Do you want to play a game?

I guarantee anyone who reads that phrase has at the very least heard it once. They might not know where it is from, but they’ve heard it. When a phrase from a movie can be repeated like that and the collective consciousness of all moviegoers has heard it, a classic is born.

But what if that classic also created a whole entire new genre?

In Saw’s case, that genre was torture porn. 

The article Torture Porn written by Isabel goes over this. Sure, there were earlier releases like Rob Zombie’s underrated classic House of 1000 Corpses, but Saw popularized the genre. I also thought it was interesting how the article notes that torture porn partially became popularized because it was well noted that during 2004 American troops were torturing their enemies in Iraq. In Saw’s case this is a total coincidence, especially because the film is primarily Australian, but considering how many people saw the film in America and paid for it, I guarantee some of that subconsciously helped people buy tickets.

Besides all the subtext, I just want to dive into how Saw is in some ways a call back to the horror franchises of old. There are ten Saw movies as of 2023, and the series is only 19 years old. That’s the same pace that Halloween and Friday The 13th followed. Not even A Nightmare on Elm Street was able to have the financial success that the Saw series did. Billy the Puppet and John Kramer are arguably the two most identifiable horror icons of the 21st century and also of all time. Saw X also set up a Saw 11, which means this franchise could perhaps have the most entries for any horror series, especially for how popular it is. Only time will tell, but as it stands, the first film is a seminal classic.

The Orphanage is, to put it simply, an outstanding film. I hadn’t seen it before and I did not know what to expect, and was left shocked by how much I loved the final product. I also found the theme of grief in the film to be incredibly well handled. It also related heavily to the Horror and Grief article we read earlier in the week written by Millar and Lee. 

Funnily enough, The Orphanage is explicitly mentioned in the article as being one of the most significant horror films in recent memory that dealt with grief, and I believe this was done incredibly well with the “antagonists.” While The Orphanage does have a traditional antagonist in the form of Tomas, he is not really evil. He was simply a little boy who wanted to play. His mother did evil things yet her reasoning was all because of grief. She was driven mad by it. Millar and Lee state that grief is interesting in horror films because the antagonists, or monsters, can capture the shocking feeling of losing a loved one and having one’s life turned upside down. The Orphanage does this and on top of it quite literally makes the antagonist of the film grief itself. Grief is what was the main opposing force against our protagonist. She could have survived and lived a fulfilling life with her husband if she was able to overcome it. Benigna wouldn’t have killed the other children if she wasn’t driven mad by grief. The ghosts in this film are all reflections of those we have lost and the importance of moving on and laying the dead to rest.

Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyma-

Nevermind that, can’t risk it. I enjoy the new Candyman, I think it is an incredibly well made, albeit flawed, film. It is also especially interesting when looking at the film in the lens of a post slasher, and the differences between that and a normal slasher film.

I believe this is most interestingly showcased through perspective. Hutchings’ chapter about slashers and post slashers showcases how Candyman breaks the slasher perspective rule. The chapter notes that slashers would typically showcase a significant amount of the film from the slashers perspective, at least in the opening scene. Yet Candyman is different, and it also shifts the perspective from the original film in an incredibly well done way. 

Candyman never follows the perspective of the killer, and in this film Candyman is seen about as often as the shark from Jaws is seen. This creates more of a folklore and fairytale feel instead of a typical slasher just being about a masked maniac. The new Candyman also reclaims the original story and puts a light on black people directly instead of a white woman looking inwards. The film forces us to reflect on police brutality and other racial issues, and this shift in perspective proves to be by far the most effective part of the film.

Train to Busan is an incredible film. A core theme of the movie is the idea of preserving communalism and helping out one another. There is also a large critique aimed at capitalism, especially since the ideals of capitalism essentially “created” the zombies in the film. 

Oddly enough, I found the film to be very comparable to a great deal of Martin Scorsese films, with some notable alterations. Scorsese’s films all showcase a criticism of corporate power, which is similar to the criticisms of capitalism and corporatism in Train to Busan. A good example would be Killers of the Flower Moon, his most recent masterpiece. In the film Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro’s characters quite literally kill people in order to get money. This is similar to the character Yon-suk in Train To Busan. He kills people and pushes them in front of the zombies in order to protect his own skin. Even when people do good things for him, he still uses that as an opportunity to catch them off guard and be safer himself. 

In Scorsese films and Train To Busan, characters who only fend for themselves tend to get what’s coming to them by the end of the movie. Henry Hill doesn’t stay a gangster on the streets. Almost everyone dies in The Departed. Train To Busan is no different. Yon-suk eventually does die and becomes an infected zombie. This was exactly what he feared most, what he was trying to prevent by any means necessary yet it still happened to him. It goes to showcase that the themes of individualism can be fairly universal across different companies and different demographics, and a scaling criticism of capitalism is usually successful.

Upon finishing The Descent, I found myself greatly appreciating how it handles a great deal of social anxieties. 

Firstly, the unknown. I found this aspect of the film particularly horrifying and relevant because the unknown is inherently the most frightening thing imaginable. Jaws is only scary because we do not know when the shark is going to show up and we cannot see it, if the shark was more visible than it really would not be that good. The creatures in the film are an undiscovered species, and nothing is known about them except that they must have evolved to survive in the cave. 

Another aspect is feminism and motherhood. Sarah loses her daughter at the beginning of the film yet she is still strong enough to decide to go on this adventure. However, she still frequently dreams about her daughter and even has an auditory hallucination at one point hearing her voice. This suggests that the monsters themselves could be hallucinations, and I believe this to be the case because of Juno. When she “accidentally” kills Sarah’s friend and then Sarah finds her later, the discrepancies just do not add up. Her friend should have died on impact and it seems to suggest all is not as it seems and Juno may have committed murder instead of manslaughter.

Oddly enough, I found some similarities to Fight Club. Now, this may sound incredibly far-fetched (cave monsters vs soap?) but the way the narrator in Fight Club hallucinates Tyler Durden is incredibly similar to the way Sarah may be hallucinating (if the film is a hallucination that is). The only difference is that Fight Club is much more explicit with its ideas of hallucinations, whereas it is entirely possible The Descent had no hallucinations from Sarah up until the very end with Juno in the car. Yet, I believe the film to be a gradual descent into madness which is why she starts to hallucinate far into the film, because she has already gone insane

I thought Dark Water was an incredibly well done and unique film. A particularly interesting aspect of the movie was how it handled motherhood and maternity. Yoshimi is a single mother who is trying to do her best despite all that is stacked together, and when her new apartment building starts having strange things occur, everyone watching in the audience expects the worst. We’ve all seen horror films, especially ones of the haunted house variety, and most don’t end well for our protagonists. 

However, something about Dark Water is different. Sure, the film ends in a very sad and depressing fashion, but it is a different kind of sadness than most horror movies I’ve seen that end badly for the protagonists. When looking at a film like Insidious and the shock ending there, the twist with the father becoming possessed makes the viewer feel scared and uneasy. With Dark Water, the viewer just feels sad, but much more in a melancholy way. Yoshimi sacrifices herself at the end of the film to ensure that her daughter can grow up and live a good life. She becomes a school teacher! Yet the sense of melancholic tragedy still remains. Her mother never got to raise her up until that point even though she loved her more than anything. I saw Dark Water as a great commentary and motherhood and the unsung heroic aspects of it. Yoshimi is not necessarily honored for her choice, but her daughter knows what she sacrificed and even though Yoshimi was not there for some formative years she was the reason that those got to occur. And her sacrifice also showcased motherhood because she was taking care of the young girl who tragically passed away. Even in death, Yoshimi is an incredible mother and radiates with matriarchal energy.

This weeks screening was A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and I found the film to be incredibly exciting and well done. It is a great role reversal of the girl being targeted in a film, especially a horror film. Now I am not saying a horror film cannot be feminist, but usually we see this with the “final girl” such as Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween films. However, the final girl trope has been criticized in more recent years. This is because there are some sexist undertones to the trope. The final girl must be innocent, she must not have been sexually promiscuous and she must not have done any drugs. Essentially, the final girl has to fit into a PG-13 (at worst) archetype.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is much more comparable to a film such as Jennifer’s Body. At first glance, these movies might not seem to have anything in common. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a foreign language drama whereas Jennifer’s Body seems like a fun casual popcorn flick, but there is something both incredibly interesting about these movies, and that is the fact that the monsters are women. Not only are they women, but Jennifer and the Girl both use their sexuality to their advantage. I found this to be incredibly unique and feminist about both of these films. In nearly every horror film, the “slutty” woman gets punished early on for her sins. The Girl watches for men who take advantage of women and their sexuality and she uses hers to wreak havoc on them. Jennifer does the same, the boys she targets even seem to be reflections of the misogynistic creators and viewers of horror films that create a negative idea of a woman’s sexuality. It is great that films like these are being made in the current day and are dismissing sexist notions that were previously pushed in films like this.