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Posted on June 23, 2018

Decapitation in Upgrade, First Reformed & Hereditary

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Three movies that happen to be playing in multiplexes this week have a surprising connection. Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018) is a sci-fi action film, First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017) is a spiritual drama with a dark comedic streak, and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) is a horror film with plenty of family drama for seasoning. When I saw all three in the same weekend I thought I was programming a few days of very different movies, and they are that indeed. But they all feature a particular variety of body horror that brings them into conversation with each other. Not only does the same gruesome thing happen to a character in each film, but it also happens at roughly the same time in each film. If you’re looking to avoid spoilers on these movies, I would skip the section about the ones you have not yet seen, although I won’t be discussing the endings. Instead, I’ll examine how this form of body horror emphasizes the film’s themes and ideas.

Posted on June 21, 2018

Veronica: Possession or Psychosis?

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The 2017 Spanish horror film, Veronica, directed by Paco Plaza and now available on Netflix, has been described as one of the scariest horror movies accessible on the streaming platform. Based on a true story, the movie follows a fifteen-year-old school girl who is supposedly possessed by a demon. It should be noted that the movie is very loosely based on real-life events. This article only looks at the narrative of the movie itself, and it questions whether Veronica is actually possessed . . . or whether something else is going on.

Posted on June 15, 2018

5 Terrifying Documentaries and the Rise of Real Life Horror

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A horror film has certain safety measures. You can turn it off, change the channel, or cover your eyes. In any movie, you have the ability to just stop watching. After all, none of it is real. But what happens when the horrific events on the screen can’t be turned off or changed? What happens when a film is frightening because it is real, because its horror is the kind that exists beyond the confines of the movie screen? This is the kind of horror that horror documentaries deliver.

The horror genre is enjoying a boom right now. There’s no denying it. But the recent surge of horrific content is not limited to the fictional. Documentary filmmakers are cashing in on their viewers’ attraction to the macabre. Any good documentary seeks to expose a new truth, understanding, or perspective. This work of uncovering becomes terrifying when we realize that what’s been documented is the inescapable horrors of reality, the things we can’t un-see, and the moments we can’t avoid. What follows are five horror documentaries that feel like fictional horror films. Their discoveries leave you wondering what’s worse, fact or fiction?

Posted on June 5, 2018

Cargo and the Rise of the Fungal Zombie

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The new zombie film just released on Netflix, Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke’s Cargo (2017) showcases a new kind of zombie–the fungal zombie–and ushers in a whole new kind of horror.

I have to start by saying that I was never really afraid of zombies as a kid. Even today, when I re-watch movies featuring a bunch of shambling corpses, or when I break out the first Resident Evil games to get away from work, it is never the hordes of infected or the walking dead that scare me. For me, they have always been collateral monsters, byproducts of a deep-seated flaw in the living subjects that flee them. In fact, the humans in these films are what terrified me—they are brutal, cold, and animalistic. Which, I guess, is the point.

However, within the past five years, I’ve seen an evolution in zombie film and videogames. No longer are the zombies signifying elements of our humanity let wild, but rather are showcasing a whole new type of non-human sentience: a collective intelligence that can plan, navigate, and communicate much like we do, but without the need of complex technology. I mean, of course, fungi.[i]

Posted on May 28, 2018

George Romero’s Martin: Pop Culture’s Vampire Rebuked

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George A. Romero’s 1978 film Martin stands as a brilliant early example of the metafictional film. The rise of the metafictional film is perhaps the most notable innovation within postmodern film, acknowledging itself as a film, accepting that it is a work of fiction, and making this an aspect of the plot. This can be brought about in a myriad of ways: characters addressing the camera and speaking to the audience, characters acknowledging cliches of the genre, as well as the insertion of the film process itself into the film.

The most popular metafictional films are often reactionary in nature, parodying a modern trend of filmmaking and exploring its shortcomings and repetitive structures. This is why so many metafictional films come out either when a genre is at its height, as in the case of Deadpool (2016) or Wayne’s World (1992), the former parodying the modern world-building superhero epic and the latter parodying the shoehorning of sketch comedy characters into a feature length cinematic world. Others, like Scream, come at a time when a genre or subgenre has reached something of a low point, as was happening in 1996 when the only slashers were either franchise sequels of diminishing quality and direct-to-video shlock. These metafictional films act almost like a friend sitting next to you in the theater, questioning the logic of what’s onscreen and saying things like, “haven’t we seen all this before?”

The temptation with meta-horror films is to assign a starting point- which was the first? Scream is commonly given the credit for starting the trend in mainstream cinema, while films like There’s Nothing Out There (1991) and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) are often cited as predecessors to Scream’s particular brand of metafiction. Additionally, one can point to 1980s classics like Friday The 13th Part 6: Jason Lives (1986) and Fright Night (1985) as paving the way for Scream by embracing and subverting horror tropes. One pivotal film that is often left out of the conversation, however, is George Romero’s classic 1978 vampire film Martin.