See the full list here.
As I wrote in 2019, It Follows dances lightly along a tightrope stretched tautly between allegory and contextless fright factory. It’s a masterclass in the social commentary of films by auteurs like John Carpenter, where the story itself is self-contained, following its own nooselike logic, but which suggests—incisively—so much about the culture from which it arises. Mitchell has a genuine vision here that distills and remixes the inexorable tension of stories involving demon possessions or ghost hauntings combined with the bleakness of the great slashers. Along the way, he engages adroitly with the anxieties of teen sexuality and figuring out one’s place in a dark, cruel world. It feels like a world unto itself, which means, of course, that it is only a dark mirror to our own fallen cosmos.
Honorable Mention: Midsommar (d. Ari Aster, 2017)
On first impression, Aster’s Hereditary is definitely the attention-getter, and the length of Midsommar is perhaps a bit offputting. But man, has it stuck with me. Entire swaths of this film are unaccountably burned into my memory. Even if Aster is lifting chunks of his film wholesale from The Wicker Man and other folk horror, he’s personalizing it and investing it with the sublime. This film is a real achievement, and if it’s a down payment on future greatness, then — wow.
Categorical Reflections
In the last several years, it feels like a lot of horror has really leaned into the literalizing grief with its images and protagonists (or antagonists, or both). Not that horror hasn’t done this for a long time already — Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting springs to mind, which is based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel. Ghost stories in particular have always rung with resonant sorrow across world cultures. Lately, though, it seems like when filmmakers want to do gentrified horror, they use it as a vehicle to work through grief. Everything from The Babadook to The Blackcoat’s Daughter pays tribute to grief, and Aster has made two films back to back that wallow in exorbitant grieving, and grief lurks in the background of Maika Monroe’s character in It Follows. One of the things I liked most about It Follows is that it bucks the therapeutic bent of so many other lauded horror hits of the last decade. But the same therapeutic bent is also what anchors the operatic grandiosity of Aster’s vision. In any event, it feels like horror is increasingly the place where our pop culture goes to mourn, and I find that to be a fascinating development.☕️
Catecinem 