It’s about as mean-spirited as horror can get…and it’s glorious. The film is 100% pure rage, leaving brains splattered across the hot pavement, and murdering innocent children who accidentally end up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ryuhei Kitamura’s Downrange is quite simple, stranding a carpool of teenagers on the side of the road as an enigmatic sniper targets them one-by-one. Horror movies give us the illusion of control when the world is coming for you, and there’s nothing more satisfying than standing up to life and kicking it right in the balls. It’s the fantasy of self-induced power and the fight for survival. People aren’t looking for superheroes to save them, they’re looking for the final girl to stab that bad mother fucker in the back. They say when the world is in flames and there’s political turmoil, entertainment has the most to gain, especially horror. Our genre is quite literally unstoppable right now. From Split to Get Out, Annabelle: Creation, and then IT, horror film after horror film continued to take the top spot at the box office, taking in hundreds of millions worldwide. Yet, there stood several horror films that annihilated everything in their path. There’s panic across the board about getting people into theaters. The momentum continued through 2016, setting the stage for what could easily be horror’s ultimate mic drop.
But then something happened – in 2015, there was an overload of independent films that made choosing a top ten immensely difficult. It perfectly represented where horror was at the time, being that none of the films deserved the honor of “best of the year”. Just a few years ago I was unhappy that The Babadook topped my best of the year list. There is no question that 2017 was one of the best years ever for horror. *Keep up with our ongoing end of the year coverage here*
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