Recent Thoughts on Movies

Collected ramblings on cinema

Despite cinema being undoubtedly my most lucrative subject to write about on Medium, I’ve run out of things to say about it of late. Well, at least things to say that aren’t being better said elsewhere. But I have had a few underdeveloped thoughts that keep recurring yet resist the work of a full article, so I’m just going to aggregate them here and maybe develop some of them later. Enjoy!

AirBnB Horror

There’s been a new trend in horror lately, that of horror movies centralising their scares around the, frankly dubious, rise of holiday rentals. Ignoring the social horror that comes with that ubiquitous website’s brand of gentrification, increasing rents, lowering the housing stock, propping up wealthy landlords etc etc, the fear of taking over someone else’s private space seems to have finally bubbled over from ‘who else has the key?’ To ‘what else is in here?’. Barbarian, Leave the World Behind, Parasite, SuperHost, you should have left and more, all play on that fear that comes from the uncanny familiar/unfamiliarity of another person’s private space being opened up to strangers. This is nothing new, Psycho did it back in 1960, but given the rise of ‘holiday lets’ today it is no wonder cinema has found a new way to mess with our heads. Horror has always had its finger on the pulse when it comes to societal fears, and never more so than now. Even films that aren’t strictly ‘horror’ horrify audiences. The Sound of Freedom whipped up a fear frenzy amongst… well everyone it seems, and anything branded ‘woke’ is immediately terrifying to certain sections of society. Regardless, I have no problem with the bloated, amoral business of holiday lets being depicted as the monstrous, deadly subject that they are.

Once Were Woke

Speaking of ‘woke’ there’s an awful lot of films from the 20th century that would be called ‘woke’ now but weren’t criticised that way at the time. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Is about a villainous right wing judge gentrifying an area and industrialising it by dismantling affordable public transport and replacing it with an isolationist freeway. Jumanji depicts class disparity and reliance on capitalism (though doesn’t criticise it) in the way a factory’s closure spells disaster for a whole town…