All tagged meta-horror
Spontaneous combines gallows humor and whiplashing tonal shifts to pile on emotional intensity, capturing two-plus decades of ongoing trauma on two generations of children the United States has failed to protect from mass shootings due to its own systemic incompetence and lack of political will. The film leaves you numb, reflecting the effect of personal and national trauma, as well as the necessity of overcoming it.
Craig Gillespie’s 2011 remake of Tom Holland’s 1985 meta-horror classic streamline's characters, cuts out the creepy sexualized treatment of Amy, and favors a more action-oriented approach over Holland’s self-aware campiness and references to horror movies of yore. But in buffing out the original’s messy strangeness, the remake loses some of the magic that made the original a beloved gem.
Rallying against many clichés that seemed built into the slasher genre at the time of its making, Cabin in the Woods was not only a rebuke of what the horror genre had become, but also a celebration of what it could be.
More than a quippy teen slasher brimming with meta-humor, Cabin is a teen slasher about making teen slashers. Leaning into filmmaking allegory and industry clichés, the film argues that the recycling of old ideas from the masters was unsustainable, that we needed to burn down the work of the Ancient Ones so that something new could rise from the ashes.
Let’s talk about the 1996 meta-horror mega-hit film Scream and how it’s meaning has changed post #metoo, now offering a critique of domineering misogyny and gaslighting, reflected in the film’s use of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ creepy, mysterious, broody, and catchy-as-hell “Red Right Hand.”
