Sober Horror Fan

Day 168 of Sobriety.     Lake Mungo is a 2008 film by director Joel Anderson, who seems to have made this one feature and then vanished with scarcely a trace, which is a great shame because Lake Mungo is very good. It tells the extremely sad story of a family who lose their teenage daughter in a tragic drowning accident, and the uncanny events that follow in its wake. It is presented as a faux documentary—a “mockumentary”—and I think it is one of the best examples of that style that I have seen.     The acting is absolutely convincing throughout. I found it very easy to “buy into” the mockumentary conceit and allow myself to be convinced that I was watching something real. Apparently, the actors were given scenarios, but no actual script, and so the dialogue (or more often than not monologue) is all improvised.    Like several more recent films, such as Hereditary (2018), Midosommar (2019) and Talk to Me (2022), the exploration of bereavement and grief...

Day 56 of Sobriety.   Sheesh… Where to start with this one..? I was curious about Martyrs because, while it had a reputation for being extremely violent and disturbing, it also seemed to be pretty well regarded, garnering high positions in quite a lot of rankings of “best horror films of the decade,” and so on. I knew that the film involved graphic scenes of women and children being subjected to abuse, and was not going to be a comfortable experience, so it languished in my “to watch” pile for a considerable time before I felt mentally robust enough to sit down and watch it. And yeah, it was very grim viewing indeed. Without giving away the plot (and it does have a plot—it’s certainly not a mindless film) it is pretty much non-stop violence, trauma, and torture for its entire running time. Having looked at various reviews of the film online, one response that seemed to come up repeatedly in various iterations was, “It’s a good film, but I never, ever, want to sit thr...