In the absence of Content for the Content Mill I'm dredging up one of my blog post rants from the Medium era, of which I had a scant few. So what you're about to read is about a year old, but I was reminded of it because it's an ongoing complaint. I've edited it a little but it's otherwise unchanged. - June
 |
| god, this fucking bullshit movie pissed me off |
Have you ever seen the remake of
Suspiria? I’m a big fan of the original — it was bright, and colorful, and full of music, and quite intense and surreal; in short, the perfect late 1970s horror film. The sort of platonic ideal of the genre, if you will. The remake, meanwhile, was none of that, and as it careened towards its long-overdue finale I tried to figure out what about the film was bothering me. As I sat through the credits, I figured it out: it was basically an Ari Aster film without Ari Aster, and much like his actual films I initially felt really ambivalent about it. Ultimately, the strongest feeling I had watching it was a cementing of my dislike of “elevated horror,” both as a label and as a movement, and my finally being able to put to words what it is, exactly, that I can’t stand about it: it’s basically a rebranding of arthouse horror cinema, but slathered in money and metaphor to hide the fact that most of these movies aren’t meaningfully “smarter” than other horror movies. Finally, I came around to the inevitable conclusion: I fucking hated
Suspiria (2018) and everything it stood for.
