![]() ![]() ![]() Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s film is a kind of body-horror liberation story in which Hunter’s compulsion perversely awakens her to how unwanted the stifling life she has accepted actually is. And then she does the same with a thumbtack, and a battery, and more things that weren’t meant to be inside a person and that tear her up inside and on their way out. She holds up a marblelike holy Sacrament and then eats it. )Įverything goes quiet the first time Hunter (Haley Bennett), the meek housewife in Swallow, disturbs her immaculate universe. Director Remi Weekes makes capable use of our expectations about what can fester in the dark, drawing together a tale that blends the deeply felt with the starkly horrifying. The loss of their daughter hangs between the duo, infusing the story with both dread and longing. His House is ultimately a haunted-house tale, as the couple brings ghosts along with them that infest the government-subsidized house they’re able to get and are struggling to keep. The film centers on the couple Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) and Bol (Sope Dirisu), who make the treacherous journey from South Sudan to find a new life in an English town, meeting prejudice and sorrow along the way. His House is far from a perfect film, but it intrigues. But when awful things start happening to them, and they’re picked off in their individual squares onscreen, you become acutely aware of the physical distance between these characters and the degree to which they’re all actually alone. Its characters may feel like they’re hanging out together, and their gathering certainly counts enough to call up a malevolent entity. But the real secret to its success is the way it taps into the contradictions of online socialization. The film borrows freely from lo-fi predecessors like the Paranormal Activity films, The Blair Witch Project, and Unfriended while being sparing with its clever DIY effects. Host, which takes place on Zoom and which was directed remotely, is centered on a group of friends that accidentally summons a demon when they participate in a digital séance in an attempt to alleviate lockdown boredom. Rob Savage’s videoconference horror movie was entirely conceived of, shot, and released during the pandemic, and one of the reasons it’s so deliciously enjoyable is that it works within its own limitations. They explore everything from the pull of the ancestral to the slipperiness of identity to the rattling depths of seclusion, revealing just how haunting and delightful a scare can be, even in the worst of times. The films on this list - curated by Alison Willmore and Angelica Jade Bastién - represent ten of the best horror offerings of this surreal year, each, in their own ways, capable of captivating a distracted audience largely confined to their homes. Would horror movies have the same pull on our small screens, with the realities of quarantine not exactly out of frame? According to our critics, the answer is: Without a doubt. Horror fans, like the rest of cinephiles, were deprived of the ability to sit in a darkened, crowded theater and let a story envelop them. In the midst of a pandemic, movies have quietly premiered in a handful of open theaters, been rushed on demand, or, if they’re lucky, found footing on some streaming platform. What does it mean to choose fear in a year already dominated by it?įilm itself has also experienced a strange run. ![]() The category’s penchant for toying with societal taboos and visceral antagonisms might make it, for some, a strange one to explore in 2020, what with so many parts of the world still ravaged by the very real, panic-inducing effects of COVID-19: death and unprecedented isolation, among other things. Horror is a genre predicated on pushing the boundaries of one of the most essential and revealing of human emotions: fear. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Photos by IFC Midnight, Neon and Shudder, What does it mean to choose fear in a year already dominated by it? ![]()
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