It’s a totally bitchin’ two for one on this episode of Horror Homeroom Conversations in which we head back to the 1980s with Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015) and François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell’s Summer of 84 (2018). Criminally underrated, both films deploy depictions of nostalgia in order to reflect and then disrupt audience expectation of Reagan’s America. In doing so, each film reveals a surprising depth that challenges horror film conventions.
If you’ve heard anything about Sundance’s much buzzed about Summer of 84, it likely revolves around its soul crushing ending. And while the last act of the movie does deliver a gut punch you won’t be able to stop thinking about, its impact ultimately stems from its very subtle but highly effective deconstruction of cinematic nostalgia. Directed by the trio RKSS (François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell), Summer of 84 is, on the surface, a coming of age movie about a quartet of boys who become convinced that their neighbor Wayne Mackey (Rich Sommer), a local cop, is a serial killer. Most reviews have drawn parallels with Neflix’s Stranger Things and given the movie’s focus on adolescent friendships, it’s an apt comparison. But I suspect that the filmmakers are actually referencing- very specifically- another rite of passage movie: Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic Stand by Me. Read more
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