The common wisdom, inherited thanks mostly to the 1968-1978 boom of great American horror movies that accompanied some of the nation's most turbulent and hopeless years (at least among those that could be reflected via moving pictures), is that the worse off things are, the more relevant and powerful our cinematic nightmares become. That the halcyon days of horror are directly proportional to the index of actual human suffering. If that's so, the entire world has spent the last decade counting down the few remaining seconds left on the Doomsday Clock. While the few years leading up to Y2K brought with them a set of snarky, masturbatorily meta slasher movies that ensured audiences not only felt superior to the movies they were raised on, but also absolved them of any sense of socio-political obligation, the dozens and dozens of new horror classics that have swarmed out of every corner of the globe since then (not unlike the teeming cockroaches that burst out of E.G. Marshall's chest at the climax of Creepshow) seemed to impress upon us all that the biggest nightmare of all wasn't that the world would end, but that we'd have to continue living on in the colossal mess we've cultivated.
Some of our great new horror movies look to the past for assistance, others resonate with bleak nihilism for our future. Want stone proof the aughts sucked? Recue the blunt climax to the most diverting movie in our entire list of the 25 scariest post-2000 movies, Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. We're totally f**ked. Eric Henderson.
See the list here at slantmagazine.com
No comments:
Post a Comment