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Stephen Graham Jones at the NY Times
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Lenona
Oct 16, 2021, 11:46:02 AM10/16/21
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I don't know why columns, op-eds, etc. so often have two titles. The one I saw in the paper today said "This Halloween, Give Horror a Chance."
Btw, on the next page, another columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, did a VERY long piece on how "the unvaccinated may not be who you think."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opinion/halloween-horror-movies.html
From the bottom:
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of, most recently, “My Heart Is a Chainsaw” and “The Only Good Indians.” He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
First half:
These days, there’s a lot to be anxious about. There’s a lot to fear. There’s the environmental wreckage that’s increasingly evident around the world, the fragile state of our political systems, the mutating virus making the very air we breathe dangerous.
It’s perhaps no surprise that a horror renaissance has happened in film over the last decade. If many other aspects of one’s day are a running list of terrors or involve creeping dread and consuming paranoia, then the eyes and mind, already accustomed to that, will expect it from whatever page or screen they land on.
In 2016, Victor LaValle’s novella “The Ballad of Black Tom” showed racism and institutional violence through the lens of Lovecraftian cosmic horror (while pushing back against the racism and xenophobia built into H.P. Lovecraft’s original work). The year after that, Jordan Peele’s horror film “Get Out” literalized the oppression and occupation of Black people. As Americans have taken to the streets to protest police violence, a raft of films and shows have explored the horrors of the nation’s racist history, culminating recently in “Candyman.”
On Friday, there’s the release of “Halloween Kills,” which adds to the 43-year-old franchise. We’re all still watching the religiously tinged “Midnight Mass” on television, and the bookshelves are bleeding this year from Chuck Wendig’s “The Book of Accidents,” about a dark past that continues to haunt. Next week we get a collection of tragic tales, “Ghost Sequences” by A.C. Wise, and “Nothing but Blackened Teeth” by Cassandra Khaw, a story, in part, about soul-sucking relationships.
Horror fans have always known that the genre is more than a nightmare carnival. Horror is, and always has been, in dialogue with the anxieties and fears of its time. During the Great Depression, the misery and economic strife were embodied by monsters from literature and folklore, as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy made their way across the movie screen. In the 1980s, when paranoia about the Cold War and fears of nuclear winter reached a fever pitch, a slate of suburban terrors assured us that our insecurities were valid, that we were not, in fact, safe in our homes. Enter Jason Voorhees, with his machete and hockey mask; Michael Myers, with his mechanic overalls and chef’s knife; and Freddy Krueger, with his fedora and very sharp fingers.
But horror doesn’t just reflect our fears and anxieties back at us. It also helps us process them...
(snip)
Btw, on the next page, another columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, did a VERY long piece on how "the unvaccinated may not be who you think."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/opinion/halloween-horror-movies.html
From the bottom:
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of, most recently, “My Heart Is a Chainsaw” and “The Only Good Indians.” He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
First half:
These days, there’s a lot to be anxious about. There’s a lot to fear. There’s the environmental wreckage that’s increasingly evident around the world, the fragile state of our political systems, the mutating virus making the very air we breathe dangerous.
It’s perhaps no surprise that a horror renaissance has happened in film over the last decade. If many other aspects of one’s day are a running list of terrors or involve creeping dread and consuming paranoia, then the eyes and mind, already accustomed to that, will expect it from whatever page or screen they land on.
In 2016, Victor LaValle’s novella “The Ballad of Black Tom” showed racism and institutional violence through the lens of Lovecraftian cosmic horror (while pushing back against the racism and xenophobia built into H.P. Lovecraft’s original work). The year after that, Jordan Peele’s horror film “Get Out” literalized the oppression and occupation of Black people. As Americans have taken to the streets to protest police violence, a raft of films and shows have explored the horrors of the nation’s racist history, culminating recently in “Candyman.”
On Friday, there’s the release of “Halloween Kills,” which adds to the 43-year-old franchise. We’re all still watching the religiously tinged “Midnight Mass” on television, and the bookshelves are bleeding this year from Chuck Wendig’s “The Book of Accidents,” about a dark past that continues to haunt. Next week we get a collection of tragic tales, “Ghost Sequences” by A.C. Wise, and “Nothing but Blackened Teeth” by Cassandra Khaw, a story, in part, about soul-sucking relationships.
Horror fans have always known that the genre is more than a nightmare carnival. Horror is, and always has been, in dialogue with the anxieties and fears of its time. During the Great Depression, the misery and economic strife were embodied by monsters from literature and folklore, as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy made their way across the movie screen. In the 1980s, when paranoia about the Cold War and fears of nuclear winter reached a fever pitch, a slate of suburban terrors assured us that our insecurities were valid, that we were not, in fact, safe in our homes. Enter Jason Voorhees, with his machete and hockey mask; Michael Myers, with his mechanic overalls and chef’s knife; and Freddy Krueger, with his fedora and very sharp fingers.
But horror doesn’t just reflect our fears and anxieties back at us. It also helps us process them...
(snip)
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