Already 2022 is shaping up to be a major one for horror films. Just three months in and we’ve seen two new entries from major franchises, a boom in the folk horror subgenre, and much more promised in the remaining nine months. Below are my thoughts on six recent horror releases: the good, the mediocre, and the ugly.
SCREAM: January 14th in theaters
The first, and more successful, of those two franchise entries is SCREAM, though it left me feeling like something was missing. Maybe it stems from the absence of the series’ original auteur, Wes Craven, but there’s a lack of synthesis between the ideas presented in the film about horror culture. It ends up feeling like Scream 5: Film Twitter with no real perspective on the topics du jour: we find out characters like A24 style horror and don’t like what they call, annoyingly, “requels” but we don’t really know why. This is exemplified in the classic cold open SCREAM kill scene, where a character picks her favorite scary movie yet again. This time she selects THE BABADOOK, saying “it has great themes about motherhood and depression”. But she never explains how she connects to these themes or why they make her like the movie. This scene not only suggests that a horror movie has to be ABOUT something to be good but that as soon as it is ABOUT something, it becomes good, with no amount of insight into whether the film actually explores those themes well.
And SCREAM simply does not. A final reveal of the killers being “bad fans” who think they own the franchises they love has some bite but it feels incongruous with the rest of the film’s discussion of horror. The saving grace of the film is the new final girls, sisters played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, as well as the chemistry between the cast in general. The two sisters lend the film a much-needed emotional backbone for the mayhem but still do end up feeling underdeveloped outside of their relationship with one another. SCREAM ends up feeling like the slightest entry in the franchise, even if I may still prefer it to SCREAM 3.
THE RUNNER: January 16th on Shudder
A mix between retro horror and album film, THE RUNNER comes from the creative minds of electro-pop duo Boy Harsher, who direct and appear in the film as themselves. The band makes up a meta-narrative surrounding the actual story which deals with a blood-covered woman running from something left ambiguous. The events surrounding her are punctuated by music videos or performances playing on televisions in different locations she arrives at; through this, we realize that the film is set in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. Like many album films, it is primarily aesthetic driven, and there is a lot of care put into its pastiche of a bygone era of horror. It manages to feel more retro than dated, something a lot of ‘70s/’80s inspired horror is having trouble with these days. It plays with its dual nature of album and film cheekily, such as when a voice on TV says the next song comes from “THE RUNNER Original Soundtrack”.
The actual horror plot packs a lot into the film’s truncated run time. The central character listlessly yet menacingly moves throughout a small town, and we learn that her trauma is most likely sexual in nature. She goes to a bar and grinds on a random patron while making intense eye contact with a woman across the room, with whom she goes home. What begins as healing queer love turns bloody and violent as our lead character sticks her hand deep into the chest of the other woman, pulling out her heart. The runner’s traumatic sexual history makes it hard for her to get close to someone she cares about without hurting them. “There are bad nights… things I regret… things I’d like to take back,” the lead singer of Boy Harsher says in a faux interview segment towards the final moments of the film. If you feel similarly, it’s easy to see yourself in THE RUNNER.
THE LAST THING MARY SAW: January 20th on Shudder
Perhaps the latest trend in horror is the folk horror revival, spurred on by films like MIDSOMMAR and THE WITCH. THE LAST THING MARY SAW is a disappointingly frightless entry in this trend that does little to distinguish itself from its contemporaries. An 1800s village is the site for much abuse and hushed secrets, including two women’s queer awakening after a matriarch dies unexpectedly. The film is shot similarly to Eggers’ film, attempting to use more natural-looking lighting for the time period. However, unlike in THE WITCH, this just leads to muddy frames and confused shots. A few work, such as when a woman is illuminated through bright strings of light shining through the slots in a shed that resemble prison bars. But a few successful creepy images alone do not a horror film make. I wish the film was a little less concerned with how it looked and more with what it was about. Queer coming-of-age folk horror should connect to me more as a fan of the genre and a queer person, but little here feels connected to actual queer identity. If that sounds like a concept you’d enjoy, I recommend the BBC film PENDA’S FEN for a more effective version of this tale.
SLAPFACE: February 3rd on Shudder
This adaptation of director Jeremiah Kipp’s short film of the same title is simple but effective indie horror. It focuses on a younger brother named Lucas of a family unit made up of two siblings. Tom the older brother is trying to be a father figure for Lucas, despite their relative ages, and this comes out in toxic ways. One such is a “game” the brothers play where they take turns slapping each other until one gives in, an overt but effective metaphor for family-taught toxic masculinity. Things get a little more complicated when a witch from a local legend gets involved, taking the younger sibling under her magical wing.
I appreciate the film for keeping things murky here. A lesser film might present the feminine influence of the witch as purely good, a rebuttal of the toxic energy the brother gives out. But the film wisely acknowledges that toxic role models come in all genders, and the witch is as much an aggressor as a protector. There’s some interesting if most likely unintentional trans subtext presented in the film: Lucas desires to be included in a friend group of girls who bully him, both menacingly and flirtatiously. And there’s the whole matter of the witch becoming an avatar for Lucas, literally flinching in his place when Tom hits him in a climactic game of violence. There’s something to the story of a young boy only knowing masculinity as violent who finds solace amongst women that connected to me, even if it isn’t explored that deeply. Instead, the film settles for a basic final theme of “toxic masculinity is bad”. Hardly groundbreaking, but it works for this fable-esque film.
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: February 18th on Netflix
Maybe we need to start leaving ‘70s horror tentpoles alone. Between this and HALLOWEEN KILLS, it seems like attempts to recreate iconic killers in modern settings leave them feeling like empty symbols. The original films hold such creepy power that is completely missing from these last two entries in their respective franchises. The major issues are the same with both: both are obsessed with being about American society despite not having much to say about it and neither can decide if they want to painstakingly recreate the original aesthetic or do their own completely different thing. This leaves Leatherface and Michael Myers looking and feeling like old men in silly masks.
There’s absolutely no sense of griminess to this entry in the Leatherface story. The film attempts to shoehorn in odd points about gentrification and racism that fall completely flat, but the most egregious modern “take” is that school shootings and slashers films are things that need to be compared as overtly as possible. The lead character here, played by actor Elsie Fischer, experienced an active shooter inside their high school before the events of the movie. The film draws many comparisons between this event and the chaos caused by horror villains like Leatherface, but to what end? These things are better left to subtextual messages. When you make your horror movie explicitly showing America’s real life culture of violence, it leaves your killers feeling silly and empty. Leatherface is a beautiful metaphor for the brutality of American capitalism in the original film. Here, he’s merely a boogeyman to remind one person of their trauma.
HELLBENDER: February 24th on Shudder
Finally, a new folk horror film that feels distinct from the recent big names in the subgenre! Made by a family of filmmakers who also act in the film, HELLBENDER is similar to THE LAST THING MARY SAW in that it uses dark magic as a metaphor for a young woman’s coming of age in an isolated place. HELLBENDER, however, outside from a cold open, is set in the modern day. The isolation comes from being homeschooled on a wooded mountain as opposed to the time period, as Izzy, the lead girl, starts to learn her boundaries are put in place for a different reason than she’s been told. She’s not sick, as she has been led to believe: she’s a witch, just like her mother and grandmother before her, who we see being killed by townsfolk in the opening scene. They draw their power from consuming creatures who “fear death”, and the more fear, the more powerful their magic can be.
HELLBENDER, it becomes clear, is a story about intergenerational trauma. Izzy’s magic grows too powerful for her too quickly, and consumes her, leading to her going after her mother. But the film doesn’t absolve her either, showing her to be the source of Izzy’s trauma much as her mother was the source of her own. Each Hellbender, as the family’s last name is revealed to be, only begets a child after consuming her mother. This is an effective metaphor for the need to destroy the past to build a future, but the horror comes in with the possibility that the future one creates will always be a reflection of the past, that you can’t just run from your trauma or lash out against in violently, it must be dealt with emotionally. In HELLBENDER, this comes crashing down in a Lovecraftian dreamscape that uses the film’s small effects budget effectively creepily.
Join me in two months when I’ll be discussing films like X, WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR, and FRESH!
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