The 2024 Movie Monster State of the Union

As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to provide a sort of state of the union over the year. movie monsters– a quick analysis of what is always considered scary. However, on reflection, what was conceived as the 21st century bestiary began to seem less a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and more like the aisles of my local Walmart. As the old world dies and the new world struggles to be born, it seems that the monsters of 2024 may represent the same fears, but they have taken on a more mundane tone. Since I’m not sure what to do with this information, submitted for your approval is io9’s 2024 monster review.

The Familiar

In a year that saw the re-election of a former president to office, an ongoing war in the Middle East, the escalation of nuclear brinksmanship, and the return of bird flu, 2024 brought with it a sense of repetition. The feeling that we are going to double down on exactly what we tried before, only more, with a full trilogy of material in such a mind is bound to pay off like never before, right?

It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the year that was seen new variations A quiet place, aliens, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Godzilla, Hellboy, Salem’s Lot, The Crow, The Strangers– as well WitchboardThe likes of which we haven’t heard from since a direct-to-video sequel in 1995.

Currently, there seems to be no end in sight for the return of the recognizable IP of yesteryear, with new Saw, Conjuring, Insidious, Fear Street, I know what you did last summerand Final Destination films scheduled for release next year. Without talking 28 years laterAnother piece of nostalgia that boasts a trailer on track to become the most watched horror trailer of all time.

As we enter 2025, this “devil you know” attitude will extend to Universal, once again doubling down on its stable of classic monsters, trading the company’s previous attempt at a shared cinematic universe for tailor-made hires. Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy from no less than the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Leigh Whannell and Lee Cronin, respectively.

Today also sees the release of a new one NosferatuReplete with a marketing campaign hoping to make its cozy gothic trappings a new Christmas tradition. It is interesting then that the film audience largely rejected vampires, with an emphasis this vampire, in particular – the last few years with movies like Abigail, Renfield, and The Last Voyage of Demeter failure to make a major impact on culture or the box office.

The hallmarks of Dracula and/or Nosferatu– feeding on the blood of others, self-isolating, but maintaining tremendous wealth and influence over others – are good things entirely approved by the culture. Children call it “sigma”.

What feels particularly new about this ongoing tendency to stick to what we know, however, is the sudden reverence we’ve developed towards the humble slasher genre – formally considered the bedrock of horror. Although yesterday’s cultural detritus becomes tomorrow’s critical darlings is nothing new (recent Best Picture winners have included stories about a fish man who falls in love with a human woman; a universe where people have evolved the products of pig in the place of phalanx; and a social mind). the ABC movie of the week, Bad Ronald), nothing that has achieved this level of cultural significance has been so laser-focused on gore effects. It’s half past two Terrifying the films have more in common with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis than Dario Argento. In a violent nature, who reimagined a film as Friday the 13th o crazy from the perspective of his dead killer, he added an experimental flourish to the classically simple narrative of the genre, emphasizing the thin wall that differentiates films like these from the French New Wave is really the occasional splats of blood.

Although the envelope pushed Terrifying The franchise may seem like a litmus test for human empathy, it should be noted that legitimate people like Art the Clown and his unrated Harpo Marx-meets-Freddy Krueger routine. Something too subversive could not find this audience. That’s why I’m legitimately intrigued by a movie that didn’t come out this year: the Macon Blair remake. The Toxic Avenger. Something of a politically motivated judge, jury and executor of big business assets was deemed too radioactive to be released. I wonder why…

Medium

Converging with the continued popularity of the slasher film has been the taboo-busting approach of having child star characters recently released into the public domain. In the last year, new slashers have been announced with Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Bambi, Popeye, Steamboat Willie, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid and the Mad Hatter. Something about transporting characters meant to draw as much income as possible into the realm of bloodthirsty killers feels “right” in a way that’s both timely and inevitable—not to mention punk rock. Once an IP has fallen into people’s hands, isn’t the only moral thing to do to turn it into a monster? Especially if all roads lead to 2024, the consensus must be Mickey and the company sold us a bill of goods the first time.

You only need to lightly dust YouTube these days for an endless variety of video texts about the dark Pokémon theories or an unusually scary PlayStation 2 game featuring Piglet. In these circles, a lost Cartoon Network bumper or unproduced episode SpongeBob SquarePants it is spoken of in the same hushed reverence as the unexploded nuclear ordinance. When everything is available online, anything that isn’t – no matter how harmless – suddenly becomes suspicious and arcane. If we had to tell children scary stories for not venturing into the By the way, lost media hunters should at least be dissuading others from sharing their credit card information with shady collectors on the dark web.

Recent movies like I watched Glow TV understand the kind of fanatical devotion that investing too much of oneself in children’s media can bring – the kind of people who used to call themselves “Lovecraftian”, but are now referred to by terms like “Disney Adult”. To a generation where Cthulhu has been available as a stuffed toy all his life, the Grand Old Ones might as well be Garfield and friends, after all. Smile 2 is another film of the last year to understand this, after the heels of films like The ring and It followswhere curses are spread like transmissible memes that move like viruses—and even our celebrities aren’t immune.

As of 2024, “cosmic” horror is closely tied to the earth and although the beliefs of its media savvy cultists will seem silly to you, you don’t have to believe in the destructive powers of its particular fandom until they do.

Technology

The last year has also seen a number of films showcasing artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology – films such as The submission and The fearIn which the machines intended to improve our quality of life are personally invited into the house, vampire-like, only to reveal some disgusting appetite of their own.

However, as terrified as we are of robots taking our jobs, paradoxically we have also lost faith in the concept of technological progress. We’ve had movies about killer robots, toys, smart homes, and personal assistants, but we’ve yet to reach that “singularity” in which this emerging technology does something scarier than being better at what you’ve outrageously defined. . to be.

As our government continues to admit that our airspace is and has always been occupied by aircraft that defy physics beyond human understanding, I am reminded of Jordan Peele’s 2022 feature. Nowhich suggest that UFOs are secretly some sort of insatiably hungry, atmospheric beast that our zoologists have not recognized or cataloged. Somehow, it’s easier to believe. Which brings us to…

Life itself / Old people

As AI replaces us in the workforce, one of the most curious trends of the last year has been a series of monster movies focusing on – in one form or another – doppelgängers. Whether it is a hitherto unknown biological entity as in cuckooa demonic presence as in Never let go and Father’s heador a voluntarily engineered proxy of oneself as in The SubstanceThe anxiety at the heart of these stories does not reside in becoming a monster, personally, but in being replaced by one-and potentially missing out on the cool things a monster gets to do.

Bitch at nightA recent film in which Amy Adams turns into a dog as an expression of her repressed rage, is seen as a net positive. The idea of ​​losing control has tremendous appeal lately. Like Demi Moore’s fear of irrelevance The Substancereal fear is left behind.

Speaking of, if 2024 could be defined by a single persistent boogeyman, the title would have to be given unanimously to the old. Movies like Heretic, apartment 7A, and Alien: Romulusthey presented the elders (if not in spirit late, as in the specter of poor Ian Holm in Romulus) tormenting young people for a host of reasons, ranging from financial gain to simply proving that they are still relevant from the comfort of their own trapped homes.

People often fail to see a distinction between mummies and zombies, but the difference between them is worth noting. Mummies are distinguished from zombies in that a zombie is something clinically dead, but somehow still behaves as if it were alive. A mummy is something that by all means should be dead, but in some biological way is it still alive, as how the heart of the Kharis continues to beat by virtue of the leaves tana in Universal’s. The hand of the mummy, The Tomb of the Mummy, The ghost of the mummy, and U The mother’s curse.

With the release of Nosferatu today, in Count Orlok we have a familiar, elderly, copyright-infringing ghoul from the dawn of film who simply refuses to go away. The right man for the time, indeed.

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