I Still Believe in Heroes

The great horror films are the ones that have something important to say. Yes, scares matter, but they need to amount to something. For a while, it seemed like horror films had nothing of importance to say. Scares seemed to be the ultimate goal and story was put in the backburner, and that led to a long stream of lackluster horror films. In recent years, however, we have seen genre re-defining films such as  The Conjuring , It Follows , A Quiet Place and  Get Out  restore some of the prestige that horror cinema once had.  Hereditary  is the latest film to accomplish this, and it is perhaps the most effective in doing so. Hereditary  is all about family. It’s about a family whose evil history comes back to haunt them and little by little begins to tear them apart. The film stars Toni Collette as Annie Graham, who at the beginning of the film finds herself speaking at her estranged mother’s funeral. Due to their strained relationship, Annie finds it h...

"Since childhood, I've been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them. Because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection. They allow and embody the possibility of failing and living." Those were the words that Guillermo del Toro spoke after winning his first Golden Globe for his directorial work on The Shape of Water . It was a speech that I connected with and understood completely. With the Oscars coming up, I want to say a few words on what Guillermo del Toro and his films mean to me and why I am rooting for him to win the Best Director award at the Academy Awards.              Growing up, my parents never really censored what my brothers and I saw on TV or at the movies. As a result, I was exposed to many of the great horror films at an extremely young age. Slashers were a constant in our home. Despite how much they scared me, they also fascinated me. Slashers were the norm for...

                           To say that slashers were on the decline before the release of Wes Craven’s Scream would be an understatement. By that point in 1996, the slasher genre had gone completely stale and left for dead. Most of what we got were rehashes of things we had already seen. It was sequel after sequel of the main slasher franchises such as Friday the 13 th and Halloween . What was once a thoughtful look at gender and a vehicle for women be heroes (because of the Final Girl trope) had become a soulless excuse to show blood and violence on the screen. Then, Scream arrived and rewrote the whole narrative on slasher films. The genre was once again alive and thriving.               Scream follows Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a young high school girl who is approaching the one-year anniversary of her mother’s grizzly murder. As the date app...

What is it about horror movies that draw audiences in to see them?   There is the thrill of being scared, sure, but is that really as far as it goes? I think not. You see, more than any other genre, horror films are a product of their generation and they typically speak to or highlight the societal issues that are going on around the time that a given horror film is made.   In many ways, horror films help us understand or comment on important issues such as race ( Get Out ), sexuality ( It Follows ), and mental/physical/emotional issues ( The Babadook ). Horror is a genre with many faces but for this particular article, I will touch on what I believe to be the best horror subgenres, the slasher film, and discuss why they are important.              I can understand why people may be a bit turned off by slasher films. In many ways they are a lot closer to reality than a monster or demonic horror movie. Many slasher films...