Originally Posted by
Deacon Blackfire
Kind of daunting for me to jump into this thread because I love horror and have been watching/collecting horror films for years, and I never really know where to start, but here it goes!
To stay somewhat relevant, while I absolutely despise the terms like "elevated horror" invented by people who, upon seeing a film like The Witch or Hereditary, think that intelligent and thematically dense horror films are some kind of new innovation and not something that has existed practically since the beginning of fucking cinema, the films that frequently have that term applied to them are quite excellent. The Witch is a dread soaked descent into a Puritan nightmare, a wrenching exploration of the kind of chaste, spiritually and emotionally atrophied world these people lived in and I am a huge fan. I liked Midsommar quite a bit, though the Director's Cut is overly long and I would recommend the theatrical cut, which makes some smart edits that trim unnecessary fat. But Hereditary is on another level compared to Midsommar. That film is so gloriously, viscerally traumatic and affecting, and to echo the comments above, it resonates with me and my sense of family in deeply personal (and upsetting lol) ways. So many terrific scenes and moments, and the whole finale is white knuckle shit. The fact Toni Collette didn't even get an Oscar nomination for it is all you need to know to disregard award shows forever.
All in all, both Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) and Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) have gone two for two in a big fucking way and I can't wait to see their next films. It's always great to have new talented directors producing films as fertile and rewarding as these. Hopefully they keep their momentum. I absolutely love Kill List and some of Ben Wheatley's films afterwards are pretty interesting too but his latest film, In The Earth, left me pretty disappointed.
The latest talk of the horror scene seems to be the Hellraiser reboot remake (on Hulu? wtf) and the fact Jamie Clayton is playing Pinhead, and I guess I have mixed feelings about it. That there is mouth-breathing backlash to incorporating more sexual diversity in adapting Clive freakin' Barker is pretty rich and casting a trans person as a Cenobite is interesting and in some ways even appropriate. However I really hope the internet doesn't pull a Ghostbusters 2016 with this, that this stupid non debate doesn't become so married to the film so early in its development that its quality and success become some kind of distorted referendum on whether or not the chuds were right about diversity and inclusion instead of being evaluated as a film, adaptation, and remake. The guy directing it, David Bruckner, directed The Night House, which I haven't seen but have heard good things about and is on my 'to watch' list. Once I see that I'll have a better sense of how I feel about this project but it's hard to imagine it topping the overpowering, incredible putrescence of the original. As I have discussed with friends of mine, it's a film that you feel like you can smell and the palpable pulpiness of its gooey effects, juxtaposed with the heaving British soap opera story and the romantic swell of Christopher Young's beautiful score... It's the kind of thing you don't recreate. They say it will be a very close adaptation of Barker's original novella The Hellbound Heart but frankly, aside from Kirsty's role being changed from "Rory's friend" to "Larry's daughter", the original film was already a very close adaptation of The Hellbound Heart, not to mention written and directed by the original author.