Eve Tushnet
every Halloween is self-parody Halloween:
Last night I watched The Final Girls, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s 2015 slasher parody about mourning. It’s charming, touching, and mostly successful—and a great example of the reasons 2015 specifically and the ’10s generally have been such great years for horror fans.
2015 was just a cornucopia of bloody fruit: the lush Gothic fantasy of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, David Cronenberg’s nihilistic satire/poignant ghost story Maps to the Stars, and Jemaine Clement and Taika Watiti’s vampire roommate comedy What We Do in the Shadows. There was Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a swoony, hazy black-and-white Iranian-Californian vampire disco noir romance—that happened. All of these movies were sublime, but even movies that were a bit more standard, like Austria’s Goodnight Mommy, often showed vivid visual sensibility and a deep emotional resonance.
If the ’80s were the decade of slashers, horror-comedy, and terrifying children’s films, the ’10s are shaping up to be a decade of sun-drenched heartache, featuring women.
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