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I had an immensely fun chat with New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri about Ron Howard, whom he talked to for an epic 7,000-word interview this week. (We also got into the weeds about the history of frame rates, which is another immensely fun topic if you’re kind of a nerd, like I am.) Listen to the episode here! Share it with a friend! Leave a comment about YOUR favorite Ron Howard movie. (I know, I know: It’s Hillbilly Elegy. Kidding! And yes, we did discuss THAT one.)
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Horror is the most overintellectualized genre in filmmaking.
This is partly a coping mechanism, an effort to ward off accusations that the genre is fundamentally unserious or gauche. And there have, undoubtedly, been politically minded horror directors over the years, with auteurs like George Romero infusing anger about Vietnam into The Crazies or John Carpenter crafting an anti-Reaganomics parable with They Live.
Sometimes this got stretched a bit (see: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Vietnam War metaphor), but in ways that were at least debatable. Then, in the wake of Massacre and Halloween, came the slashers, the endless parade of movies about promiscuous, drug-addled teenagers meeting grisly demises at the hands of Michael, Jason, and Freddy (and more!) before a final, virginal girl saved herself. While normie audiences loved them (at least, enough to turn what we might call Friday’s Nightmare on Halloween Street into an inescapable maxiseries in the 1980s and 1990s), academically minded critics derided them as reactionary Reagan-era amusements. Meanwhile, rape-revenge pictures like The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave represented the misogynistic spirit at the heart of the American experiment, etc.
Horror got meta for a while during the postmodernist boom with the Scream series and Cabin in the Woods, and grotesque for a while with the torture porn subgenre (think Saw’s sequels, Hostel etc.) in response to 9/11. Then came the well-deserved critical and commercial success of Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017), which crystallized what I sometimes think of as the Op-Ed era¹ of horror films: movies intended to have a very precise ideological or political read because they were making a point. Peele’s film, for instance, is, a treatise against cultural appropriation. Or take 2020’s remake of The Invisible Man, a movie about domestic abuse. The remake of Candyman is about the evils of gentrification; The Babadook, an early ancestor of the subgenre, is about the horrors of postpartum depression; Antebellum suggested that modern America is just as bad as the prewar South; and Blink Twice is about the horrors of #MeToo.
Again, some of these movies are great: The clockwork precision of Get Out is a real feat, even if I prefer the messier dream logic of Peele’s economic-inequality metaphor, Us. But the directness of the metaphor and the exchange of text for subtext often neuters the terror—it becomes the horror equivalent of clapter—while also rooting it in a specific period in a way that renders it instantly out of date. The Black Christmas remake, for instance, was hilariously dated even when it hit theaters in 2019, what with its digressions about “not all men” and broadsides against Camille Paglia. It’s a movie that will only really be legible to someone who spent a lot of time on Twitter between 2015 and 2019 or so, and even then only barely.
This is one reason why Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a darkly comic horror movie about the disappearance of an entire class of kids and the ways the townspeople dealt with that tragedy, is such a refreshing change of pace. We discussed it on Across the Movie Aisle this week (link below!), but one of its real pleasures is the slipperiness of the metaphor, the way in which the film doesn’t insist on any one reading. Is it a metaphor for school shootings, as many defenders have vociferously insisted since before the film was even released? A broader statement on the failure of older generations to care for those who came after? A secret pandemic movie? A movie about outsiders infiltrating your communities and poisoning them? Yes, no, sure . . . why not? Make your case, hash it out.
“I am very done with horror as some sort of didactic, you know, tool. Like, I don’t need to go see a horror movie and feel like, well, I didn’t learn a lesson, so it can’t be good,” Cregger recently said on the New Flesh podcast, noting that the film was solely intended as a manifestation of his grief at having suddenly lost a dear friend. “As long as people are having a blast and t