![]() The filmmakers understand that Jordan is a tormented schmuck who, with the right luck, could be allowed to turn into the monster of his dreams. It’s as if Jordan is trying to teach himself how to behave as Scott Rudin, while Jaclyn is learning the rules of the survivor who flourishes (we feel her yearning for power as viscerally as his). The film doesn’t play these moments for easy pathos, instead homing in on how each character is conditioning themselves, and one another, to play preordained roles. It’s easy to feel virtuous when decrying the crimes perpetuated by Harvey Weinstein, but what of the casual ways we manipulate and exploit one another daily? The film’s lynchpin is a series of scenes between Jordan (Cummings) and Jaclyn (Jaquelin Doke), a young assistant whom Jordan utilizes as a punching bag, a foil for his roiling frustrations. It’s also one that’s governed by a knowing complicity with a devil. Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s The Beta Test is a livewire thriller-slash-parable, dashed with audacious elements of farce, about how a man rechannels his longings. It’s the stuff of primordial nightmare, mapping the infinite reaches of human anxiety-about everything from sexuality to technology-into two agonizing hours. It just happens to be one of the most artful, flawlessly executed examples of that type, the rationed-out shocks underscored by groundbreaking creature effects, jarring sound design, and the talents of a magnificent ensemble. Giger’s visual rendering of psychosexual horror and biomechanical hellscapes, not to mention the unusual foregrounding of working-class and female characters, Alien is still-at its core-a prototypical haunted-house picture. Steven ScaifeĪ film whose shadow looms darkly over subsequent decades of horror and sci-fi, Ridley Scott’s Alien is a master class in the evocation of escalating dread. The film is neither an explicit condemnation or celebration of earnest belief, but rather a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel. As such, Agnes files religion alongside other power structures that can provide comfort and stability but also create space for abuse of the power dynamic. Throughout this extensive stretch of the film, Reece’s script homes in on Mary’s (Molly Quinn) search for something new to be devoted to and live by, which she finds briefly in the company of a stand-up comedian (Sean Gunn) who was once a lover and teacher to Agnes. Midway through, though, the film abandons its exorcism conceit and switches to another nun’s perspective some time after she leaves the convent. At the start of the film, the eponymous nun (Hayley McFarland) is seen having a profane and apparently telekinetic outburst over dinner with her fellow sisters, after which two priests are dispatched to perform an exorcism on her. The setup of writer-director Mickey Reece’s Agnes sounds like the typical starting point for a gauntlet of spiritual horror. ![]() And some of our favorites are currently streaming on Hulu. ![]() For every eviscerated remake or toothless throwback, there’s a startlingly fresh take on the genre’s most time-honored tropes for every milquetoast PG-13 compromise, there’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners attempt to push the envelope on what we can honestly say about ourselves. They are, in what amounts to a particularly delicious irony, a “safe space” in which we can explore these otherwise unfathomable facets of our true selves, while yet consoling ourselves with the knowledge that “it’s only a movie.”Īt the same time, the genre manages to find fresh and powerful metaphors for where we’re at as a society and how we endure fractious, fearful times. Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors and incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. Horror films remain perennially popular, despite periodic (and always exaggerated) rumors of their demise, even in the face of steadily declining ticket sales and desperately shifting models of distribution. Through the decades-and subsequent crazes for color and sound, stereoscopy and anamorphosis-since that train threatened to barrel into the front row, there’s never been a time when audiences didn’t clamor for the palpating fingers of fear. Ever since audiences ran screaming from the premiere of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 short black-and-white silent documentary Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the histories of filmgoing and horror have been inextricably intertwined. ![]()
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