Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
As a long time connoisseur of horror films I have become numbly desensitized by various overused horror tropes over the years. The devil shenanigans of the 70's. The slashers/teen victims of the 80's. The serial killers of the 90's. And the zombies of the 2000's. That's why I'm always looking for more original themes of horror that push the boundaries of imagination and suggest whole new sources for our sense of the uncanny and disturbing.
Thankfully a few standout films along the way have met that standard for me. "Phantasm" was one of the first to open me up to a new kind of nightmarish creepiness. "Hellraiser" was a crazy hoot with its S&M interdimensionals. "Jacob's Ladder" blew me away, being a wholly original treatment of the demonic/madness theme. "Exorcist III" from the early 90's was so uniquely horrifying to me that it made me sick. Cronenburg certainly shocked me at a visceral level with "The Fly" and "Naked Lunch". David Lynch got under my skin with surrealistic masterpieces like "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive". The little indie flick "The Babadook" was surprisingly terrifying, tapping into the childhood bedtime fear of the boogyman. There was a series on Syfy channel for awhile that really impressed me called "Channel Zero" which featured various miniseries introducing wholly new expressions of the "monsters/others" archetype. More recently Jonathan Glazer's "Under The Skin" really unnerved me with its outright strangeness and xenoerotic twistedness. "Vivarium" was practically revelatory for me in what it simply left undefined. And "Skinamarink" tested my whole preconception of what a horror film could be .
So I remain cautiously optimistic in that we seem to be getting more and more new and daring directors these days who are experimenting with novel forms of the genre. Or at least fresh renditions of the old classic themes. Robert Eggers certainly seems to be a promising one of those. Both his A24 films "The Witch" and "The Lighthouse" were unsettling excursions into the darkness of isolation and evil. Here's his essay from the NYT on what horror has always meant to him. His new film "Nosferatu" will come out this Christmas.
www.nytimes.com
Thankfully a few standout films along the way have met that standard for me. "Phantasm" was one of the first to open me up to a new kind of nightmarish creepiness. "Hellraiser" was a crazy hoot with its S&M interdimensionals. "Jacob's Ladder" blew me away, being a wholly original treatment of the demonic/madness theme. "Exorcist III" from the early 90's was so uniquely horrifying to me that it made me sick. Cronenburg certainly shocked me at a visceral level with "The Fly" and "Naked Lunch". David Lynch got under my skin with surrealistic masterpieces like "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive". The little indie flick "The Babadook" was surprisingly terrifying, tapping into the childhood bedtime fear of the boogyman. There was a series on Syfy channel for awhile that really impressed me called "Channel Zero" which featured various miniseries introducing wholly new expressions of the "monsters/others" archetype. More recently Jonathan Glazer's "Under The Skin" really unnerved me with its outright strangeness and xenoerotic twistedness. "Vivarium" was practically revelatory for me in what it simply left undefined. And "Skinamarink" tested my whole preconception of what a horror film could be .
So I remain cautiously optimistic in that we seem to be getting more and more new and daring directors these days who are experimenting with novel forms of the genre. Or at least fresh renditions of the old classic themes. Robert Eggers certainly seems to be a promising one of those. Both his A24 films "The Witch" and "The Lighthouse" were unsettling excursions into the darkness of isolation and evil. Here's his essay from the NYT on what horror has always meant to him. His new film "Nosferatu" will come out this Christmas.
Plumbing the Depths of Darkness, and Finding Liberation
As a creator of horror films, I often face my fears by sharing them onscreen.
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