people who don’t watch horror movies are SO confident that they know everything there is to know about the genre. like it’s okay to not know things. it’s okay if you don’t like friday the 13th or whatever. i promise you don’t need to make an ass out of yourself on the internet about it
horror is an incredibly diverse genre, because there is potential horror in everything. it’s in nature, it’s in architecture and technology, it’s in human relationships, it’s in folklore, the past, the future, the mundane. there are horror movies from all over the world. it is straight up anti-intellectual to pretend that the handful of B slashers you’ve vaguely heard about comprise the totality of what horror has to offer. If you’re just not interested in horror, or if you dislike certain subgenres of horror, then that’s fine, you’re not obligated to like anything at all. but smugly announcing that you don’t like horror because you dislike a handful of VERY specific non-universal tropes is just as stupid as saying that you hate comedy because you don’t like adam sandler movies.
Honestly I’m not surprised that people feel this way about the genre. There’s so much (in the past) that has been wrong with it. Things like the hyper sexualization of women, killing off of POC/ethnic stereotypes, and even harmful portrayals of mental illness.
Yes there have been amazing horror films in the past (Night of the Living Dead is my go to example) that don’t have any harmful tropes, but horror now is better than its ever been. It’s diverse in a lot of ways and it mostly has to do with the emergence of better directors. And I think this trend will continue so I feel bad for anyone who deprives themselves of good horror.
Here are my recommendations:
1- Hereditary : Ari Aster does an amazing job showing grief and loss. Probably my favorite horror movie in the past decade. (Midsommar is amazing too)
2- It Follows: Really interesting approach to horror and sexual assault
3- Anything Jordan Peele. Whether its his last 3 movies or his version of The Twilight Zone. This man tackles literally every bad horror trope and is my favorite director in this genre.
4- The Lighthouse, The VVitch, The Ritual, Men, Annihilation and so many more movies in the past 5ish yrs have all given us content that is so far removed from “classic horror”
5- Watch horror movies from other countries. I don’t even wanna get into how much you’re missing out by defining horror in a very “western” sense.
Anyway horror is by far the most entertaining genre in film and its rapidly evolving.
There is a Health drink on the ground next to these garbage bins in this disgusting alley during an outbreak of murderous unknowable monsters.
“The Dead Wagon” by Greye La Spina (1927) “This cart carries a gruesome load; it is piled high with bodies.”
These older horror stories all try and bring things to as neat a resolution as a story about spirits and death can manage. There must always be a hero, or a redeeming quality to give the reader some hope. I can appreciate that, but modern literature has really burned me on these notions. The messy or unresolved ending just hits the spot.
===
“The Harvest” by Shannon Campbell & Pam Wishbow (2016) “Just think of blackberry jam."
Oh fuck yeah, that autumnal folk horror. Much of this sort of thing comes out of places with traditional seasons but I love that this anthology is all about horror from the Pacific Northwest, so here you can feel the gray gloom and green hells of those thickly forested areas. This particular story also gets into the insidious and unknowable machinations of plants. Who knows what they’re thinking…
===
The Uninvited dir. Lewis Allen (1944) "But it isn’t fair to hate a house because someone’s died there.”
The randomizer threw a lot of older movies at me early on. This particular one seems to get a lot of praise but I didn’t quite see it, as it takes time to get to the spooky. The vibe is mostly lighthearted until some supernatural family drama near the end and it’s just not enough to make it work.
Hotdang, that’s a scary story! It’s a novella-length yarn and the author uses that space to build things up so gradually that you don’t notice the creeping dread until it’s too late. And it’s funny because the character in this is a horror book nerd and is insistent on dropping titles, names, and the occasional critique of some pre-70s horror fiction, which felt a bit annoying, but then here I am constantly dropping what I’ve just read or watched. Feel seen, indeed.
First-person perspective in a comic must have been a fresh thing in the fifties, and if you’re going to do it, then you may as well pull from a classic like Frankenstein. I also recognize this sort of amnesiac monster thing from many stories since ‘53, in particular the disturbing “His Silicon Soul” from Batman The Animated Series.
