You know, I’ve seen some horror movies recently, so I should really post about that.
Malignant - see my post in that thread. It’s bad. I really enjoyed it.
A Nightmare on Elm Street - my girlfriend hadn’t seen it and it’s on HBO Max, so we fixed that. It was not as intensely scary for me as it was originally, but it holds up really well. Great dream aesthetics, memorable choices about staging and the direction of the plot. This time around I could appreciate all the little details, too. And I’ve long remembered it as having a Freddy who’s just pure, nearly silent menace, as opposed to the wisecracking killer of…basically the entire rest of the series. Turns out that’s not really accurate. Freddy of the first movie doesn’t exactly crack a lot of jokes, but he’s clearly having a good time freaking out his victims, and cackling when, e.g. one of them pulls his face off inadvertently, a scene I did not remember. He also has more lines than I remembered. They’re not jokes, but…yeah. You can actually see the seeds of that in this one. I’d also forgotten the sequence towards the end where Nancy pulls him out of her dream and it’s practically Home Alone for a few minutes as he stumbles into traps she’s set up. I did remember the closing realization that she hadn’t actually stopped him, but I didn’t realize that that whole final scene demonstrates its unreality by leaning directly into wish fulfillment out of the gate. Brilliant, honestly..
A Nightmare on Elm Street - So, the 2010 remake was also on HBO Max and I remembered someone(s) telling me it wasn’t actually that bad. Reader, they were either wrong or lying to me pretty hard. It’s bad. I will give them this much credit: it’s not a straight remake. The premise is more or less the same, but they don’t try to shot for shot it (with one iconic shot an exception Freddy’s glove reaching up out of the bath…totally squandered by immediately pivoting away from the original imagery here) and while a few beats echo the original huge swathes of the movie are very different. Unfortunately, virtually none of it works. My central complaint is they just don’t manage to ever capture the dreamy surreality of the horror in the original. Sure, characters have nightmares, but they don’t feel like nightmares, they feel like horror movie cliches. Characters have to stay awake (in one other touch I liked, one of the characters does some research on extended periods without sleeping and I think the results come from actual sleep science), but they don’t feel desperately tired to me. In the original, Nancy has to go to great lengths to wake up out of her nightmares or have an external force wake her. The remake, most nightmares end in a jump scare and the character doing the movie “sit up screaming”. In general, if there’s a boring, conventional, uninspired horror movie choice to make, this movie makes it. Also: the movie goes significantly more into Freddy’s backstory in ways that don’t really benefit the movie (apparently drawing on intended backstory for the original but I think it’s just as well it didn’t make it in there and makes Freddy much grosser in a sexual way that…that is certainly a form of horror but is unpleasant and not used in a worthwhile way here.
Candyman - Because my girlfriend hadn’t seen it. Like Nightmare on Elm Street, still very much holds up. I was struck by new things here as well - how long the movie takes before it really leans into the supernatural side of things or even gets to Cabrini Green, so infamously the primary staging ground of its horrors. The incredibly grotty aesthetics. I remembered Tony Todd’s seductive aura as the titular killer, but on a second pass I’m realizing that the way he keeps setting her up to be viewed as a monster and eroding her supports isn’t just isolating her in a predatory way, as I originally took it, but setting up her own legend to carry her into eternity with him. Just such interesting choices, when it could be a conventional “mirror monster” urban legend affair like countless low budget Bloody Mary flicks.
Candyman - it was also prep for seeing the new Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta, the sequel. Unlike the Nightmare remake, this is pretty good. Unfortunately, it’s also disappointing. I had high hopes given some of the pre-release material, the fact that it’s a sequel and not a reboot/remake, and Jordan Peele was involved. The idea that it was going to really lean into the blackness of the original movie and have things to say on that front was also promising. And…as I say, i don’t think it’s bad. There’s a bunch of lovely cinematography, including tracking shots along Chicago streets looking up, which is such a new angle to me, and a zoom back away from an apartment building during one of the kills. I like the cast, by and large. There are several interesting ideas played with, like the way the main character incorporates the legend into his art, or the idea that it’s a recurring archetype that perpetuates into the future. The problem, I think, is that it just doesn’t have any focus. It feels like there were, I dunno, five different drafts of the script that have been frankensteined into a single movie that never commits to any of it. You could do a movie where the kid she saves in the original is infected by Candyman’s myth and grows into him over time, or one where a crazy person is trying to use him to reinstantiate Candyman for our times, or one where it’s a generational archetype our hero is being drawn into, or one about an artist trying to break out by incorporating this potent myth into his work to tragic consequence, or… or… but no. It does all of that, and ends up feeling overstuffed and incoherent. And…you definitely can tell the creators had things to say about blackness and the way horror as a genre has exploited black bodies, and so on. I’m not black. It’s not my experience. I’m probably the wrong person to tell you they don’t really pull it off. But certainly it did not work on that level for me.
The Bridge Curse - I watched all of the above with my girlfriend. This one, well. I had some downtime and just wanted something disposable I could stream without worrying about whether it was likely to be worth showing her. And in my experience, foreign - especially Asian - horror tends to be a bit better on average than no-name American horror, so, Taiwanese ghost movie it was. It’s…fine? Basic idea is there’s a bridge on a university campus where a female student supposedly drowned herself, and now if you go up the stairs on the other end at midnight, there will be a 14th step where there’s normally 13, and if you turn around, the ghost will be right behind you. So, kids haze their friends by making them go up the stairs at midnight. It leads off with a livestreamed video of some kids doing just that, and then cuts to a framing story where a reporter is investigating the deaths of those kids. Go figure, most of the rest of the movie is the ghost killing said kids in spooky lonely parts of the campus while they shriek and run around and freak out, etc, with occasional cutaways to the reporter poking at stuff. Nothing you haven’t seen before, mostly. Exceeeept, one tiny detail - turns out the flashbacks to the past stuff? It’s actually two different sets of kids, one in 2012, one in 2016, framed in such a way that I never actually noticed that the two sets didn’t interact. Why does that matter? Because there’s one kid who was there both times. And oh…huh. There’s a link to the 2020 frame, too…. Does that make the movie worth watching just for that? Eh, probably not. But it did perk the movie up for me.
