I watched a few horror movies this weekend, here's some thoughts:
- LOVED Nope. Nope really fed my hunger for allegories and deeper meanings to mine. There's a bunch of fun stuff to deep-dive into (ie: there's a crazy strong Director/Audience vibe I want to look more closely at). But more importantly, it's just a good movie. The family dynamics felt natural and real. The mysterious elements were all fun to figure out and I felt they had satisfying answers. The horror elements were genuine and tense. Then the actors all bodied their roles. This joint was just plain good.
It's been a solid summer for that between Nope and the Black Phone. They're not quite hitting the scary levels that I thought the Ritual did or the gruesomeness of The Sadness; but these are genuine horror movies that I can suggest to non-horror movie heads. These are quality Hollywood fare and I think Nope is especially worth a trip to see in Imax. There are so many striking visuals, many of which happen at night, that I think the massive screen and sound quality bring the best out of.
We're eating pretty good lately fam!
- Next up, I watched Men. That was...an experience. Men does a lot of things well...I think it might have my favorite cinematography of any horror this year. It's another allegory-rich story, although in this case it's symbolic to the extent that it's inaccessible. I had to look up "the green man" to get any idea of wtf I had just watched. That said, it did nail some really good scares and discomfort. In a year with The Sadness' nastiness, Crimes of the Future's gross body-mods, and The Black Phone's absolutely brilliant mask...Men has the scene that will probably stick with me more than any of those movies...but those movies were all better imo.
- Finally, I watched Umma, a nice self-contained ghost/haunting movie. It falls into the trend of generational trauma or ghosts as the representation of our past. In this case, it covers a mother and first-generation immigrant from Korea and her daughter who has been home-schooled but wants to step out into college. This mother is dealing with the psychological trauma of her own upbringing while trying not to repeat it with her daughter. The issue is that this sort of thing has been done to the point that even adding an interesting cultural layer didn't help avoid some familiar tropes. It wound up being solid, but didn't do enough to stand out from other psychological trauma flicks. It's on Netflix though, and worth a once-through imho.