Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

This past week has seen the rollout of the thirteenth edition of Reverse Shot’s excellent Halloween series, “A Few Great Pumpkins.” Selections this year range from Walter Forde’s The Ghost Train from 1941 (“terrifying, very much despite itself”) to a 1960 short by Shirley Clarke to Karyn Kusama’s “sinister, rattling” The Invitation (2015), which “gets at the tenor of contemporary American life better than any other recent horror film.”

And there have been plenty of contenders. Horror has been on the rise over the past several years now, and the hosts of the podcast TIFF Long Take discuss the genre’s “ever-increasing legitimacy” with Faculty of Horror podcast cohost Alexandra West. “Thanks in part to the overwhelming critical praise for films like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Robert Eggers’s The Witch, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out,” writes the TIFF Review in its introduction to the episode, “the perception of horror has changed over the last decade, from a beloved but relatively niche genre to one that cinephiles feel they should pay attention to.”

The industry loves horror, too, of course. David Gordon Green’s Halloween has topped the box office for two weekends in a row now. As for the other horror movie of the moment, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, the Guardian’s Guy Lodge suggests that it “looks set to join a run of recent art-horror experiments that have been major events on the festival circuit, attracting a fierce if not unanimous critical following in the process, only to struggle, once unleashed into the real world, to find much of an audience beyond that.” That said, he likes it. “In a genre overrun with workmanlike-or-worse remakes, revivals, reboots and retcons of classic horror properties,” writes Lodge, “Guadagnino’s slow-and-loose spin on Argento’s original comes about as close as it can to being an original itself.”

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, though, does not like it. He deems it “sordid, flimsy Holocaust kitsch, fanatical chic, with all the actual political substance of a designer Che T-shirt.” Whatever you think of the 2018 version, Rolling Stone’s David Fear urges us to revisit Dario Argento’s 1977 original, “a sacred text of Italian horror, the sort of grandiloquent Grand Guignol gorefest that inspires both hushed whispers and earsplitting screams . . . There may be pound-for-pound scarier movies, though this supernatural tale makes for a strong Top Ten contender.”

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