But go back and watch the original. Watch it at night. Alone. With the lights off.
And then tell me with a straight face it didn't get under your skin.
I don't suppose I have a lot to say about this film, other than that it just works. It's smart and atmospheric, sports some really great visuals, and has an almost arthouse sensibility to the way it unfolds its narrative.
It's also really scary.
Scary in a brooding, creak-of-the-floorboards-in-the-night sort of way.
Scary (when it needs to be) in a HOLY-FUCKING-SHIT-DID-YOU-SEE-THAT!!!! sort of way.
It features one of my favorite character actors, Xander Berkely, playing a classic Xander Berkely shithead.
It has a score by Philip Glass that pretty much blows every other horror-movie score since "Halloween" right out of the water.
It has a kid in it whose real name is, I shit you not, DeJuan Guy.
It's also the rare studio horror movie that has a few things to say — about race and class, about the insular nature of academia, and about modern folk mythology.
And it all comes together in this almost perfect little package of a really spooky little film. This movie should have been a gamechanger for 1990s horror. Unfortunately, we went down the meta-"Scream"-irony-for-the-sake-of-nothing path instead and somehow found ourselves lost in the Death Valley of torture porn a few years later. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment