Slasher Films

Oh that makes sense.

Ti West announced in TIFF that a third movie to cap off Pearl and X is coming at Pearl's premiere.

It is called MaXXXine and it will be set in 1980's era Los Angeles.

I'm curious to see how West approaches Maxine after the events of X - he's too thoughtful a director to just have it be "final girl has to survive again" like so many other slasher sequels, but I could see it being an exploration of the theme of resentment stemming from the loss of a life that could have been and the ephemerality of youth from a different angle. Perhaps Maxine tries to escape the porn industry only to find that the life she chose as a repudiation of her upbringing is ultimately just as suffocating and entangling as the fundamentalist Christian upbringing she left.

Don't forget that the VHS market in the Eighties was making the horror and eighteen-only sections the most interesting. It sounds like the movie will have something to do with that, but even the setting invites one to assume so much.

Just got back from seeing Pearl. Jesus Christ. Mia Goth's performance there will go down as one of the all-time greats. It's a vastly different film from X, and that's what makes it work so well - the nods to 70s exploitation films are there, but this is way more rooted in Psycho and other classic psychological thrillers. I really like the direction he took with her - she's a deeply ill and disturbed young woman who knows that there is something extremely wrong with her, and while she obviously spends the film unraveling, there's something very believable and tragic about her even as she goes further and further off the deep end. I actually liked it more than X, but it honestly kinda is apples to oranges.

Am I the only one who feels that there's been a shift in how horror movies are marketed in recent years? I feel like in the '00s, ads, trailers and so forth focused almost exclusively on the villains, with the heroes' helplessness being emphasized when they're in the promos at all. Current horror trailers place at least as much emphasis on the victims fighting back. I remember when I saw the trailer for the first of the new Halloween trilogy, which ends not with Michael but with Laurie cocking a shotgun and giving a Pre Ass Kicking One Liner, I felt like "Huh, that's different."

Horror back then was processing 9/11; overnight we woke up to a new, more dangeorus world. A world full of unpredictable* and unstoppable* forces of nature ^note The contemporary public perception does not necessarily correspond to hagiography nor to the clear-eyed perspective of present observers. that will come after us, and we can do nothing to stop those monsters, only watch agape. Additionally, there is a political context in the wake of the first Republican trifecta since before the Great Depression, that I can't right now write with appropriate care and sophistication, though when Halloween resurfaced, that time, it was in the spirit of unity by humanizing the monster.

Horror now rejects that decade's pessimism. We aren't helpless in the face of monsters, and we don't need to passively accept monstrosity. Monsters aren't divine alien forces, they are comprehensibly human. We need to recognize the monsters, sometimes in ourselves, then combat them. As political culture has increasingly emphasized the rights and difficulties of women and minority groups, they have taken greater presence in our horror. (See: the reevaluation of Jennifer's Body). Though traditional we vs them horror endures.

Also of note is the fact that this decade has had a major awakening of self-awareness in pop culture. Scream was dead for the entire decade. Even our horror comedies simply embraced tropes. It was only later that horror went after it's own tropes, reevaluating it's history of exoticizing and demonizing the Other.

Edited by Readersprite on Sep 21st 2022 at 1:41:52 PM

...damn, that's beautiful. If this site let you give awards like Reddit, I'd hand you one for that!

Cross-posting from the Five Nights at Freddy's thread:

The movie. Is still. Not. DEAD!

From Jason Blum himself, the movie has a director in Emma Tammi, director of the horror western 2018 film The Wind. It's also set to have its principal photography start on February 2023. And Jim Henson's Creature Shop is still attached to do all the animatronic and practical effects.

Hope you guys love practical effects, because FNAF will be having it all over the place!

Grinch Horror Movie 'The Mean One' in the works: https://movieweb.com/the-grinch-turns-slasher-this-christmas-in-new-horror-movie-the-mean-one/

This is an expy film though, right? I'm pretty sure none of Dr. Seuss's stuff has reached the public domain yet.

Yeah, from the article mentioning "Newville" and "Cindy You-Know-Who" it seems this is trying to be just different enough to dodge the copyright laws whilst being very blatant in its Expy-ness.

The Mean One seems like it might still have some trademark issues though, but that's the holder's business.

That article makes the obvious connection to that Winne the Pooh horror film, and wonders about a potential wave of films in this genre, kids' characters turned monsters. Does anyone have a proposal for other characters that can be horror-ified?

We already have Pinnochio's Revenge. Ditto The Banana Splits. Candy Land? I don't know if someone's actually done a film, but there's a common fan theory that Peter Pan kills the Lost Boys who get too old.

Well tbf.

Peter has been depicted as a bad guy a couple of times. In Once Upon a Time and Grimm Fairy Tales he does outright kill them.

I think those sorts of trailers are mainly for long running franchises (whether the latest installment is a sequel, remake, or reboot). For them, emphasizing the heroes fighting back serves two purposes. One, it serves as a way to set themselves apart from their predecessors, saying, "This time you'll get the catharsis at the bad guy's defeat." The other is that the heroes becoming more able to stand up against evil is just what we expect from horror films.

You see it all the time in slasher movies, where someone who starts off as a Non-Action Guy, no less helpless than any of the other victims, has by the end become an Action Survivor able to hold their own against the killer. And if the heroes carry over into the sequel, they bring their acquired badassery and knowledge of the killer/monster with them, making them far more capable of responding to the threat. Ellen Ripley, Ash Williams, and Sarah Connor are particularly famous examples.

However, if a horror film isn't part of a franchise, then their trailers do still focus on the looming, seemingly unstoppable evil and the hapless victims. They have to, because their villain's bona fides haven't been established yet.

I saw Terrifier 2. Way too long, with too many unanswered questions for its length. Otherwise, an improvement in every way on its predecessor; there's a functional slasher plot instead of a nonexistent one, it's not quite as butt-ugly, and it's so gross that it'll make the more squeamish swear off horror entirely.

Dolly go stab in the first trailer for Megan:

My favorite part is when she dances.

Heh. The dancing is indeed amusing.

So this may be a January release but this is still terrifying.

It's the second week of October and I've only seen two horror movies. I'm ashamed of myself.

You've got a lot of catching up to do, 2022 will go down in history as one of the best years for horror.

God, Halloween Ends is feeble.

They really should have quit while they were ahead.

Some truly baffling creative decisions, but Michael's reduced importance to the narrative makes me think they had a couple really great sequel titles they wanted to use without enough material for both.

Someone came up with the line "Evil dies tonight" and they built a new film continuity around it.

Just got out of it. Definitely felt like David Gordon Green had some ideas he wanted to explore thematically about the nature of evil across a trilogy, but not enough plot to actually cover three movies. And that applies to Kills as well.

2018, Kills, and Ends all take a different angle in regards to collective/generational trauma, but in the end not that much actually…happens?

I didn’t hate the film, but it definitely didn’t feel like the third act of a story, or the grand finale of anything. The new trilogy overall feels very disjointed, with 2018 being the clear standout, and I have to wonder how much of that has to do with COVID.

Also, almost…no, not almost, definitely weird in how bloodless it is, especially compared to Kills. Almost all the kills happen in the last 30 minutes or so, and it felt like they were almost entirely offscreen. And Michael didn’t even do most of them.

Edited by BadWolf21 on Oct 13th 2022 at 9:55:55 AM