Blogs Against Humanity - Adventures in Sympathetic Misanthropy

Its a rare thing for a film to affect me on a very deep level, to touch something almost primal and leave me effected by its resonance in its wake. I can think of only a handful of films that fit that description. SCANNERS cemented my adoration of horror as a genre. I'd always greatly enjoyed horror growing up, but this film led me truly fall in love with horror. It led me to embrace the fear and the artistry of the medium, and I can honestly say that it had a huge impact on my life. THREADS took the sum-total of my long-simmering cold-war terror in the face of possible nuclear annihilation, distilled it down into a concentrated dose, and then forced it down my throat. Bleak, unrelenting, cruel, hopeless, and immersive, this film became my inoculation against that fear, a fear which has never died. And every few years, I put on THREADS, and take another dose, shake myself out of the world it creates and then destroys, and go on with my life. THE CROW affected me largely because ...

Man, where to start. One of the most highly-rated and most talked about horror-films of 2018, HEREDITARY features what ends up being the complete and utter disintegration of a family that is already hanging on more-or-less by its emotional fingernails. And, in the process, first-time director Ari Aster knocks it out of the fucking park with his first at-bat. The film features the Graham Family, who is dealing with the passing of grandmother Ellen, and the resulting emotional fallout. Ellen was a mercurial, difficult woman, who has been living with her daughter's family for the past several years as her condition had deteriorated. Daughter Annie (played by the absolutely magnificent Toni Collette), her children Charlie, and Peter, and her husband, Steve, all deal with this in various ways. Steve takes care of the financial aspects, while Annie comes to terms with her deeply complicated feelings about her mother. 13-year old Charlie seems somewhat disconnected from the events and ex...