¡QUÉ HORROR! 2016
Candidate #3
WHY HORROR?
(October 2014)
"Horror has come a long way since it first got its
hooks into me. As a devout fan, I used to feel like an outsider, but these
days, I meet fans everywhere I go.
“Horror is now more popular than it’s ever been.”
“Horror is now more popular than it’s ever been.”
--Tal
Zimerman
I
could be wrong and memory is f*cking with me right now, but I think this is the
very first actual doc that’s made its
way to ¡Qué horror! Candidacy (as opposed to the
occasional faux doc that’s made the
rundown).
Rob
Lindsay and Nicolas Kleiman’s Why Horror?
follows long-time horrorhead Tal Zimerman as he explores his life-long
fascination with the genre, asking the titular question, “Why horror?” of art
historians and literature experts and language professors and psychologists, as
well as a host of familiar genre faces, from the old school vanguard (John
Carpenter, Don Coscarelli, George Romero) to current established names (Alexandre
Aja, Simon Barrett, Eli Roth, Ben Wheatley).
For
any audience member who happens to be a kindred spirit to Tal, the game-changing
benchmarks of a lifelong horrorhead of a certain generation--such as the
socio-political horror of Romero’s original zombie trilogy, giallo, the home video boom, the
self-referential metahorror of Scream,
J-Horror, found footage, and the digital revolution sparking the current wave
of global horror--are all touched on in the great animated section “A Way Too
Brief History of Horror Cinema” (with VO from one of our all-time favorite
hobbits, Elijah Wood).
There’s
even the acknowledgement that, yes, Virginia, there are actually female horror fans (who make horror films too!), with
appearances by the Soska sisters and Karen Lam.
For
the more critically-minded horrorheads out there, or, for those who, at the
very least, are curious to dig at the possible roots of their fascination with
the genre, Why Horror? is an
excellent and highly recommended watch that smartly encapsulates just how
deeply horror is entrenched in our humanity, and how it’s really a universal language
that we all know.
The
question is, just how fluent are we willing to be in it?
“I like ‘smarts.’ I just
like intelligent views of the world. And I am deeply committed to finding ‘smarts’
where other people don’t think to look for it. And I think horror is the perfect
place.”
--Dr.
Susanne Kord
European
Languages, Culture and Society
University
College, London, England
(Why Horror? OS courtesy of
shocktillyoudrop.com.)
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