Wow! Just, wow wow wow times a thousand!

Horror is one of my least favorite genres because I find it largely cheap and ineffective. Too often horror movies are stupid and fail to do the one thing they're supposed to do: be scary or horrifying. A comedy that is not funny or a thriller that is neither thrilling nor suspenseful is a failure, and that is precisely what the vast majority of horror movies are.

I avoided The Wailing for the longest time because of its daunting 2 hour 40 minute runtime, as well as the suspiciously high rating (99% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes rated it 8/10). What a fool I was. Both the extended runtime and superlative reviews in this case are wholly justified. This movie is a revelation! A work of film-making genius!

In the typical Hollywood horror you know that you can relax during the day scenes because everyone is perfectly safe, and during the night scenes you're alert because that's when the killer or the monster or the demon likes to operate. Not in The Wailing. This movie doesn't care for such tired tropes. It doesn't matter whether its in the dead of night or broad daylight, no one is safe. The result is that for the entire duration of the movie anything can happen at any time (and very often does), and there are absolutely no red herrings or silly jump scares. At no point does the movie's pace slow down and you're never bored with exposition dumps or tedious development of unimportant characters.

Everything about The Wailing is top notch: the set design (every crime scene is horrific); the cinematography; the story and structure of the screenplay; and the Japanese character's performance is fantastic. He actually managed to elicit empathy/sympathy from a few times, which made the ending that much more powerful. This is the kind of movie that should be shown and taught in film schools, such is its brilliance.

I honestly believe that had this movie been made in Hollywood EXACTLY the same way it is (shot for shot, with the exact same dialogue, without changing anything) it would have cost perhaps $50 million or less, but it would have easily grossed $300 million domestically plus at least another $200 million internationally. Hollywood needs to wake up and realize that we a starving for these kinds of truly original movies. Take it easy with the mega-budget PG-13 franchises and reboots and remakes and sequels, and take a chance with original mid-budget R-rated films. As the following very wordy article brilliantly explains, mid-budget R-rated movies are actually more profitable at the box office than these tired PG-13 superhero movies: https://web.archive.org/web/20161009120520/http://www.the-fanboy-perspective.com:80/a-rant-against-modern-tentpole-film-making.html