Casual cruelty and playful perversion make up the slow-burning scares of writer-director Eskil Vogt’s sophomore feature, The Innocents (De uskyldige), whose child characters convey a creepy conception of ethical sentiment. Privileged protagonist Ida (excellent as her young co-stars: Rakel Lenora Fløttum) vents her frustration about her parents’ move to a bare concrete complex by torturing her autistic sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) and engaging in animal abuse. Rapidly escalating, the agony the little girl and her new friend Ben (Sam Ashraf) inflict first upon insects and invertebrates, then a trustful cat, unmasks the inhumane impulses central to the menacing morality lesson offered up by this film.
There is no doubt that the writings of H. P. Lovecraft have enjoyed a significant renaissance of late. In both literary academia and mainstream culture, his idiosyncratic oeuvre has now been properly recognised for codifying and popularising a unique form of horror commonly known as ‘The Weird’. In an essay written by Lovecraft himself, aptly titled ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, he deftly outlines the specifics of this distinct sub-genre, explaining how his own particular brand of horror stories evoke a disturbing and fearful sense of the unknown by violently exposing his characters to an insidious alterity that exists beyond the bounds of human reason and perception.
In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein describes the process of “disaster capitalism.” To simplify greatly, she notes that the neoliberal free market has evolved to take advantage of national crises and seemingly “natural” disasters, using these moments of collective distraction and general freak-out to stealthily implement intensifying exploitative policies and social arrangements. The COVID pandemic has set off another round of this predation, forcing us to turn our homes into offices, blend our domestic work with paid labor, pay for our own office supplies, and manage the psychological fallout that results from these changes. Meanwhile, we are advised to concentrate on the bright side of this brave new world – “More time with your loved ones!” “You can wear pajamas to work!” – while ignoring the dangers and downsides, “More time to get isolated and abused by domestic partners!” “More time to never be done with work!” For those of us who see the cup as half empty, we can find an avenging spirit in the protagonist of the only film directed by famed photographer Cindy Sherman, Office Killer, a horror film made in 1997 but still relevant today.
Spoilers follow! Read more
Alma Katsu, author of historical horror novels like The Hunger (2018) and The Deep (2020), returns to the genre in her latest The Fervor (releasing on April 26, 2022). Like her other novels, The Fervor centers on a main historical event, playing with the timeline and details ever so much. This time, readers are placed in 1940s America during Japanese internment, a time when American exceptionalism, isolationism, and, of course, xenophobia ran rampant. The links to our current cultural moment are pretty plain on the page. Like us, the characters are wrestling with a strange communicable illness thought to originate from Asia, and they witness a marked increase in the attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in response. Unlike Covid-19 and the increased violence against AAPI people in the States and around the world, the sickness, “The Fervor,” is one part Japanese mythos and another part experimental bioweapon.
*The following article contains massive spoilers for Scream (2022)*
Here’s a review without spoilers if you’re interested!