Horror films have really been going through quite the renaissance since the slump that it hit in the 90s with self-aware rip-offs of Scream like I Know What You Did Last Summer and other examples of meta-horror being too self-righteous.
After that mess, we had the thoroughly mean-spirited era of horror that happened in the early 2000s with films like Rob Zombie’s Halloween remakes being frequently cited as examples. With companies as exciting as A24 and Spectrevision, horror is finally getting back on it’s feet. With that though, comes subversions and deconstructions of classical tropes that we’ve seen in both classics and more modern horror movies.
The Prophet Of Doom In “Get Out” (2017)
“The prophet of doom” is a pretty old trope in horror movies, most notably popularized in Friday The 13th by the character “Crazy Ralph” who tells the campers headed to Crystal Lake to be careful since it has a “death curse.” It’s been used time and time again in tons of horror movies, but we really haven’t seen it in the form in which it appeared in Jordan Peele’s blockbuster hit Get Out.
The main character is being heavily affected by mostly casual instances of racism and nothing terribly overt, but enough to make anyone watching the film squirm. The character that we find out he’s supposed to be switching bodies with at the end of the film is the only one who seems mostly okay until we realize that his blindness is symbolic of “color-blindness”, a distinctly modern phenomenon that’s also racist, which insists that it doesn’t see color.
Grief in “Hereditary” (2018)
The main theme that’s explored in the film Hereditary by new filmmaker Ari Aster is grief. The film opens with a funeral scene, focused on the main family’s grandmother. From there, we have a few odd happenings and some strange omens, but things are going pretty okay for this family in their period of recovery.
Then, we have the family’s son Peter, being forced to take his younger sister Charlie to a party. While Peter is getting high, his sister eats some desserts with nuts in them, which she’s deathly allergic to. When they’re on their drive home, and Charlie has her head hanging out of the window to get some fresh air, she’s decapitated by a pole. What a coincidence this is for Annie, masterfully portrayed by Toni Collette. She essentially suffers from a nervous breakdown and resorts to anger and seances to cope with her grief, which wasn’t the right decision. Surprise! There’s a cult, all of your problems are happening thanks to a demon.
Everything Slasher In “Cabin In The Woods” (2011)
The Cabin In The Woods was done for a while before it came out, but they couldn’t find a distributor. Since this delay happened, people were kinda confused to see Thor himself in a slasher movie, but oh well. Other than the marketing for this film which really did it a disservice by making it look like a pretty bad B-movie targeted at teens seeking cheap thrills, this movie painstakingly goes to ridiculous measures to let you know how many slashers the writing team has seen.
This comes from a place of love and separates it from other meta-horror films that only serve to make fun of horror for being dumb while… um… making a horror movie. Not only does it subvert pretty much every trope that it can get its hands on, but the twist of all the slasher victims being sacrifices engineered by scientists for the sake of fending off some otherworldly Lovecraftian entity? Very nice.
Pagan Religion In “Midsommar” (2019)
Generally, because of the rise of Christianity as the dominant religion in the west, pagan religion is seen as something that humanity is better off having been abandoned. In Midsommar, however, it’s still kind of that. The main difference is that the female protagonist is pretty much entirely redeemed from a terrible relationship and the loss of her own family prior to her trip out to celebrate the titular Midsommar festival.
While it can be argued that the male she was in a relationship wasn’t deserving of the end of the film, it’s clear that some things aren’t meant for the modern west to understand. Whether the religion the cult in Midsommar practiced was on to something or it was just the engineering of a culture long forgotten is up to the viewer, but either way, it’s a really interesting twist on a Wicker Man-style film.
Feminine Redemption In “The Witch” (2015)
What is there to say about The Witch other than that it’s maybe perfect? Not only is it about the closest thing we can think of to a feminist horror film, but it has a great message. When Thomasin’s entire family has been destroyed almost entirely by the pride of her father, the only thing she really has left is to decide that she’d like to live deliciously.
Even though the whole fiasco was engineered by witches since Thomasin wasn’t one yet, she had no hand in the events that unfolded, meaning that she only ever did what is “wrong” for some people when she had no other options.
Whodunit? In “Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil” (2010)
While it’s very easy to screw up a horror-comedy by blurring the line between what it wants to be so much that it gets tonally inconsistent, that isn’t something this movie struggles with. The most interesting thing about the film is the mechanic of making the sweet, lovable hillbillies the film centers around seem like complete monsters to the antagonists of the film who keep killing themselves thanks to their own closed-minded ideas.
The real villain reveals himself to be who’s essentially the Fred Rogers of the Scooby-Doo gang of the film, making this a really interesting take on a mystery.
Idle Hands In “The Lighthouse” (2019)
One of the best horror films of the last decade, The Lighthouse, aside from its incredible performances by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, absolutely excels at doing a lot with a little in terms of setting. One of the main themes of the film is a gap between generations, which is incredibly timely, given the recent mantra “ok boomer”.
Wrapped into that theme is the fact that Pattinson’s character is constantly toiling for no reward, all while being taunted by the secrets held by the lamp at the top of the lighthouse. Perhaps the light holds everything all of his hard-work in the purgatory that is his time on the island has earned for him, which isn’t a good thing.
The Basement in “Parasite” (2019)
The basement has always been scary, even if you don’t live in one of the South Korean semi-basements that shows up as the home of the poor family featured in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Something about a dark, cold underground lends itself to secrets, to repression, and specifically in South Korea, class warfare.
Regardless of who’s watching the film, class warfare as a theme gets to you since with increasing income inequality comes either fear of the poor rising up, or existential dread at the hands of a life ruled by capital.
Aliens In “Under The Skin” (2013)
One of the most interesting things that happens in Jonathan Glazer’s film Under The Skin is a subversion of traditional gender roles which treats woman as the psychological other, which is a legitimately heavy topic for any film to contend with.
While this isn’t explicitly listed as a theme that the director meant to tackle, the fact that it features an extremely sexual alien that resembles a female consuming what appears to be a series of men who are only interested in her for sexual reasons really lends itself to being more from the female gaze than might be explicitly stated. This theme of “woman as object” really works when put into the alien context.
Every Vampire Ever In “What We Do In The Shadows” (2014)
What We Do In The Shadows by Taika Waititi is a masterful send-up of pretty much every type of vampire you can think of. There’s the classical Nosferatu vampire, disfigured and hideous, the sexy vampires of Interview With The Vampire and other such films, and the new-school Twilight vampire that’s also been pretty thoroughly mocked.
While it might seem at first like a movie like this could very easily become a really bad spoof, it’s an understated comedy and deadpan sense of humor combined with its mockumentary style really make for an enjoyable watch.
