around an old, dark house by a deranged family of Satanists. If that doesn’t pull you in, nothing will.

Samara Weaving is an appealing lead as the young woman who marries into a clan of vast wealth and privilege, only to find out where they came from and what the family must do to maintain them. Weaving is excellent at both the comedy and horror, while Andie MacDowell and Henry Czerny lead a sparkling supporting cast of cracked characters. It may not be especially scary, but ready or not, this one’s a real crowd-pleaser.

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Annabelle Comes Home (2019)

Who would have thunk that the third time would be the charm for this popular Conjuring spin-off series? First-time director Gary Dauberman — who wrote all three entries in the sub-franchise — rises to the challenge and brings a wonderful sense of atmospherics and dread to the proceedings that was lacking in the earlier films. Anyone who channels the lighting schemes of horror legends like Mario Bava is all right in our book.

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Annabelle Comes Home also proves to be the sharpest-written of the bunch, as four girls — one of them the daughter of Conjuring ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who cameo here) — try to fight off the evil title doll as she unleashes hell on them over the course of one night. The cast is given depth and agency, which makes us care all the more when Dauberman turns the movie into a full-on monster mash. This one’s old school fun.

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Midsommar (2019)

Ari Aster blew everyone away in 2018 with his writing and directing debut, Hereditary (see below), a frightening tale of family dysfunction, grief, memory and naked witches summoning an ancient demon (Was that a spoiler? Sorry). His follow-up, Midsommar, wears its direct influences on its sleeve and tries a little too hard to signal its own importance, but it’s supremely eerie in its own way and quite nasty in what it shows and what it hints at.

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Four college friends — including disintegrating couple Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) — are invited by an exchange student to Sweden, where they’ll visit the reclusive commune in which he was raised. Fans of films like The Wicker Man will have a pretty good sense of what’s coming, even if Aster doesn’t quite answer all the questions he raises. What he does do, however, is chill the blood with both the way the travelers turn on each other and how the Harga find spirituality and transcendence in their deeply disturbing rituals.

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Us (2019)

The second feature from Get Out writer/director Jordan Peele still cleverly uses the horror genre for social commentary, but the focus is less directly on race this time and more on class and privilege. Lupita Nyong’o is outstanding as Adelaide, whose well-off family is terrorized by savage doppelgangers intent on murdering them. Who those duplicates are, and what they mean, provides for a biting commentary on the haves and the have-nots.

Some of the story logic is fuzzier this time around, but Peele is still adept at creating a genuine atmosphere of dread while deploying well-worn horror tricks in unique new ways. He also gets tremendous performances out of his cast, including Black Panther’s Winston Duke and The Handmaid Tale’s Elisabeth Moss, in what is ultimately a solid sophomore outing for the director.

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Halloween (2018)

After years of mostly lackluster sequels and reboots, director David Gordon Green (and his co-writer Danny McBride) take this horror icon both back to the roots and into the future. The result is a direct sequel to the original that ignores all the other films and concentrates, with stark precision, on two ideas: the concept of Michael Myers as a primal force of evil and the theme of PTSD as exemplified by Jamie Lee Curtis’ powerful performance as a permanently damaged Laurie Strode.

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Both a thrilling rollercoaster ride and a chilling exploration of an unknowable psyche, the new Halloween is also relevant to what’s happening in 2018 — making The Shape a valid and still scary vessel for whatever metaphor you want him to represent.

Mandy (2018)

Dream-like, surreal and hypnotic — when it’s not screaming with rage — Mandy may be more interested in atmosphere and imagery than story (the plot is admittedly far too simple for the movie’s two-hour length) but is an unnerving experience nonetheless.

At the center of this boldly experimental assault from director Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) is a primal performance from Nicolas Cage, whose reputation for gonzo performances does a disservice to the raw emotion he can still deliver as a lumberjack out for vengeance against a frightening cult. Mandy might try your patience, but its visual poetry and uncaged (ha ha) star are never dull.

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Hereditary (2018)

It’s still hard to believe that this is the first feature ever from writer/director Ari Aster, who brings a literal parade of horrors to his terrifying exploration of a family’s complete breakdown from forces within and without.

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Toni Collette is off-the-charts stunning as the mother who tries to hold her clan together even in the face of unspeakable tragedy and the knowledge that her own family history is working against them. Harrowing and thoroughly unsettling, Hereditary is perhaps the best example yet of a new wave of genre films that are about something while still scaring the living shit out of you.

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The Endless (2018)

Two brothers (played by Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead, who also directed, produced, edited and wrote the film) return to the cult they once belonged to as youths, each carrying different memories of their time there and different expectations of what they’ll find in the present. But neither sibling is prepared for the inexplicable events that occur once they arrive.

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Following their features Resolution and Spring, the Benson/Morehead team once again prove themselves adept at creating believable, atmospheric, dread-infused horror with limited resources. These guys clearly know what they’re doing, and the eerie The Endless is a strong next step for them.

Watch The Endless on Amazon

A Quiet Place (2018)

Who knew that mild Jim Halpert from The Office would end up directing one of the most acclaimed and outright scary movies of the past few years? In his third outing behind the camera (which he also co-wrote and stars in), John Krasinski uses silence — which can be deployed to great effect in horror movies — in the most ingenious manner possible. He, Emily Blunt and their three children live in a near-future world overrun by hideous, blind creatures that use their superior hearing to track prey by sound, thus necessitating that the human survivors remain as quiet as possible.

The result is a thriller in which literally every footstep is suffused with dread and a rusty nail becomes an object of extreme terror. While the script creaks a bit and could have used some better development, there’s no doubt that Krasinski directs this for maximum tension while getting terrific work out of himself, his wife and the kids. A Quiet Place is not just compelling horror, but a loud announcement of an outstanding new directorial talent.

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It (2017)

It’s been a long time since a Stephen King screen adaptation really got the author’s work and intent right, but It does so and then some. Full of heart and warmth for its seven young main characters — all of whom are perfectly cast — It sets them against an insidious evil in the shape of Bill Skarsgard’s unforgettable Pennywise the Clown.

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Director Andy Muschietti’s take on King’s masterpiece is humane, moving and even funny — a coming-of-age story that also happens to be an engrossing and unsettling monster tale. It’s very rare that a truly “epic” horror movie is released, but It can stand proudly in that rarefied category.

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It Comes at Night (2017)

Was this movie mismarketed? Or did audiences just reject its overwhelming, unrelenting bleakness? Either way it’s one of the overlooked horror gems of the past few years. Writer/director Trey Edward Shults is not interested in the whys or hows of his post-apocalyptic setting — he just puts regular, fearful human beings into the aftermath and lets us watch them as any chance for survival slowly unravels.

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Understated, incredibly claustrophobic (the house is a character itself) and stocked with great performances from Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, and the rest of the cast, It Comes at Night is as naturalistic as a horror movie gets — and is all the more terrifying for it.

Watch It Comes at Night on Amazon Prime

Split (2017)

This was the film we had the toughest time deciding whether or not to include on this list. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan gives it the structure, atmosphere and tone of a horror movie, yet it’s clear now that it’s also an origin story for a comic book-style supervillain and a de facto sequel to his Unbreakable.

But for most of its running time, Split is a harrowing, darkly humorous psychological thriller anchored by an incredible performance from James McAvoy as a man with 24 different personalities in his brain — as well as a monstrous 25th that is about to emerge.

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The Girl with All the Gifts (2017)

Not just one of the best horror movies of 2017, The Girl with All the Gifts was one of the best movies of that year. Moving and compassionate while at the same time frightening and dread-inducing, the movie puts a fresh spin on the zombie genre and creates memorable, empathetic characters who grapple with questions of not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be alive.

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Stars Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine and Glenn Close give top-shelf performances, but the movie belongs to young Sennia Nanua as the flesh-eating yet fully sentient Melanie, who may be a forerunner of a new, unexpected step in the evolution of whatever the human race ends up becoming. Gripping from start to finish.

Watch The Girl with All the Gifts on Amazon

Raw (2017)

Deeply graphic and disturbing, yet also rich with symbolism and subtext, Raw is both as grisly and sophisticated as horror movies come. The movie also touches on gender politics and family dynamics in its tale of two sisters at a French veterinary school who awaken to the power of their own bodies as well as primal, vicious hungers neither one of them thought possible. Director/writer Julia Ducournau stages the film in gritty, intimate style, making the gnawing on human flesh all the more horrific to watch. Raw is a movie that lives up to its name.

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Get Out (2017)

The directorial debut of comedy writer/actor Jordan Peele is a sharp, funny and creepy horror satire on race relations, white liberal hubris and socal justice. It’s also a genuinely suspenseful thriller, albeit with nods to earlier movies like The Stepford Wives, and proves that horror continues to be an effective genre through which to tell culturally and socially relevant stories.

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Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a young African-American photographer who heads to the country with his white girlfriend (Alison Williams) to meet her parents for the first time. The meeting does not go well as Chris realizes that the seemingly nice yet awkward Armitages (led by an excellent Catherine Keener) are not what they appear to be at all. Get Out is thrilling, refreshing and a nice change of pace for the genre.

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Under the Shadow (2016)

International cinema has been exploring genre with great success in recent years, and this intimate yet mournful thriller, set in 1980s Tehran during the ongoing and brutal war between Iran and Iraq, is one of the more thoughtful and unique horror movies to emerge from that creative wellspring.

Iranian politics and social mores are woven carefully into the plot, which follows a woman and her daughter who are haunted by a djinn (an evil spirit) that may have been unleashed when their apartment building is shelled. The metaphor of the evil set free by war is fairly on the nose, but director Babak Anvari still constructs an atmosphere of slowly ascending terror and macabre imagery.

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Train to Busan (2016)

Just when you thought the zombie genre had been utterly exhausted, someone comes along and reinvigorates it. Director Yeon Sang-ho’s South Korean production brought something back to the genre that had been gradually draining out of it: humanity.

Sure there’s a bit of sentimentality too in this story of a father trying desperately to get his daughter to her mom by train as a zombie plague breaks out, but the movie’s well-drawn characters, subtle social commentary (some on the train feel they are more worthy of survival than others) and frightening action sequences add up to a thrilling and emotionally powerful ride.

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The Wailing (2016)

South Korea struck again with this epic-length (156 minutes!) story of possession and exorcism in a small village from director Na Hong-jin. Once again a father must fight to save his daughter’s life: in this case he is a cop (Kwak Dowon) investigating a series of mysterious and violent deaths, only to discover that they have a supernatural cause that soon infects his family.

Despite odd moments of humor here and there, The Wailing is almost unremittingly bleak and its imagery is thoroughly unsettling. Deliberately paced and building an atmosphere of unspeakable dread, The Wailing is a standout of Asian horror.

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The Invitation (2016)

This intense little psychological thriller from director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body) starts off as a weirdly off-kilter domestic melodrama and shifts disquietingly into outright paranoia as it explores the dynamics of grief, modern relationships and how well we really know our friends and neighbors.

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Kusama’s deft handling of the material and setting (an angular and eventually sinister L.A. house), as well as a superb cast (led by Logan Marshall-Green and Tammy Blanchard, with support from the always creepy John Carroll Lynch) elevate the standard dinner party thriller into something a bit more special. And the final scene is a knockout.

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The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuring 2 is a rare example of a horror sequel equaling or even surpassing the original. This time the focus is more directly on paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) as their skills, courage and faith are tested by England’s famous Enfield Poltergeist.

Director James Wan once again proves himself a master at using negative space, sound (or lack thereof) and period detail to wring goosebumps out of even the most jaded viewer, and the deeper characterizations make the stakes that much higher as well. There are few horror “epics,” but The Conjuring 2 comes close to being one.

Watch The Conjuring 2 on Amazon

The Witch (2016)

A stunning feature film debut from director Robert Eggers, The Witch tells the story of a 17th century Puritan family who are excommunicated from their village and build their own farm on the edge of a vast forest — only to be preyed upon by an ancient, malevolent witch who lives deep in the woods. Touching on themes of religious persecution and mania, sexual awakening and humanity vs. nature, The Witch is a fully immersive and wholly terrifying experience.

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Director Robert Eggers maintains astonishing control of mood and texture throughout, and the entire cast — including newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy as the family’s teen daughter — seems eerily snatched out of the past. The Witch is classic supernatural horror.

Watch The Witch on Amazon Prime

The Visit (2015)

M. Night Shyamalan began a welcome and long-overdue comeback with this quirky and creepy little found-footage experiment, which focuses on a teen brother and sister who make an unforgettable and eventually terrifying trip to visit the grandparents they’ve never met.

Shyamalan seems comfortable working within the lower-budget confines of the Blumhouse scream factory, and he manages to inject both a nice streak of morbid humor and enough of his trademark character touches to keep us off-balance. The movie has an unsettling tone throughout and, for the first time in a long time, the “twist” is well-earned and shocking.

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It Follows (2014)

One of the best horror films of the past couple of years is, like all the genre’s standout entries, rich in metaphor and subtext – is the curse passed through sex among the movie’s characters a stand-in for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, or is the sex act itself a way to affirm life or at least postpone the inevitable onset of death? Writer/director David Robert Mitchell keeps it ambiguous – much to some viewers’ chagrin – and instead focuses on the movie’s overall atmosphere and tone, which is dream-like and full of dread.

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Lead actress Maika Monroe is a star in the making, but the most unforgettable thing about It Follows is its implacable walking phantoms, who cause your flesh to crawl every time they enter the frame.

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The Babadook (2014)

An instant classic upon its release, this Australian shocker is, astoundingly, the debut film from writer/director Jennifer Kent, who retains the kind of complete and unwavering grip on her story, themes and tone that you would expect from a much more seasoned filmmaker. Essie Davis is outstanding as Amelia, a widowed mother still reeling from the loss of her husband Oskar as she does her exhausted best to raise their troubled six-year-old son Sam (Noah Wiseman), who was born the night that Oskar died.

Enter the Babadook, the subject of a frightening storybook that Sam finds and an entity that is soon terrorizing mother and child. Thoroughly frightening and unnerving, The Babadook is also quite profound as it touches on the nature of grief and parenthood, hinting that both can drive a person to the edge of madness — or into the clutches of the Babadook.

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Oculus (2014)

Following his ultra-low-budget indie debut Absentia, writer/director Mike Flanagan expanded his short student film into this striking tale of supernatural and psychological terror. Karen Gillan (Doctor Who) stars as a woman who believes that an antique mirror has been responsible for the tragic history of her family, and sets out to destroy it by any means she can. The mirror, however, has other plans.

Set in two parallel timelines that eventually intersect, Oculus is original, creepy and filled with mounting tension; the film is steeped not just in the atmosphere of ‘70s horror cinema but also modern supernatural literature. With more features to his name since (including Ouija: Origin of Evil, his adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, and Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House) Flanagan is a talent to watch.

Watch Oculus on Amazon Prime

You’re Next (2013)

Home invasion movies can kind of be formulaic after a while, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett (The Guest) find a way to freshen it up by turning You’re Next into a macabre soap opera as well. In the meantime, however, there’s a ton of suspense and bloody mayhem to satiate fans of visceral horror, and the family dynamics at work make for a nice counterpoint to the terror.

The cast is terrific, a mix of horror vets (Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden) and mumblecore regulars, and Sharni Vinson is outstanding as the dinner guest with a secret of her own.

Watch You’re Next on Amazon

The Conjuring (2013)

A film about real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren had been in development for nearly 20 years — outlasting Ed himself — before finally coming to fruition in 2013 as The Conjuring. Based on a case the Warrens investigated concerning the haunting of a family farm by a witch, the film afforded director James Wan the change to take the horror skills he had honed on his previous project, Insidious, and apply them to a larger scale Hollywood production.

The result was a genuinely scary experience with plenty of atmosphere and just enough empathy for the family and the Warrens to elevate the movie about the usual shock tactics. It was also a major box office hit, making it that rare genre entry that was enjoyed by both critics and audiences.

Watch The Conjuring on Amazon

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Both a deconstruction of the genre and one of the 21st century’s best horror movies in its own right, The Cabin in the Woods could only be the work of Joss Whedon (co-writer) and Drew Goddard (co-writer and director), whose love and understanding of both the genre and the wider pop culture context around it make this one of the smartest satires in recent memory. Proposing that the standard template for a horror film is what keeps the real horrors at bay, the movie turns that formula on its head yet works it to maximum effect.

Goddard is assured in his directorial debut, the cast (including a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth and a brilliant Richard Jenkins as one of the weary “technicians” pulling the strings) is game, and the movie nails its meta premise perfectly.

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We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel and directed by Lynne Ramsay, We Need to Talk About Kevin is the perennial “evil child” story disguised as an arthouse film. But the combination works, thanks to Ramsay’s striking direction and imagery and two knockout performances by Tilda Swinton as the mother and a frightening Ezra Miller as Kevin. Swinton’s anguished portrayal deepens the film’s themes and offers a searing and complex picture of a parent’s occasional ambivalence toward their own child.

Yet the movie doesn’t skimp on its horrors either, both psychological and physical, and stretches the boundaries of what can be considered a horror movie.

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Kill List (2011)

With just one feature to his credit before this (Down Terrace), director and co-writer Ben Wheatley hits his second film clear out of the park, fashioning it into a mash-up of gritty crime thriller and chilling Lovecraftian horror tale. The result is a unique movie that’s not quite like anything else on this list and will you leave you shaken to the core. Two former British soldiers turned hit men (Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley) take a job in which they must kill three people — a priest, a video archivist, and a member of Parliament — but soon find out that they have gotten involved with something far beyond their experience and understanding.

The somber mood, ambiguous plot (Wheatley deliberately and correctly leaves much unexplained) and almost unwatchable bursts of violence come to a boil in the truly horrifying and enigmatic climax.

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Insidious (2011)

After one hit (Saw) and a couple of misses (Dead Silence and Death Sentence), writer/director James Wan and his writing partner Leigh Whannell scored with this tiny ($1 million budget) indie that became a huge hit (and sadly spawned two lousy follow-ups). But Insidious deserved its success: it’s a genuinely scary film, with Wan displaying a tremendous talent for utilizing the camera frame, darkness and silence to create an oppressive atmosphere of dread only enhanced by some truly bizarre manifestations.

In pulling tricks from all eras of horror, Wan came up with something original, terrifying and entertaining – a horror ride that all fans could enjoy.

Watch Insidious on Amazon

I Saw the Devil (2010)

Director Kim Ji-Woon (A Tale of Two Sisters) sends an intelligence agent (Lee Byung-hun) on a mission of vengeance against a sadistic serial killer (Choi Min-sik) in this shocking and stunningly depraved cat and mouse thriller in which all notions of morality go out the window along with numerous bloody body parts. Yet Kim keeps you invested in the characters as well, and this Korean epic has an undertone of sadness that’s hard to shake. Kim holds it all together masterfully, creating a horrifying experience like nothing else we saw the year it came out.

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The House of the Devil (2009)

Indie auteur Ti West’s homage to the horror movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s is replete with stylistic touches from both decades, ranging from the old-school opening credits to the use of zoom lenses to the 16mm film stock meant to look retro. But this isn’t just a pastiche: while The House of the Devil is the definition of a “slow burn” film — which may leave some viewers impatient — the payoff is worth it as babysitter Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is subjected to a night of Satanic horrors that will leave you shaken.

West is an expert at leading us along and then tightening the screws hard, and if you told me that The House of the Devil had actually come out around 1981 or so, I just might have believed you.

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Paranormal Activity (2009)

For better or worse, Oren Peli’s homemade, shoestring thriller kicked off a tidal wave of films using the “found footage” or “faux doc” style of moviemaking, an esthetic that has proven increasingly confining and exhausted. But there’s no denying the strength of a few early contenders, starting with this. Peli shows us almost nothing in terms of visual effects, which only heightens the experience: you can’t help but feel a powerful sense of dread every time his camera sits and stares into the shadowy abyss of the couple’s bedroom while they sleep.

Tons of sequels, rehashes and rip-offs later, Paranormal Activity remains authentically frightening and deserves its berth on a list of the century’s best horror movies.

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Let the Right One In / Let Me In (2008/2010)

In an era of endless bloodsucking YA hotties, leave it to an 11-year-old girl to create the best and eeriest vampire seen on the screen in years. Based on a novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist and directed by fellow Swede Tomas Alfredson, this is the story of the friendship that grows between lonely, bullied 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and the little girl who lives in the apartment next door, Eli (Lina Leandersson) — an ancient vampire inside the body of a child. Let the Right One In is scary, funny, romantic and also quite mournful, tackling themes of youth, sexuality, loyalty, loss of innocence and love within a terrific and haunting vampire tale.

The two child actors are outstanding, with Leandersson projecting an otherworldliness and weariness far beyond her years. Credit is also due to the English-language remake by director Matt Reeves, who stayed largely faithful to the original while tweaking its meaning slightly (his actors, Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee, are fine if not quite as good as the Swedish cast).

Watch Let the Right One In here and Let Me In here!

Martyrs (2008)

Brutal and almost unwatchable, Martyrs represented perhaps the apex of the French extreme horror movement. A young woman (Morjana Alaoui) finds herself the subject of vicious “tests” by a secret society, aimed at creating a “martyr” whose suffering can give them a transcendental glimpse into the afterlife. The ordeal she goes through is just the grand finale of a nihilistic exercise in depravity. Director Pascal Laugier’s plunge into unrelieved sadism is given context by its powerful, eerie climax — if you can make it to the end.

Watch Martyrs on Amazon Prime

The Strangers (2008)

Writer and director Bryan Bertino made quite a splash with his debut feature, which relied more on a mounting sense of dread and escalating suspense than violence and gore. The story is a simple, straightforward home invasion narrative, but Bertino keeps it creepy and unsettling throughout thanks to some eerie imagery and his three terrifying antagonists. Bertino has directed some features since – the direct-to-video found footage thriller Mockingbird and The Monster – but The Strangers remains an impressively chilling calling card.

Watch The Strangers on Amazon

Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

Michael Dougherty’s Halloween-themed anthology sat on the shelf for nearly two years until finally (and criminally) getting just a direct-to-home-video release, but the wait was worth it. Dougherty wrote and directed a loving homage not just to the year’s most haunted holiday, but to horror movies and ghost stories in general, delivering four interconnected tales that each serve as a nasty, creepy and thoroughly entertaining exercise in traditional horror, with just the right amounts of atmosphere, scares and gore.

A lot of the best horror movies of this century aim to get under your skin in an unpleasant way, whereas Trick ‘R Treat just wants to have fun – and does.

Watch Trick ‘r Treat on Amazon

[REC] (2007)

This nasty shock to the system from Spanish horror specialist Jaume Balaguero uses the “found footage” style in logical fashion, as it’s told from the point of view of a news team that accompanies a fire brigade to a call at an apartment building. Things quickly take a turn not just for the bad but for the unspeakable as our heroes confront a zombie plague of a horrific nature, and [REC] rubs your nose in every nightmarish moment. The building itself is a spectacular, claustrophobic setting, and what [REC] lacks in meaningful character development it makes up in relentless terror and dread.

Take a good, stiff drink before watching.

Watch [REC] on Amazon

The Mist (2007)

A faithful and pretty great Stephen King adaptation, The Mist is terrifying not just for the macabre monsters that come streaming out of the title cloud to lay siege on a small group of people trapped in a supermarket, but for the way those people turn so quickly on each other as well.

Movies

Revisiting the Ending of The Mist

By Dan Cooper

Writer/director Frank Darabont, nailing his third King-based adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, innately understands that King’s stories are often so disquieting because of the human monsters in them as well as the slimy, tentacled ones. In this case the threat is Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a religious fanatic who quickly does her best to divide the supermarket into two hostile camps — I’ll let you work out the metaphors.

Beyond that, however, The Mist is a genuinely scary monsterpalooza, with one of the bleakest endings ever. When you go even darker than the King original, that’s saying something.

Watch The Mist on Amazon Prime

The Orphanage (2006)

The debut feature from Spanish director J.A. Bayona (The Impossible) was produced by his friend Guillermo Del Toro, and frankly feels like it. It certainly has many of the hallmarks of Del Toro’s own Spanish-language horror films, with its focus on children, its marvelously atmospheric setting, its short bursts of shocking violence and its ghostly apparitions.

Either way, it’s a rich, beautifully crafted film that becomes unexpectedly and powerfully emotional at the finish. Belen Rueda is sensational as Laura, who returns to her childhood home — an old orphanage — with her husband and adopted son, only to find that it is not exactly empty. An English-language remake was planned for a long time, but perhaps fortunately, it has not happened.

Watch The Orphanage on Amazon

The Descent (2005)

Six women go exploring an unmapped cave system, with tragic and terrifying consequences, in writer/director Neil Marshall’s (Dog Soldiers) riveting horror hit. Marshall subverts the genre with his strong all-female cast (not a male hero in sight), refusing to dumb them down, but then puts the screws to them by introducing the blind humanoid inhabitants of the caves, surely one of the most horrific monster creations of the decade.

The movie is unstoppably scary, showing no mercy to the characters or the audience (one shock early in the film makes this writer jump to this day), but also examines how far people will go to survive in seemingly impossible circumstances. The Descent is a harrowing, suffocating masterpiece.

Watch The Descent on Amazon

Shaun of the Dead (2004)

This loving homage to the films of George A. Romero — the father of the modern zombie movie — and to the horror genre in general launched the careers of director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost outside of the U.K. And deservedly so: Shaun is a near-perfect blend of horror and comedy, energized by Wright’s visceral style of directing and flavored with clever pop culture and genre references that are even more delicious if you’re a fan.

Movies

25 Fiendishly Funny Horror Comedies

By Kirsten Howard

The Walking Dead vs. Real-Life Survivalists: How to Prep for The Zombie Apocalypse

By Ron Hogan

Pegg and Frost are perfect as two slackers who must contend with a zombie apocalypse — two of the least likely but most endearingly goofy heroes you’ll ever meet.

Watch Shaun of the Dead on Amazon

Saw (2004)

Saw is now so closely associated with the torture porn genre that its numerous sequels almost singlehandedly gave birth to that people often don’t remember that the original is more of a suspenseful police procedural and genuinely gripping puzzlebox than an outright exercise in sadism. Not that Saw is a sitting-room drama either: there are plenty of visceral moments in the film, and even in his feature debut, director James Wan (The Conjuring) displays a surprising amount of control and confidence in his handling of the horrors.

Saw may or may not be a truly great film, but its influence is enormous and it still packs one of the best endings the genre has ever seen.

Watch Saw on Amazon

28 Days Later (2002)

Looking at Danny Boyle’s revisionist zombie film now, its grimy handheld video esthetic is getting perhaps just a wee bit dated — but even that fails to dilute the sheer aggressive energy of Boyle’s take on the horror genre.

The movie, like its spiritual forefather Night of the Living Dead, is also rich in political and social subtext, while balancing moments of outright terror with passages of almost poetic reflection. Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland expertly reinvigorated a subgenre that had been nearly moribund, paving the way for both the superb (The Walking Dead) and the silly (the film version of World War Z).

Watch 28 Days Later on Amazon

The Ring (2002)

It was a foregone conclusion that the Japanese horror smash Ringu (1998), after becoming an underground sensation internationally, would be the subject of a big-budget Hollywood remake. But who imagined it would be this good? Director Gore Verbinski and writers Scott Frank and Ehren Kruger retain the original’s focus on atmosphere and creepy imagery over cheap scares, while Naomi Watts — fresh off her sensational turn in Mulholland Drive — is excellent as the reporter and mother who discovers the haunted videotape that causes viewers to die in seven days.

The American version fleshes out a few more narrative points that the Japanese film left ambiguous, but never wavers from its tone of quietly mounting terror. There have been plenty of J-horror remakes in the wake of The Ring, but it remains the first and the best.

Watch The Ring on Amazon

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Debate rages (even now, between this writer and his editor) over whether Mulholland Drive is actually a horror movie, but the simple truth is that filmmaking legend David Lynch has incorporated elements of horror into many of his films. No one comes as close to capturing the essence of a nightmare on screen, and Mulholland Drive contains two of the century’s most skin-freezing scenes: the infamous diner sequence and the discovery of a decomposing corpse in a darkened apartment.

Even if the plot didn’t invoke the genre in other ways — including a supernatural force at work in Hollywood and the Repulsion-like disintegration of a young woman’s mind — those two scenes would be enough to earn a spot on this list.

Watch Mulholland Drive on Amazon

The Others (2001)

Alejandro Amenabar (Open Your Eyes) wrote and directed this elegant ghost story. Nicole Kidman is superb as Grace, who relocates herself and her two small children to a remote country estate in the aftermath of World War II. Their highly structured life — the children are sensitive to sunlight and must stay in darkened rooms — is shattered by mysterious presences in the house. Amenabar relies on mood, atmosphere and a few well-placed scares to make this an excellent modern-day companion to classics like The Haunting and The Innocents.

Watch The Others on Amazon Prime

Session 9 (2001)

“Location, location, location” is what makes this tiny independent chiller from writer/director Brad Anderson (The Machinist) work so well and keeps its reputation intact. A five-man asbestos abatement team is hired to clean out the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital in Massachusetts, but the crew, led by the stressed-out Gordon (Peter Mullan), soon finds itself at the mercy of both personal tensions and an unseen force inside the facility.

Anderson shot the movie at the real Danvers, and the empty treatment rooms and labyrinthine underground tunnels create an undeniable atmosphere of disquiet and uncertainty. The nearly gore-free movie is a model of how a fantastic setting, a solid cast and an almost complete lack of jump scares can make for a thoroughly haunting viewing experience.

Watch Session 9 on Amazon

The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

Guillermo Del Toro has made several great movies in his career so far, but for our money this remains his best, scariest and most profoundly affecting work (Pan’s Labyrinth is a close, close second). The Devil’s Backbone is a ghost story set during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, at an orphanage for boys where an unexploded bomb is embedded in the courtyard and a spirit is wandering the halls at night.

The movie is drenched in both a heavy atmosphere of dread and a blanket of sadness; its mournful elegance counterbalances some of its more chilling scenes of terror. This is dark supernatural storytelling at its finest and a marvelous example of just how high the horror genre — so often maligned by critics — can reach.

Watch The Devil’s Backbone on Amazon

Kairo (2001)

Films like Ringu and Juon were the cornerstones of the Japanese horror explosion of the late ‘90s, but for my money, Kairo is the pinnacle of that era. Director/writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film is one of the most unnerving exercises in surreal horror ever made, with one frightening image after another washing onto the screen. Although the movie’s central idea – -that the realm of the dead is infiltrating our world through the internet – is original and compelling, its presentation is somewhat murky. But Kurosawa doesn’t necessarily feel the need to spell things out: he wants to instead lure you into a living nightmare – which Kairo accomplishes over and over again.

Watch Kairo on Amazon

That’s our list — did we miss any of your favorites that you’d like to add? Let us know below!

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FATHERED BY EVIL Three sisters born as result of rape brand evil dad the ‘Irish Joseph Fritzl’ and reveal no one helped their desperate mum EXCLUSIVE Alison O'Reilly 22 Sep 2019, 8:30Updated: 22 Sep 2019, 12:10 THREE brave girls of the “Irish Joseph Fritzl” today break their silence about their rapist father — and tell how no one helped their desperate mum.

Ashley, Iseult and Megan Manning have waived their right to anonymity to reveal how they, and three siblings, were conceived after their mother was sexually abused and “held like a captive” for nearly two decades by evil Sean McDarby.

Brave sisters Ashley, Megan and Iseult 4 Brave sisters Ashley, Megan and Iseult Evil beast Sean McDarby 4 Evil beast Sean McDarbyCredit: Handout pic - refer to Picture Desk Monster Joseph Fritzl 4 Monster Joseph FritzlCredit: Handout Iseult and Ashley as children 4 Iseult and Ashley as childrenCredit: Handout pic - refer to Picture Desk The sisters say their mother Mary — who was beast McDarby’s stepdaughter — was repeatedly abused and lived in fear for years.

The monster first raped Mary in 1976 when she was just 12 years old and impregnated her for the first time when she was 16.

But when Mary reported the horrific situation, they said “no one did anything following mum’s numerous attempts to seek help”.

'EVERY TIME SHE REACHED OUT - NOTHING HAPPENED' Speaking for the first time about her horror ordeal, Iseult told the Irish Sun On Sunday: “I honestly do not know how she survived and every time she reached out, nothing happened.”

McDarby was arrested in his workplace at a haulage business in Dublin and questioned by cops.

He admitted to gardai and the HSE that he fathered six children with Mary between 1981 and 1989 — but said he didn’t believe he did anything wrong.

McDarby, from Ballickmoyler, Co. Carlow, was accused of statutory rape, rape, disposing of a baby’s body, physically abusing Mary and isolating her and her children.

A lengthy file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions but no charges ever followed before his death more than ten years ago.

Shockingly, McDarby was the first to hear of the DPP’s decision.

'OUR MOTHER HAS LIVED A LIFE OF HELL' Ashley, 35, the eldest of the three, said the system let their mother down time and time again.

She said: “I am angry that no one stepped in to help my mother. She did avail of the rape crisis services, she did talk to social services and gardai and so did her rapist, but nothing was ever done.

“The legal system, the support services and the HSE are all to blame. This has affected all of us, our mother should have been given some right to justice, our mother has lived a life of hell and I’ve no idea how she got through it all.

“Despite everything she was able to separate her love for us, from the reality of our own conception, having come about as a result of such brutal rape by her stepfather Sean. This makes her an unbelievable person. Sean McDarby was pure evil.

“The anger I carried, I carried because sometimes she couldn’t. This is a result of the emotional and physical exhaustion she had from constantly fighting and trying to survive.

“I can only imagine how terrified she must have been, torn between protecting us and herself, and sleeping with a hammer under the pillow and locking every door and window in the house.

“I am really glad abortion is now allowed in Ireland particularly for cases of rape because it means my mother could have got away sooner had she decided to abort us.”

ATTACKS BEGAN AT 12 The Manning sisters have never referred to their mother’s rapist as their “father”.

Instead they call him the “Irish Joseph Fritzl” and say he treated their mum, who had no positive childhood experiences, like a slave.

Psycho Fritzl, 84, is serving a life sentence in Austria for holding his daughter captive in an underground cellar for 24 years where she was raped and beaten and gave birth to seven of his children.

Mary’s alcoholic mum Mona married McDarby a year after husband Richard, a respected businessman in Ardee, died in 1973.

Three years later, when Mary was 12, the predator began raping her.

And in 1981, when she was 16, she became pregnant with her first child, Rory, and gave birth at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda.

The little boy was only three months old when Mary became pregnant again following another sex attack.

Six months later Mary miscarried at home in her bed following a particularly brutal rape.

McDarby, then 37, made her put the dead baby in a bag and he buried the child in a field on his former land in Carlow — where the tot remains today.

The rape and physical abuse continued and Mary gave birth to Ashley at the Coombe Hospital, in Dublin, in 1983.

After Mary became pregnant for a third time, he took her away from Ardee. He brought her to a house in Dublin where she reared all of her children on her own with no money or support and no contact with the outside world.

She then gave birth to Iseult in Holles Street in 1984.

Two years later another child — who was later adopted through St Patrick’s Guild Adoption Agency — was born. Mary never saw him again following his adoption. And in 1989, Megan was delivered at Holles Street hospital.

'STRUGGLE WITH IDENTITY' In an extraordinary interview, Ashley told how on one occasion Mary did escape to America with the help of a neighbour but returned when she learned her three girls were taken into care.

She added: “In a desperate effort, having received no help or support from the state, my mother fled when she was 22 to escape Sean McDarby’s systematic rape and abuse. We ended up in care.

“My mother had no choices. Her maternal instincts to protect and care for her children, forced her to return to Ireland, as she did not want us in care. Unbelievably, yet again the results of years of neglect were dictating the choices she had to make.”

McDarby is not on any of the children’s birth certs but DNA has proven he is their father.

After being moved to Dublin, Mary was totally cut off from family life, money and society. She was moved around the capital three times by McDarby.

Iseult, 34, said: “It was his intention to isolate her and he knew the children would isolate her further, there’s a bond there with a mother and child and he knew she couldn’t go away.

“I have struggled with my identity, I ask myself, do I look like him? Do I act like him and do I have his personality traits?

“Our mother was forced to carry us alone. Giving birth, nobody came to visit her, he dropped her outside the different hospitals as part of his cover.

“How do I explain to friends and partners about my ‘father’? How I was raised and the childhood we had. People would say, ‘Where’s your dad?’. Teachers would ask me where’s your ‘father’.

“How did my mother give birth in so many hospitals with no one there and it never raised any suspicion?”

BEAST 'DID NOT PERCEIVE IT AS ABUSE' Eventually, Mary did make friends in Dublin and revealed her deepest and darkest secrets.

Through those pals, she sought help and counselling and met her now husband, Karl O’Reilly, with the couple going on to have three children together.

Mary reported McDarby to the HSE in 1988 before she went to the US and then to the gardai in 1994.

However, Mary’s case didn’t make it to court and her civil case around 2005 collapsed because of time constraints.

Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show social services personnel asked McDarby during an interview had he abused Mary.

And even though Mary was underage during her first pregnancy, his response was that he “did not perceive it as abuse”.

Brave Mary went on to write the book Nobody Will Believe You in 2014, which told of her harrowing life at the hands of her stepfather.

Iseult still has many unanswered questions, asking: “Why was he not prosecuted? Why is it that the person who has been violated, physically mentally emotionally must carry the shame fear and many other emotions and the abuser Sean McDarby, walked around our streets a free man for years with free will and faced no consequences for his heinous actions.

“She lived through hell because of him and I’d like to ask the DPP what exactly is your job? Her book is a lonely and sad story because it shows her helplessness.

“While she wasn’t physically locked under the stairs, she was mentally isolated and cut off from her friends, family, community, choices and freewill and he used her body at mind at will.

“The power he took from her was her innocence, her confidence, her friends, her family, her community, her choices in life — but more than any of this, he took from her, her freewill and used both her mind and her body at will.

“Choices I take as normal such as travelling, or to go to college, to choose my profession, to choose a boyfriend, to develop a relationship and choose when to have children, such important choices were all taken away from my mother.’”

'WE ARE PROUD THAT SHE IS OUR MOTHER' Sister Ashley added: “He left her to raise five children she didn’t choose to have.”

Mary has now reclaimed her own life after years of personal development, education and therapy.

Daughter Megan, 30, said: “Today she’s a successful psychotherapist, she has incredible compassion, sensitivity and understanding of the needs of others, who have had difficulties in their own lives.

“She is an amazing woman. We are proud that she is our mother. She has also helped her children to come to terms with the reality of their own conception, she knew that trauma not transformed, will be trauma transferred.”

After decades agonising over their mother’s pain and coming to terms with their own identity, two years ago, the girls complained to the Child and Family Agency Tusla, the Justice Minister and the Gardai. Former Minister Frances Fitzgerald ordered a review of the case and part of that investigation included Drogheda Gardai requesting reasons why McDarby was never charged.

However, the family have never received any information as to why no charges were brought. The trio say nothing became of that review, but they did meet with Gardai.

Iseult said: “The DPP made the decision not to charge him despite the lengthy statements my mother gave. It’s like it’s all been for nothing and it’s a was 1 / 3 “He was a danger to us and society. We do not want this to happen to any other child or woman.

“However if it does the person should be held accountable, unlike Sean McDarby. Instead, he died a free man.”

Gardai and Tusla said they can’t comment on individual cases.

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