The evenings darken, fog floats through the streets and people duck into theircollars on their way to movie theater or home cinema. With the horror in theair leading up to Halloween, many people feel like horrifying. There’s alreadya new movie in the Halloween franchise (The last one! Now for real!) and therest of the month there will be a lot of horror to follow. It is, asGeneration Z’ers say on social media: spooky season.
As almost always during this period, news reports appear about a horrorproduction that is so intense that visitors pass out or leave the room puking.
This year has Terrific 2 the honour, an American slasher film about ademonic clown, called Art the Clown, who causes massacres on Halloween. Googlethe title and the articles pile up. The observation: because of the brutalchopping and sawing in the film, the ambulances should be ready to receivevisitors at the exit. Well, such stories are mostly smart PR, free advertisingfor movies that usually don’t have the biggest marketing budgets. It helpedthe horror classic The Exorcist fifty years ago. ‘They wait hours to beshocked’ headlined the New York Times above a piece in which reporter JudyKlemesrud stands in a cinema queue and examines why the film is such asensation.
After the performance she was surprised that almost everyone came outpositively. The public had a lot of fun with the spinning head of thepossessed Linda Blair. It’s not much different with the latest killer clown.I’m curious why exactly Terrific 2 has floated to the top. Still, I’llalmost certainly skip it once it reaches the Netherlands (there is no releasedate for the Netherlands at the moment). According to American reviewers, thefainting factor is not that bad, but you have to have something with spicy’gore’ to enjoy it. No one will ever mistake me for a horror hero, so it endsthere.
Nevertheless, thanks to Wikipedia, curiosity can still be nurtured a bit. Thatway you can still talk a little bit if necessary. And quite a lot of people dothat: journalist Rob Harvilla, also too afraid of cinematic misery, has evenmade reviews of Wikipedia pages about horror films.
Fine for pulp, but there are still artistically high-quality films that youreally want to experience. The internet offers help there too. Reviews canalready help. However, if you want even more certainty, you can go to the siteof slate to go. Popular films that contain horror elements are analyzedthere through all kinds of tables.
You can see how a particular movie scores on such factors as ‘spookiness’ and’gore’. That last category goes from Singin ‘ in the Rain (no horrificthings) to saw (lots of horrible things). So this summer I could see that_nope_ the latest film by modern master Jordan Peele, would not be too bad.
You give up the element of surprise a bit, but in this way you enter the rooma little more relaxed as a fearful hare.