Satanic Sundays! Six Flicks That Brought The Terror In 2001

It is wet cold with a chance of snow on this Sunday. A perfect day of loathing and misery to celebrate a Satanic Sundays! Sunday. This Sunday I am going back to the early days of the 21st century when terror was in the air. The year of 2001! Instead of a burning bush we had a Bush burning his way through the world. A time when Christian oppression held a majority and ruled with the threat of a bad credit score for all. Anyway it was also a low period in horror. Save a few souls who felt the dark enough to express it’s horrors and terror through so-so movies-bad movies that often caused the audiences to cringe in torment. Here are a few of the luckier flicks of that year that punished us but also seemed to please us as well.

The Devil’s Backbone


After Carlos, a 12-year-old whose father has died in the Spanish Civil War, arrives at an ominous boy's orphanage he discovers the school is haunted and has many dark secrets that he must uncover. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. It is 1939, the end of three years of bloody civil war in Spain, and General Franco's right-wing Nationalists are poised to defeat the left-wing Republican forces. A ten-year-old boy named Carlos, the son of a fallen Republican war hero, is left by his tutor in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere. The orphanage is run by a curt but considerate headmistress named Carmen and a kindly Professor Casares, both of whom are sympathetic to the doomed Republican cause. Despite their concern for him, and his gradual triumph over the usual schoolhouse bully, Carlos never feels completely comfortable in his new environment. First of all, there was that initial encounter with the orphanage's nasty caretaker, Jacinto, who reacts even more violently when anyone is caught looking around a particular storage room the one with the deep well. Second, and more inexplicable, is the presence of a ghost, one of the former occupants of the orphanage named Santi.



Bones


Over 20 years after his death by a gunshot, Jimmy Bones comes back as a ghost to wreak revenge on those who killed him and to clean up his neighborhood. Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson and starring Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss and Bianca Lawson. The time is 1979. Jimmy Bones is respected and loved as the neighborhood protector. When he is betrayed and brutally murdered by a corrupt cop, Bones' elegant brownstone becomes his tomb, Twenty-two years later, the neighborhood has become a ghetto, and his home has turned into a Gothic ruin. Four teens renovate it as an after hours nightclub, unknowingly releasing Jimmy's tortured spirit. Its thrills and chills when blood spills when Jimmy's ghost sets about its frightful revenge, his killers unaware of the gruesome fate that awaits them. With each new victim, the terror mounts, and Bones' vengeance spins out of control, threatening everyone in his path, including his former lover, Pearl.



Dagon



A boating accident runs a young man and woman ashore in a decrepit Spanish fishing town which they should discover is in the grips of an ancient sea god and its monstrous half human offspring. Directed by  Stuart Gordon the film is based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Dagon tells the story of Paul Marsh, a young man who discovers that the truth will not set him free instead it condemns him to a waking nightmare of unrelenting horror. A boating accident off the coast of Spain sends Paul and his girlfriend Barbara to the decrepit fishing village of Imboca looking for help. As night falls, people start to disappear and things not quite human start to appear. Paul finds himself pursued by the entire town. Running for his life, he uncovers Imboca's dark secret: that they pray to Dagon, a monstrous god of the sea. And Dagon's unholy offspring are freakish half-human creatures on the loose in Imboca.


The Covenant



A group of college students break into an abandoned convent and become possessed by demonic spirits.Directed by Mike Mendez. Forty years ago a horrible tragedy occurred at a girls' boarding school, now, as part of a homecoming tradition, a group of college students break in every year to spray their school letters on the bell tower. When Mo (Perry) gets left behind, she becomes the victim of devil worshipers and demonic possession. Her friends return to find her, but then have to fight for their own lives.





Wendigo



Directed by Larry Fessenden and starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan and John Speredakos. George is a high-strung professional photographer who is starting to unravel from the stress of his work with a Manhattan advertising agency. Needing some time away from the city, Jake, his wife Kim, and their son Miles head to upstate New York to take in the winter sights, though the drive up is hardly relaxing for any of them. George accidentally hits and severely injures a deer that ran onto the icy road; after George stops to inspect the damage, he's confronted by an angry local named Otis who flies into a rage, telling George that he and his fellow hunters had been tracking the deer for some time. An argument breaks out, which leaves George feeling deeply shaken. When George and Kim arrive at their cabin, they discover that it's next door to Otis' property, and they soon find that a dark and intimidating presence seems to have taken over the cottage. Since, when they stopped at a store en route to the cabin, a shopkeeper told Miles about the legend of the Wendigo, a beast from Indian folklore who is half-man, half-deer, and can change itself at will, the child begins to wonder if the creature might have something to do with his family's sudden misfortune.



Route 666



Directed by William Wesley and starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Lori Petty, Steven Williams,Mercedes Colon, Alex McArthur  and L.Q. Jones. Smith, a mob informer hiding out with the Witness Protection Program, decides to make a break for it and hide out in the Arizona desert. The Feds catch up with him and rescue him just before a group of hitmen can manage to silence him for good. In the course of getting Smith away from the mafia thugs, the pair of agents assigned to protect him turn onto an abandoned stretch of highway nicknamed 'Route 666' after the mysterious death of a prison chain gang. As the three continue on their way, they soon discover just what happened to the chain gang, and how the highway earned its name.