All movies, of course, come to us pre-packaged in some way, sure. But there is packaging, and there is packaging.
1979’s The Visitor is firmly in the second camp, at least for those of us who see it for the first time now, in hi-def, remastered form and given an aura of the cult secret.
For some of us, the very words “Keven Spacey stars as a real estate mogul reincarnated as a talking cat named Mr. Fuzzypants” inspire a kind of maniac glee. Bad-movie aficionados live for such moments, so the release of Nine Lives, now streaming on Amazon Prime, was like a gift from the gods.
Many horror movies are about external dangers coming to get you – monsters, demons, Dex Dogtective. But many are about the latent terror that was already there. Jennifer Kent’s brilliant, unsettling The Babadook is a recent example of the second sort.