What Happened to the Scary Summer Horror Movie? – New Republic

Its an interesting premise, and It Comes at Night blends a remarkable number of traditions. Theres the family-as-microcosm thing, hearkening back to those isolated rural families of Chekhov, while the boarded-up-house-plus-contagion-fear recalls Night of the Living Dead. The woods have a menace that matches The Blair Witch Project. And the terrible prospect of losing loved ones to disease most closely matches 28 Days Later.

It Comes at Night makes a number of striking moves with genre. It will also be remembered as the breakout role for Kelvin Harrison Jr., who you may recall from The Birth of a Nation. As the teenage son Travis, his perspective holds the movie together. Harrisons embodiment of teenage fear is excruciating to watch. He speaks little, communicating with his parents through tear-filled stares and keeping his eyes down when talking to strangers. He acts his adolescence with his whole body.

The character of Travis also develops the movies most interesting theme around physical intimacy. He eavesdrops on others breathy, nighttime conversations. We hear his breath inside his gask mask, see him in bed, enter his dreams. The house is filled with intimacies that make its inhabitants feel soft and vulnerable. The fear that haunts the house therefore feels like a commentary on the terrible emotional danger of cohabitation and family units, as much as on mistrust.

It Comes at Night is a valuable meditation on what becomes of people when they become desperate. But it isnt the frightfest that its trailer so strongly implies. In the theater, I heard a baffled What the fuck? from a few rows back as the credits rolled.

In fact, neither of the two supposedly frightening movies that opened this past weekend are actually frightening at all. Each feels too concerned with engaging with or rejecting the classic tropes of horror movie-making. It Comes at Night teases with a conventionally bloody trailer, then offers its audience a product overloaded by cinema history and without enough new to offer. The Mummy tries to get out of its own box, but remains mired in the legacy of the 1999 version, which after all is only just old enough to vote.

It is hard to make scary movies in in the 21st century, and a studio might be forgiven for investing in dumb Michael Bay robo-violence instead of even trying to make a new kind of monster. Genre will always loom with a big shadow over any movie attempting to make us jump. But as psychologically innovative pictures like The Conjuring or The Babadook should remind us, it is worth at least trying to do something new, instead of clumsily defanging something old.

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What Happened to the Scary Summer Horror Movie? - New Republic