The bogeymen follow each other and are not alike, while fear is always new when you feel it. We underestimate this primal feeling, which first serves to save our lives, but which can also cause us to do stupid things – buy an overpriced house because the real estate market is on fire or undergo an operation. botched for fear of aging, for example.
However, it can make damn good horror movies. Each era has its monstrous figures and its Seven Hours men. Depending on the fashion, it was the vampire, the werewolf, the serial killer or the zombie who were popular. In horror there are waves and hollows; the 1960s and 1970s will have been inspired by the war in Vietnam and the conflict between deep America and urban America; in the 1990s, the public fell in love with psychopaths a la Hannibal Lecter and the fashion was for the psychological thriller, while the supernatural was despised; finally, the zombie made a strong comeback in the 2000s (enough for us to start seriously getting bored) while the torture porn (as in hostel) emerged in the wake of the war in Iraq.
Fear is a quest for authenticity, but also for aesthetics. What are we afraid of today and in what form does it present itself? Unsurprisingly, technologies have opened up new paths of horror.
Ghosts no longer lurk in old castles, but in the pristine kitchens of suburban homes with surveillance cameras. Franchise Paranormal Activity gave several films where we have static shots of very ordinary rooms, and the thrill is provided when an object moves by itself in a corner. My boyfriend loves it, he believes that these films offer a “dramaturgy of objects”, as Ionesco said.
There is also what is known in English as “found footage”, the most famous of course being The Blair Witch Project, in the late 1990s. As cameras have evolved, it’s no longer old Super 8 film stock that serves as an archive: young people love the weird pixel of video tapes. Remember that these images are for today’s generation the visual equivalent of 1940s films for teenagers of the 1980s!
Murder live in a live chat FaceTimetext messages from dead people, videos snuff ; the possibilities of frights are numerous while playing with our gadgets. Moreover, on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, short horror videos are extremely popular, sometimes presented as real “evidence” of paranormal phenomena, sometimes downright as works of art lasting a few seconds. I don’t advise you to watch too much before going to bed, it’s enough to have nightmares all night long.
One of the most fascinating phenomena in recent years is that of “liminal spaces”, a bit difficult to describe. These are places deserted by the crowd, always a bit gloomy, almost post-romantic, which inspire both anguish and nostalgia.
Very popular with fans of recent ruins, like those who will film the economic disaster of Detroit – as we can see it in all its sadness in the excellent ItFollows – or abandoned malls. As if it gave a taste of what our cities could look like after the Apocalypse. Thanks to this tendency, I came to understand the strangeness felt in my childhood when I played in the remnants of Expo 67.
On this subject, we reached a peak last year with the film skinamarink by Canadian director Kyle Edward Ball, in which, for two hours, we see walls and floors in a house from the point of view of two children who have woken up in the middle of the night and are looking for their missing parents, while the windows and the doors disappear. A small cult is developing around this unclassifiable film, which is more experimental cinema than horror, which is not to displease Mitch Davis, proud that skinamarink was presented as a world premiere at the last Fantasia festival, of which he is the artistic director. “I’m very happy to see how much this film resonates with a younger audience that isn’t traditionally drawn to experimental cinema,” he tells me.
There is no better specialist than Mitch Davis to observe new trends in horror. “I feel that liminal spaces are the most pronounced we see, followed very closely by films about gaslighting, in which a character or the audience is made to doubt what he sees and hears, as in Resurrection, Speak No Evil, Don’t Worry Darling, Watcherand somehow Barbarian. »
Mitch Davis notes that younger audiences particularly connect with existential fear. “Understandably, with concerns about environmental collapse and the general sense of political and social divisions that threaten day-to-day stability. Also, that sense of helplessness that so many young people feel when they see government inaction on climate change and, in the United States, gun control. And now there is also the potential to lose the autonomy of one’s body to religious extremists in positions of power. »
With this widespread fear that infects everyone and new bogeymen emerging from the darkness, we can say that horror cinema still has a very bright future ahead of it.