One of the most memorable parts of 2002’s 28 Days Later was the opening sequence. Writers: Jérémie Guez, Guillaume Lemans, and Dominique Rocher What Keeps You Alive is available to rent. Horror has often exposed that marriage can be a true nightmare: Extending that to a same-sex marriage is a breath of fresh air. There are times when the plot strains credulity, but that’s easy enough to overlook when the suspense has been ratcheted up this high. Jules doesn’t die, however, and What Keeps You Alive becomes a tense cat-and-mouse thriller. As Jules learns more about Jackie’s mysterious past, she grows slightly wary - and that suspicion is amplified when Jackie suddenly shoves Jules off a cliff to her death. Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) takes her wife, Jules (Brittany Allen), to a remote cabin to celebrate their one-year anniversary.
Horror films movie#
As is so often the case, it turns out that queering the narrative was exactly what he needed to elevate his movie to the next level. There’s a version of What Keeps You Alive that’s a lot less interesting than the movie we got: Writer-director Colin Minihan originally intended the film to be about a straight couple. As Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama told me, “I often feel like horror and genre in general can be a really great container for ideas that are harder to actually make movies about.” These are the movies that stuck with me, whether because they made me think, scared the shit out of me, or - in the case of the best of them - expertly did both. That’s not to say that all of the movies on this list are serious: Many of them are just fun! The majority, however, are at least tangentially concerned with bigger questions - questions that the heightened, high-stakes genre of horror is particularly good at exploring. And if some films were overpraised for their deeper meaning - Halloween is not nearly as substantial as people seem to think it is - at least we’re taking horror seriously. At the same time, this was an especially strong year for horror films with richly developed themes about grief, women’s bodily autonomy, and, yes, trauma the fact that these movies are getting the mainstream analysis they’ve always deserved is ultimately a good thing.
When you’ve been paying attention to the genre for this long, it’s hard not to roll your eyes at the sudden discovery that horror is about trauma, a word that popped up repeatedly in reviews of Hereditary, Suspiria, and Halloween. Horror in 2018 seemed to get more thoughtful consideration than it has in years past. While horror fans have always known the genre was about something deeper than mindless gore, the massive success of last year’s Get Out gave the mainstream a chance to finally catch on.
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