Penny Dreadful
Girls are scary, clowns are scary, dolls are scary, beds are not
BORED GAMES
I’m completely at peace with the idea that I’m the only person on the planet who thought Netflix Stephen King adap Gerald’s Game was garbage. I’m a fan of director Mike Flanagan – loved Oculus, loved Absentia, loved (the first 20 mins of ) Hush and I’m not even blaming him, other than for wanting to do the project in the first place. How can no one but me see that this is just a really terrible story? “Woman gets tied to bed in sex game, hubby dies, how does she escape?” is fine material for a short story but when you add in the coincidental serial killer who hangs round the end of her bed fiddling with some bones, you’ve lost me. On that note – serial killer chiller The
Snowman is also rubbish. This movie has a sled full of problems but one of them is definitely that it’s not a very good story, packing in a smorgasbord of clichés, an obvious twist and a villain with the most hackneyed of motivations. Plus, Aled Jones doesn’t even sing the theme tune.
COLIN’S CHOICE
Movie of the month – an absolute must watch – is The Killing of A Sacred Deer, the funny, bleak and strange follow-up to The
Lobster from Yorgos Lanthimos. Colin Farrell is a heart surgeon who has an odd relationship with a young guy played by Barry Keoghan who threatens to enact a terrible revenge on Farrell’s family unless Farrell makes an impossible choice. Sacred Deer is allegorical and ambiguous (do I know exactly what happened at the end? I do not), it’s disturbing and dark but it’s also Beckettian and absurd. It also reminded me of Michael Haneke’s
Hidden, a film about casual lies leading to unnecessary brutality. Fear not, no Sacred Deer were harmed in the making of this film.
LADIES WHO LYNCH
Two more arthouse delights that venture into horror territory – both which should appeal to fans of Julia Ducournau’s coming-of-age cannibal story Raw, and explore themes of the power of young women. Thelma sees the sexual awakening at university of a girl brought up in a strictly religious household – her passion for another female student unleashes powers in her that she struggles to control. It’s a supernatural story of the dangerous nature of being able to have everything you want, when you’re not even always sure what that is. Then there’s Thoroughbreds, the final movie that Anton Yelchin ever made (lending an extra level of pathos). This stars Olivia Cooke as a young woman who euthanised her own horse and claims to be a sociopath who bonds with the very wealthy woman she’s been hired to tutor (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) – both are electric and dangerous in a story that turns murderous. Think Heavenly Creatures via Les
Diaboliques with a big dollop of dark humour.
YEAR OF THE CLOWN
Happy Death Day opened in October to excellent box office returns, with Jigsaw imminent (at the time of writing) and poised to do well. Forbes is reporting that 2017 is on track to be the best year in horror in terms of box office since 1999, the year when cult horror films The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth
Sense were released. Forbes reckons this could be because everything in the world is terrible and people need horror as a form of catharsis (there was a bunch of bad stuff that happened between 1999 and 2002, including 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan), which is a very plausible theory.
I’d like to think, though, part of it is because this year the horror movies that have done well are actually good, with the top five earners being IT, Get Out, Split,
Annabelle: Creation and Alien: Covenant. Not a stinker among them. Bad horror does make money, it’s true – the first
Annabelle took $257 million worldwide – but it dents our trust. If I take my friends to the cinema to see a horror that blows, they won’t come with me next time, and slowly we descend back into a place where horror fans have to justify the value of their genre to unbelievers who’ve been burned by Wrong Turn 6. Give us quality and we’ll give you all our money.