Coherence (2013)

An evening with friends gets freaky when a comet crosses overhead, in 2013's Coherence, watched with Jesse tonight. I would term this a sci-fi thriller, rather than a horror film. Interesting, though not earth shattering. The characters also made a bunch of rash/ill-advised decisions, which always bugs me.* 😅 Noticing how many dinner-party-gone-wrong films there are, cf It's a Disaster (2012) and The Invitation (2019). Oh also, I've been watching Buffy on Monday nights with Megan, and it was super weird seeing grown-up Xander (Nicholas Brendan) in this film! 🤣

* Sometimes people say "that's just horror," but I think that's actually a hallmark of bad storytelling. People should not have to act irrationally or stupidly to advance the plot. In the best horror, the plot advances inexorably, like in a classical tragedy, due to what I think of as "the winnowing of possibilities." Every safe option becomes closed to you through the machinations of fate, and you are forced to make dangerous decisions, you don't just stumble into them through your own incompetence.

Why I Love Horror

I love horror for so many reasons, but one reason is because many horror stories are really hero stories -- faced with horrible challenges (like being stalked by a maniac killer, imprisoned, tortured, or deceived), the protagonist discovers reserves of strength and ingenuity they never knew they had. It's thrilling and satisfying in some deep, visceral way to see the powerless defeat the powerful. I think there is also a feminist case to be made for some films (altho the ubiquitous use of female bodies as props for rape, murder, and torture is more problematic than laudatory, but I'll save that rant for another day) -- seeing women conquer the evils of the world just feels good.

Horror Dreams

I dreamt I made an artsy double-feature film combo. One was called "Valentine's Daughters," and it was about badass demonic prostitutes who sucked the souls out of their clients, starring super babe Nicki Minaj, with an incredibly dramatic high ponytail that was like 5 feet long. The second was called "One Mortal," and it was a crazy samurai bloodbath. I wish I'd taken notes on these when I woke up... I remember being so excited. 

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Rosemary's Baby is the best horror movie of all time. It is the rare perfect movie. Mia Farrow is captivating. The pacing is brilliant. The aesthetic is compelling. The camerawork is striking. The movie itself is thrilling, and the ending is satisfying. But most of all, the story stays with you, because it taps into deeply felt horrors, which are emotional and cerebral and visceral - no cheap thrills here.

This film perfectly epitomizes (and was seminal in developing) two central horror tropes -- 

1) A person leading a normal life is exposed by chance to the dark, seedy underbelly of the world. Experiencing this new truth radically transforms the hero's view of society and of their place within it. As the hero probes deeper into this new, ugly truth of the world, they are inexorably dragged deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. If they conquer the dark forces and emerge successfully, they are forever altered.

~ This trope is profitably explored in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), for example.

2) Others refuse to validate the new truth the hero is experiencing, and the hero is forced to choose between denying the truth of their own experiences (and thus accepting that they have gone mad), or believing that everyone around them is out to get them, and is involved in some great conspiracy at the hero's expense. This tension fills the hero (and vicariously, the viewer) with terror and uncanny revulsion, at the loathsome prospects of insanity, or betrayal. The need to resolve this tension is what drives the hero deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. 

~ In this blog, I have used the tag "I know yall think I'm crazy but..." to identify films with this theme.

~ Hitchcock of course inspired the term "gaslighting" with his eponymous 1944 film.