HIGH-MINDEDNESS AND LOWBROW PLEASURES IN MODERN HORROR

by David Guglielmo

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA uses B-movie aesthetics to flex its high-mindedness, whereas RESIDENT EVIL has no intellectual ambition to speak of. You might come away wishing they could borrow from one another: MIASMA could use some of EVIL’s set pieces and suspense, of which it has none without a postmodern wink, while Cregger, the director of EVIL, could benefit from some of the thematic filmmaking on display in MIASMA.

MIASMA’s ambitions are more personal, even autobiographical. The entire plot is a fabrication inside the mind of its protagonist, allowing Schoenbrun to explore themes of gender, sexual development, and our relationship with media for the third time in a trilogy of auteurist horror movies, albeit tonally divergent ones (WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR and I SAW THE TV GLOW). The same cannot be said of Cregger, whose BARBARIAN and WEAPONS come off as visceral reactions to the dour horror films of the last ten years, mainly associated with A24, which fixate on trauma and metaphor. He takes his films in the direction of a big-budget Full Moon or Troma movie—a welcome splash of black and gross-out humor.

WEAPONS starts as if it could be an A24 movie, then pulls the rug out from under you with a prankster’s glee that cleverly subverts but ultimately lessens the power of its first half. Still, it has more idiosyncrasy than EVIL does, which is simply a roller-coaster ride where the person next to you has thrown up. It’s AFTER HOURS meets SLITHER—amusing, though it never reaches the heights of our great horror comedies because it doesn’t have the cleverness of SHAUN OF THE DEAD or the slapstick brilliance of EVIL DEAD II. What it knows how to do is build suspense and then release it.

The comedy relies on what feels like improvisations from its lead, reacting less like a movie character and more like a video game player suddenly dropped into this world for the first time. In the first act, this works, but eventually even a novice would get the hang of what’s going on and develop some smarts, or at least some desensitization.

While MIASMA treats mythology as spoof, EVIL eschews it completely, making this both a reboot and a continuation of the unrelated films by treating the audience as though we’ve all been here before and aren’t going to want any more explanations for why these things are happening. EVIL never pauses and never feels the need to justify its own existence.

While both are visually excitable films, only one director is really trying to show us imagery we haven’t seen before, and that’s Schoenbrun. When MIASMA is doing that, it’s doing something. When the movie pauses to become a meditative essay, it trades its emotion for something more cerebral and potentially alienating. The pendulum is swinging in the horror genre, and maybe soon it will land.

David Guglielmo is a casting director, filmmaker, and lifelong student of film. He writes about films because he loves them.