Remember when I said earlier that there just weren’t many good supernatural horror movies being made? Well, there are a few exceptions, one of which is the 2007 masterpiece, The Orphanage.

It’s the story of a young couple who move into an old orphanage with their adopted son, Simon. It’s the same orphanage the woman lived in as a child, the same orphanage she plans to reopen as a home for disabled kids. Early on, Simon makes friends with an imaginary boy named Tomas. During a party, Simon suddenly disappears and she actually sees Tomas with her own eyes, a chilling figure with a burlap sack mask.

As the months go by, convinced her son is still alive, she calls in mediums and paranormal investigators to find clues to her son’s disappearance. Little by little, she learns of the orphanage’s history and the truth about the boy Tomas.

This film is incredibly creepy and moves along at slow, steady pace. There are no axe murderers, no elaborate torture puzzles to solve. Just an intense buildup to an ending that’s not only frightening, but heart-wrenchingly sad. I won’t drop any spoilers here, but this definitely lives on my list of must-see ghost stories. Wanna know how scary it is? I watched this for the first time on a plane. Surrounded by people. In the middle of the day. And it still scared me.

Oh and did I mention it’s a Spanish production, with English subtitles? I know a lot of people are immediately put off by that, but honestly after a while you really don’t seem to notice. And while the dialogue is well-written, it’s not a particularly verbose film. It was produced by Guillermo del Toro, whose attachment helped secure a larger budget.

Unfortunately, New Line Cinema has secured the rights to make an American version. Seems studios still believe that U.S. audiences are too stupid or impatient to watch foreign films. I just hope The Orphanage doesn’t go the way of The Grudge or The Ring.

You might categorize this post as “Get Off My Lawn” material, but they just don’t make horror movies like they used to. Actually, let me rephrase that. They don’t make supernatural horror very well anymore.

When I say supernatural horror, I mean your bread-and-butter stuff like ghost stories and haunted houses. What I’m not talking about are films that derive their scares from cheap startles, gross-outs or the latest crop of torture porn like Saw 23 or Hostel 14 (full disclaimer: I actually quite enjoyed the original Saw, but that’s beside the point). And don’t get me started on the unfortunate trend of remaking horror classics like The Thing, The Amityville Horror, Psycho, or even the film I’m featuring in this article. A shot-for-shot remake of Psycho? According to Webster’s, that’s the very definition of pointless. Look it up.

I believe a scary movie should frighten you on an emotional level, something that crawls into your brain and makes you turn on every light in the house for weeks after seeing it. Let’s face it, you’re not likely to run into a psychotic madman who forces you to solve deadly puzzles, but who’s to say that noise in the attic isn’t a spectral ghost bride? Huh?

Which brings me to the subject of this post. One of my favorite scary movies of all time is the 1963 black-and-white classic, The Haunting.  It’s a pretty simple haunted house story. A paranormal investigator invites three guests to spend the night in a reputed haunted mansion in an attempt to hopefully find some proof of the supernatural. As they learn more about the history of the house, strange things start to happen, and one particularly susceptible guest seems to be attracting the house’s attention.

I know what you’re thinking. Ugh, a black-and-white horror ‘classic’ from the sixties. No thanks. I would urge you to give it a chance. What makes this movie so scary is not lavish budgets, blood-and-gore or nifty CGI effects. It’s about good story, dialogue, and most of all, amazing sound design.

If you watched The Haunting with the sound muted, you might hardly realize it’s a ghost story at all. It’s the sound track that gives it life. The whispers, the moans, sounds of a baby crying and ear-splitting crashes and banging provide far more scares than chainsaw-wielding nut jobs. This film is more of a cerebral scare; you never really see anything happening. But you hear it. You can feel it. The true horror is left up to your imagination, which can conjure up far, far worse than any Hollywood screenwriter.

The film is based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House. I’ve not read it (yet), but by all accounts the film is fairly faithful to the book. Even though I love and recommend this movie, do not confuse it with the 1999 remake starring Owen Wilson and Liam Neeson. Helmed by Speed director Jan De Bont, this version was a big-budget, big-star, CGI-laden abortion that has very little in common with the original film, much less the novel they’re both based on.

In this age of we-can-do-anything-with-computers, it’s easy to just augment a weak story with fancy effects or shocking violence. I’m not against either one, per say, but when it’s used as a crutch or as a way to target a lowest-common-denominator demographic, then it just serves to weaken the genre. If you fancy a slow-burn, genuinely scary film which might also prompt you to buy a night light, then you should definitely give The Haunting a chance.

Today’s Halloween post is taking a little while to put together, so in the meantime, enjoy this brilliant “Walking Dead” parody.

And speaking of Walken, nobody does a better Christopher Walken impression than Kevin Pollak.

I cannot even express how excited I am about this.

So here are my picks, with the caveat that this is purely based on the movies I actually saw, either in theaters or on DVD, that were released in 2007.

1. Hot Fuzz
Fun, fun, fun. The team from ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (so far) can do no wrong. Definitely not the best crafted or written of my list, and won’t be up for an Oscar, but its energy and spirit more than makes up for it.

2. Planet Terror
Of the two ‘Grindhouse’ films, Robert Rodriguez’s contribution is definitely the strongest, taking zombie movies to the next level. The harsh, gritty, jumpy film effects really work well, making it feel like a real B movie.

3. No Country For Old Men
Great entry from the Coen Brothers, as usual. I still put ‘Fargo’ and ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’ above this one, but I really enjoyed it. Definitely one of those films I feel I need to see again to really take it all in.

4. Bourne Ultimatum
Even though this Bourne installment feels a lot like Supremacy, it was still really fun. And we get to learn some interesting things about our friend Jason.

5. The Simpsons Movie
After many months of worrying that this movie might put the final nail in the coffin of my beloved Simpsons franchise, I was pleasantly surprised. This film was 10 times funnier than the past few years of the series. Makes me think that’s why the series has sucked so bad lately. All the writers were working on the movie. Maybe they should just retire the tv show and make more movies, like Star Trek.

6. Shoot ‘Em Up
Here’s one that just was a quick blip and was gone. This rates way up in my top 5 action movies of all time. It’s just non-stop, wall-to-wall, guns-blazing action from start to finish. Despite the fact that the plot is pretty thin and most of the action gags are unbelievably over-the-top, you can’t walk out of this movie not feeling supercharged.

7. The Golden Compass
I finally feel like I’ve found my ‘Harry Potter’. I’d never followed any of the books by Philip Pullman, and frankly never heard of them until this year. But I found myself really getting excited to see this film. Maybe it was because I felt like I was getting to learn about this new world, one that’s a lot more sophisticated than the Potter films, and kind of get started on the ground floor. I’m in the middle of listening to the audio book, which of course opens things up much wider.

8. Martian Child
Another film that barely registered on any radars. Amazing, funny, touching film with John Cusack about a single writer who decides to adopt a shy young boy….who insists that he’s from Mars. Definitely rent this one when it comes out.

Update, 01.27.08: I just now got around to seeing ‘Stardust’. What a fantastic movie! If I had seen it before I’d put this list together, it would definitely have been ranked pretty high. I think I may have liked it even more than Golden Compass. If you like stuff like Lord of the Rings, Narnia, etc, you owe it to yourself to see ‘Stardust’. Quite possibly the best writing of them all. Yeah, you heard me.

Disappointments of 2007
Here are a few bummers of the year.

Transformers
I really wanted to love this, and it was definitely *good*, but it just has too many issues. While I don’t feel Michael Bay totally destroyed my childhood with this movie, it could’ve been so much better.

Spiderman 3
Again, I love the Spiderman franchise, and I think Sam Raimi is a frickin’ genius. But Spidey 3 just didn’t have the punch it should have. It may have suffered from what the Batman movies got stuck in, villain overload. It just felt like it was balancing so many competing characters and storylines it just got kind of muddy. And after years of waiting, we finally get to see Venom on screen, and I have to say it was a little disappointing.

Sunshine
The first two-thirds of this movie were amazing. Had the feel of a great submarine movie, only in space. But then the last act degraded into a bad monster movie and ruined it. I remember feeling like I enjoyed the movie a lot better when it was called ‘Event Horizon’.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
And finally, probably the worst movie of the year. The first Pirates is one of my all-time favorites that I saw twice in the theatre. The second one wasn’t as good, but had many redeeming qualities. This third one just plain sucked. The plot was just this tangled mess that seemed to go on forever. Regardless of the effects (and they were good), they couldn’t save this shipwreck.