10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[9 of 10]
ANNIHILATION
(February 2018)
"Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each
cell?”
Alex Garland’s Annihilation (based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer) is heady, horror-tinged science fiction, the kind we need far more than the Nth iteration of some tired SF franchise.
Alex Garland’s Annihilation (based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer) is heady, horror-tinged science fiction, the kind we need far more than the Nth iteration of some tired SF franchise.
And
while some may wonder at its inclusion here, I think it’s quite clear to those
who frequent the Iguana that my definition of “horror” has always been very
broad, allowing for diverse moods and tastes, from quiet elegance to raucous
bombast.
Think
of Annihilation as the horror of
science, of nature gone horribly awry.
And
not in the ‘70’s “animals go wild, nature vs man” schlock cinema sense (though
there are flitting shades of that sensibility here), but rather in the sense of
the horror of chaos, of the terrible, maddening possibility of having
everything we take for granted twisted into unnatural and terrifying shapes.
Garland
captures a grotesque beauty here, the awful majesty of seeing the mundane
transfigured into the bizarre and the alien, his vision helped along
tremendously by the soundscape laid down by Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s
Geoff Barrow (the duo also scored Garland’s Ex
Machina and Black Mirror’s “Men
Against Fire”).
Plus,
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Natalie
Portman.
Need
I say more?
(Annihilation OS courtesy of
impawards.com.)
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