A pair of links from Matt Zoller Seitz’s daily link round-up caught my eye today.
The first is a post by Drew Morton of the intriguingly titled group blog Dr. Mabuse’s Kaleido-Scope on “The State of the Horror Film in 2006.” Unfortunately, its coherence and insight can be best summed up by quoting one sentence: “Thanks to films like ‘The Descent’ and ’28 Days Later,’ I believe that over the course of the next year horror films will be coming into a renaissance not seen since the days of ‘Scream.'” Huh? The thrust of the pieces is that “recent” horror films have been adding elements of comedy or social criticism to further engage audiences–which is obviously something horror films have in fact been doing, well, forever (and moreover is giving a lot more poli-crit credit to the “When she gets her eyeball ripped out, that’s about Iraq! Yeah, that’s the ticket!” school of horror filmmaking than I’m willing to hand over). Still, it’s worth a read if you’re interested in how the genre looks to uninitiated types who nonetheless are up for thinking about how the genre works, which I’d imagine describes most professional critics and a goodly chunk of the academy.
More intriguing to me was a lengthy post from film studies god David Bordwell (he has a blog! how did I not know this?) on the self-conscious artifice of many recent film’s narratives, and the healthy role that genre–“science fiction, mystery, fantasy, horror, and comic-book movies…[and] indie cinema”–played in creating this state of affairs. I’ve always found it startling, if not depressing, how few fans of high-falutin’ art (not critics, but the kinds of people who read a lot and post on message boards and such) pick up on the ways that genre tropes frequently constitute violations of traditional formal narrative or visual structure. When a film stops in its tracks to watch a shape-shifting alien annihilate a pack of sled dogs, there’s something interesting going on there beyond the fact that a shape-shifting alien is annihilating a pack of sled dogs.