The year in horror
With Halloween upon us, let's talk about the horror movies of 2021
Film Features halloween
It’s a scary time to be alive, and to go to the movies. But have the movies themselves been scary? With Halloween coming this weekend, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the year in horror movies—the state of the genre in these uncertain times, the trends that defined these past few months of fright fare, and our spooky favorites of 2021.
It’s Horrors Week here at The A.V. Club, so be sure to check out all our horror related content, including this week’s Ultimate Slasher Franchise Tournament, where we crown the greatest slasher-movie franchise of them all. In the final round, Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise faces off with Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare On Elm Street series. Head over to the link above to see who won, or check out an excerpt below:
Maybe it was always going to come down to these two. The unholy monsters of suburbia. The leading bogeymen of the box office. America’s favorite unkillable killers. One basically kicked off the whole slasher-movie craze of the ’80s—his was the blank, rubber William Shatner face that launched a thousand ships through a thousand bays of blood. The other arrived right when the subgenre was beginning to peter out, extending its life by introducing a different kind of homicidal villain: smaller frame, bigger mouth, powers his masked contemporaries couldn’t, uh, dream of.
With apologies to Jason Voorhees, whose series got knocked out of this tournament a couple rounds back, Michael Myers is the true strong and silent yin to Freddy Krueger’s yang. Mike is death personified. He just keeps coming and killing, a Duracell battery of malevolence. He has no pretensions, just unquenchable bloodlust. Freddy is his opposite number, the McEnroe to his Borg, the demonic clown to his pokerfaced straight man. He’s the rock star, the showman. He’ll make a whole production out of ripping out your insides. The two could be a classic comedy duo, a study in contrasts.
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5 Comments
I doubt a Korean film like The Sadness is about “angry WHITE men”. America is not the center of the world that foreign pop culture must focus on.
My understanding is that the real “Devil Made Me Do It” case didn’t involve any claims of actual satanism, though those are added to the Conjuring film about it.
I watched Censor last week, and was disappointed, though I’m hopeful for more from the director:
https://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/2021/10/this-weekend-in-pop-culture-october-22.html#comment-5582124143
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance had the cycle of revenge leaving everyone worse off, but Sympathy for Lady Vengeance was relatively straightforward in just delivering punishment to someone absolutely worthy of it.
Unless there were two movies of the same name, The Sadness was Taiwanese and directed by a white Canadian director. There have been some readings of the film that look at the impact Western (and white) culture has on countries like Taiwan both in terms of exposure to violence and exposure to things like Covid. So, yeah, kind of it could be.
I stand corrected. I’m not literally standing right now, but I am corrected.
For me with 2021 horror, the two ends of the spectrum would be SAINT MAUD (which wasn’t released until this year despite being completed in, what, 2019?) which was staggering, and SKULL: THE MASK, which I just watched last night and had a ball with…it’s by no means perfect but it was incredibly fun and gory.
Listening to Dowd extol the virtues of “Malignant” as I walked home just made me really, really sad that it’s not on HBO Max anymore. I could really go for that third act again.