Penny Dreadful
SFX's high priestess of horror
A bewitching novel, a Mexican fest and how to cope if you can’t go to FrightFest...
BACKLASH WHIPLASH
Horror has never more exciting and more varied, so naturally there’s a bloody backlash. While op eds are trying to fob us off with phrases like “elevated horror” or calling horror movies “psychological thrillers” when anything deemed worthy by the mainstream lands, I’m now starting to see a backlash to the backlash. Hereditary – one of the most talked about movies of the year and one of the most divisive (personally I love it) – now seems to be encouraging a different kind of reaction from genre fans. I’m seeing people suggesting that those who found Hereditary effective only did so because they haven’t seen many horror movies. What scares people is personal and taste is subjective so I don’t care if people like it or don’t, but this feels like a weird kind of snobbery where in some way the masses (and the critics) responding to an independent horror has made genre films less special. I’ve seen multiple complaints suggesting the film was ruined by “the hype”, too, which is the same hype that caused people to actually go and see the film. You can bet most indie directors would kill for the kind of hype that’s so far led to almost $50 million at the box office. Love it or hate it, horror in the spotlight is surely a good thing. Enough with the lash.
THE SAME ONLY DIFFERENT
Most bonkers movie of the month goes to The Similars, a Mexican horror I stumbled upon on Netflix. A 2015 movie from Isaac Ezban (his second feature), it’s a weird, twisty retro-looking black-and-white chiller, which channels The Twilight Zone. It’s all set in a bus station outside Mexico City where a group of strangers find themselves trapped when a freak storm causes all public transport to be delayed, and it escalates from creepy and a bit odd to histrionic and totally nuts, lobbing crazier and crazier plot turns at you thick and fast. I knew very little about this movie going in and I urge you to have a “similar” experience, so I’ll just say this – keep an eye out for the dog.
HEXUAL HEALING
Imagine coming down to breakfast and finding a 17th century witch with her eyes and mouth sewn shut standing in your living room. The opening premise to Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, is one of the best beginnings to a horror novel I’ve read in a while, and it only gets more intriguing from there. Hex imagines a small US town with a horrible past, haunted by an undead spirit that the town has grown used to. An app is set up to monitor her movements, insiders can’t leave town for long, while outsiders are avoided or shielded from the town’s dirty secret. An excellent folk horror thrust into the era of YouTube and GoPros, I was over the moon to hear it’s being developed by Warner Bros as a TV show. Read it so you can say you knew Hex before it was famous…
BEAUTIFUL CREATURE
Horror is everywhere from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s gothic horror final act, to various Stephen King projects making tracks (Ewan McGregor for the lead in Doctor Sleep? Yep, I’m on board with that) to Natalie Dormer’s new project In Darkness which owes a big debt to Hitchcock (it’s not very good but the opener recalls classic Hitch in style). Meanwhile, Mary Shelley (out now) is about the godmother of modern horror, and doesn’t really feature genre elements at all. Instead it’s a coming-of-age tale and a romance packed with facts I really didn’t know about Shelley. That she was only 18 when she wrote the novel, that she lost a child, that the novel wasn’t initially published in her name, and that she felt the abandonment of the creature herself after her mother died when she was a baby and her own father disowned her, was all new to me. It’s essential viewing for genre nuts, in celebration of a brilliant woman ahead of her time just desperate to find a voice.