Cocktail Party: Five hyper-stylized horror films
Elevated horror has become quite the subject among recent debates on contemporary cinema - a category that is simply supposed to place the genre on a higher level, an attribute that should make the difference between a movie like Mother! (d. Darren Aronofsky) and a mainstream horror. However, it automatically raises the question on the actual need of such a pointless term - how does another label help these movies that are made with the whole purpose of not bearing labels? Given that horror (especially allegorical, psychological horror, etc.) has gained ground with the proliferation of psychoanalytic theories in cinema (Hitchcock being one of the pioneers of the phenomenon), it’s no longer considered a convenient, trivial genre. Hyper-stylized horror, another category in this area that we’re discussing (associated with the idea of bombastic visuals, and less emphasis on the narrative), is the subject of the never-ending cocktail below, which comes as an extension of this past Halloween weekend: it starts from a Dario Argento giallo, Deep Red, and goes all the way to the horror of the year, Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg's film.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
