Why aren’t we getting more horror in theaters? WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR, perhaps the year’s best horror movie, played for only one night (and one showtime) in my home state. Are distributors not confident enough in horror’s box office performance historically to give the films wider and longer releases than that? To be fair, that film and its distributor, Utopia, are more on the indie side of the market, but this trend has affected more mainstream horror films as well, such as a new EVIL DEAD film premiering directly on HBO Max. Horror movies are always best enjoyed with a crowd where you can gasp, scream, and cackle along with other freaks. It’s a depressing state of affairs when studios want to shoot themselves in the foot instead of taking the easy profits they could make off the release of even a mediocre horror movie. We aren’t the most choosy bunch when it comes to seeing scares in theaters as box office records show (remember the silent spring of A QUIET PLACE or the autumn of IT?). It’s odd that studios aren’t desperate for a little lifeblood in their theatrical release profits. Beyond that, I selfishly want to see horror movies on the big screen! I don’t want to have to worry about whether my city is deemed worthy enough of seeing HATCHING. Please, studios, have pity on us. At least enough to make some money.
FRESH: March 4th on Hulu
FRESH is a movie equivalent of a tweet by a straight woman comedian about her boyfriend who shits the bed every night. You’re crying out “don’t date him then!” but her shitspiral continues to an inevitable bloody conclusion, dragging you along with it if you’re still watching. The film follows Noa and her dating life for a good hour before getting to any real horror, (oh wow turns out the guy who hit on you in the grocery store was a creep! whocouldaguessedit) a decision that feels purposeful but ineffective. Despite spending a lot of time with Noa and her best friend Mollie, we never get much of a sense of who these people are. They are Stock Protagonist and Stock Best Friend through and through, and while the film gives a little more personality to its serial killing villain, none of them feel real in any way.
Mollie especially suffers from this, despite being played very well by Jonica T. Gibbs. Casting a black woman in the “best friend” role while giving the character no interiority, essentially using her as just a plot device there to help Noa, feels incredibly dated and also simply uninteresting. We spend several scenes with Mollie trying to uncover what has happened to Noa, and many of those are effectively creepy in concept, but fall flat when we know so little about either woman herself or their relationship with each other besides vague friendship. A few of the serial killer horror beats play fine, but most are generic, offering little new to a genre that became somewhat stale in the 2000s post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. A smorgasbord of bad decision making and overt visual metaphor, director Mimi Cave has finally made a movie about how dating sucks, actually. But really just for straight white women.
THE SEED: March 10th on Shudder
A sneaky bit of misogyny dressed up as commentary on influencers, THE SEED opens with shots of southern California avarice, glitzy buildings framed by arid sundried landscapes. Director/writer Sam Walker sets the action during a vacation two Instagram soft celebrities and their off-the-apps best friend are taking. Heather’s father owns the house where they’ll stay in order to document (on social media of course) a meteor shower. Queue one of the meteorites landing in the perfectly manicured backyard and hatching into an ERASERHEAD-style turtle baby. Body horror cosmic weirdness follows, but much of it falls flat with characters we either don’t care about or outright hate.
The movie ends up feeling dated in all the worst ways. It recalls back to the early 2010s rhetoric of “how can you be taking selfies at a time like this??”, and never really goes any further than that in its commentary on social media stardom. It leaves the film feeling hollow, and angry at its own protagonists in a way that feels very rooted in them being women, especially women who enjoy taking pictures of themselves or posting on social media, which are, of course, the greatest of all crimes. There’s even a scene that feels straight out of PORKY’S where a teen gardener extracts a kiss from the 20-something vacationers in order to deal with the alien baby. What the creators want to play as “harmless fun” in a throw-back, 80s sci-fi creature-feature sort of way comes across boringly sophomoric and nowhere near as funny as the film thinks it is.
X: March 13th in theaters, April 14th on VOD
Probably the biggest release on this list, X has made fans amongst genre-heads and pervos alike. Set in 1979, the film finds a hastily assembled group of strippers, filmmakers, and the strip club owner who are all out to make pornography with very different goals in mind. Our lead, played by Mia Goth, wants to be famous, repeating the phrase “I will not accept a life I do not deserve” throughout the film, which we ultimately learn she lifted from a TV evangelist. For others, this is about making money or making art, setting up the characters as being representative of different goals from the filmmaking process. X being set in the final days of the Hollywood New Wave is no coincidence: the film uses this end of an era as both inspiration for the artfully choppy editing of the film and commentary on why people make movies. This was, so far, only my second theatrical experience with a horror movie this year and I have to admit it might’ve given it a bit of a boost in my mind. Getting to hear people in my theater groan or wince with anticipation was something I’ve dearly missed, and I was happy to see this screening a little more crowded than most I’ve been to since theaters reopened.
But X has plenty to offer outside ‘70s horror nostalgia and the joy of seeing slasher kills with a crowd. Quickly, the elderly couple who own the property our intrepid film crew are shooting on appear to be a little too interested in what’s going on. In a lovely bit of commentary on the classic slasher trope of an almost right-wing killer striking out against sex-having teens, here the killer (played by Mia Goth again in over-the-top old lady makeup) is motivated by her desire to be young and desirable again, even trying to sleep with several of the cast and crew of “The Farmer’s Daughter”. Her husband kills to protect his wife and cover up her crimes, unable to satisfy her in bed anymore due to his fear of heart issues overwhelming him. They also watch a lot of that same evangelist who preaches the evils of sexuality and free love, in case you missed the subtext the first time. X isn’t particularly subtle, but it’s a little freeing in the ways it doesn’t take itself too seriously, content to be commentary on perverts for perverts and a delicious little slasher film in a neat package. It’s the best film Ti West has made in a while and feels like something he’s been saving in his back pocket for the right moment. I think this was it.
MASTER: March 18th on Amazon Prime
MASTER is an unfocused film from debut filmmaker Mariama Diallo. Choosing to follow two central characters for most of the film’s runtime backfires, and leaves me feeling like I didn’t get to know either very well. One character is Jasmine, a freshman at Ancaster, a fictional New England college, who experiences racist harassment and worsening mental health. The other is Gail, the first black Master of the school, who is encountering racist harassment of her own, at least at the start of the film. However, as Jasmine’s harassment deepens, we lose a sense of Gail’s in a sea of quickly added plot points: there are two ghosts, one of a witch who was hanged when the college started and one the first black student who committed suicide in the same room Jasmine is staying. And then about halfway through the movie, it’s revealed that there’s a nearby settlement of people living like it’s still the 17th century. Don’t worry too much about them, they’ll only come back when the plot needs it.
MASTER has many interesting ideas, but never focuses on any long enough to develop them. The shift in one’s life that occurs when you first go away to college is a great time for horror, especially about a loss of security in one’s sense of self, but we don’t get enough of a sense of who Jasmine is for this to really work. When she says a professor is targeting her and giving her worse grades than she deserves, the audience isn’t shown her paper or given any information on how she’s been doing in other classes. Is Jasmine a struggling student or is the professor harassing her? The film doesn’t seem interested in answering. It also isn’t interested in being scary. It employs every ghost story trick in the book: creepy shadows, uncaring friends, dream fakeouts. But every instance where it would be possible to be scared or at least creeped out is neutered by the film’s impersonal and removed style. It never lets us live in the heads of these characters, so we spend the film watching things happen to them, not experiencing them with them.
TITANIC 666: April 15th on Tubi
With a movie like this, made by veteran z-movie studio The Asylum, you have to be ready for some true trashy fun. I certainly won’t argue that director Nick Lyon’s latest mockbuster is a film that must be seen by all. But it’s definitely a movie for fans of winkingly bad horror, and one that knows what its audience wants to see. The opening of the film is a direct rip-off of Cameron’s TITANIC, with a silly reversal at the end where the Jack stand-in becomes zombified and eats fake Rose from off her floating door. It sets the town well, sure to provoke either irritated eyerolls or a little chuckle if you’re like me.
After that cold open, we cut to modern day where Titanic III is about to set sail. For those who aren’t inmates of The Asylum, this film is actually their second attempt to shamelessly riff on Cameron’s smash hit, hence the boat’s triple status. It’s a fun nod to the fans and makes for a lot of comedy around no one discussing what happened to Titanic II. As with that one, it’s a pretty simple horror theme of “the past will come for you if you dishonor it”, though here the hubris of another Titanic leads to the wrath of the undead. Another stand out moment comes during the finale where the human captain recites “O Captain, My Captain” to her zombie equivalent. If you’re a fan of classic cheese horror a la DEATH SPA, you’ll have a great time with TITANIC 666.
WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR: April 22nd in theaters
Internet horror isn’t going anywhere. Beginning in the ‘90s and reaching a tipping point into the mainstream with films like UNFRIENDED or THE DEN, this microgenre has long been one of interest to me. But even in the best films we’ve had that explored who we are online and how that will change us, there is an element of corniness, of falsehood compared to how I experienced the internet. Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature is the first movie that feels like my internet. Following a young woman (Casey) alienated from her community and family, the film opens with an extended sequence where the audience is in the place of Casey’s computer screen, watching her watch the web. Whereas recent internet horror films want to show you the screens themselves, sometimes taking place entirely through a video chat, for example, WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR wisely centers us in the room with the characters. We see skype calls and YouTube-esque videos, but we see these through Casey’s eyes, not as a neutral observer.
The film’s horror plot references internet lore like Junko Junsui, an ARG (alternate reality game) that intentionally blurred lines of storytelling and reality using the internet and led to many thinking it was more real than it was. In the film, there’s an ARG referred to as the “World’s Fair Challenge”. It’s horror based, and Casey starts by watching a series of flashing lights with her stuffed animal Poe. She begins to find herself making videos at the request of a mysterious man who goes by JLB detailing how the challenge affects her. What the actual challenge is or how it blurs reality is vague, but effectively so, making us feel as Casey does hopelessly lost in this blurring of fiction and reality. This idea of losing or gaining a sense of self through the internet really connected with me as a trans woman who grew up on message boards (Schoenbrun is also trans feminine, using they/she pronouns). When Casey repeats towards the end of the film “I swear, someday soon, I am just gonna disappear and you won’t have any idea what happened to me” it reflects the temporary nature of relationships on the internet, certainly, but also feels like a trans truism, the desire to disappear completely from a life you don’t understand. “It’s making me someone else,” she says in an earlier scene, referring to the challenge but also the internet at large. The film asks, is the internet actively making us worse, less connected, harder for each other to understand? Is anyone out there to help us? It doesn’t give any easy answers. How could it?
Join me in two months when I’ll be discussing films like FIRESTARTER, THE BLACK PHONE, and THE SADNESS!
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