Fright flicks tap into anxieties of our times

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This article was published 29/10/2022 (1433 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here’s the thing about horror movies. Most of us aren’t really frightened of, say, vampires — at least not in the sense that we worry about running into them in our everyday lives.

We’re scared of what vampires might represent, which can vary with the anxieties of their time. Over the last century, those undead bloodsuckers have stood in for a host of social fears: of outsiders, disease, contagion, addiction, technology, even boredom.

So, what are we scared of in 2022? These are fraught times, and it’s not surprising that this year’s horror flicks have been packed with extreme violence, mutilation, monsters and supernatural threat. Still, many of them start off with the things that really get to us — like too-perfect social media influencers and Airbnb reservations gone terribly wrong.

SOCIAL MEDIA: This year, we seem to be beset by internet anxieties, a subgenre that often overlaps with another perennial horror trigger — “the youth of today.” In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun follows a girl who gets caught up in “The World’s Fair Challenge,” an online horror game where participants perform a series of challenges and share the results. The real terrors here, though, are loneliness, alienation and what a vulnerable youngster will do to feel part of an online community.

 

In Sissy, from Australian filmmakers Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, the title character is a popular mental health influencer who runs into a girlhood friend and ends up attending her bachelorette weekend. Sissy’s serene online persona — all wellness mantras and life-coaching platitudes — is soon threatened by bloody chaos, as the interpersonal dynamics get nasty and the backstabbing becomes literal.

 

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is a gen-Z horror-comedy in which some hot, young, rich attention-economy stars get stuck at an isolated house party during a blackout. Over the course of a night, they get picked off one by one, the carnage lit only by the blue glow of their phones. Basically Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for the TikTok crowd, the film’s final spoof of social media is a killer joke.

 

In Hatching, a Finnish body horror flick from Hanna Bergholm, a little girl desperately seeks the love and approval of her image-obsessed mother, a lifestyle influencer whose obnoxiously titled vlog “Lovely Everyday Life” offers a carefully framed peek into their hyper-curated family life. When the girl brings home a mysterious egg, this perfect façade of floral wallpaper and rose gold accents will be menaced by a very ugly, very uncontrollable monster.

 

TRAVEL GLITCHES: Travel can be stressful, and the system where strangers rent the homes of other strangers doesn’t always help. Perhaps inspired by online threads devoted to real-life Airbnb-from-hell experiences — from weird smells to obscure stains on the sheets to bizarrely strict house rules — there’s been a recent uptick in vacation-rental horror. With films like The Rental, Superhost and You Should Have Left, this subgenre is so unsettling it might have been underwritten by the hotel industry.

Things get wild with this year’s entry, Barbarian, when two strangers get double-booked into the same Detroit house, and what starts off as an awkward interpersonal encounter becomes a descent into all kinds of buried secrets and grotesque gore.

 

In Speak No Evil, from brothers Christian and Mads Tafdrup, two families meet briefly while vacationing under the Tuscan sun. Some time later, the Dutch couple invites the Danish couple for a weekend visit at their remote rural home. Weird boundaries and escalating manipulations collide with middle-class politeness, before devolving into an absolutely savage ending.

 

THE PATRIARCHY: In Resurrection, Rebecca Hall, a single mother and successful executive, runs into an abusive man from her past (Tim Roth), and a toxic dynamic threatens to repeat itself as her psychological torment rises to the surface.

 

And it’s all right there in the title in Alex Garland’s Men, a strange little folk horror flick. Jessie Buckley, trying to recover from the death of her husband, retreats to a picturesque manor house in the English countryside (yet another online rental gone haywire!), where she is bothered by a series of menacing men. In a truly surreal touch, they are all played — from an insinuating vicar to a skeptical police officer to a sneering small boy — by Rory Kinnear, an actor who can be sinister even when there’s only one of him.

 

(Just a note: These spooky season flicks are not for everyone. You’ll want to check them out and read some reviews before renting — just like you would with an Airbnb!)

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca