Halloween is a week out now! Scared yet?
No? Perhaps it’s something like the genre exhaustion we’ve been feeling, or the gnawing sense that the horrors of the screen are ill-equipped to keep pace with the horrors of the world. (Am I alone in finding First Reformed to be the best horror movie of 2018?)
By general agreement, 2016 was not the best.
The election of a know-nothing fascist clown to the U.S. presidency, ushering in what threatens to be a reactionary era of overt white supremacy while simultaneously placing his frightening clown-child-fingers next to nuclear-launch buttons?
There is a certain modest genius to a well-crafted disaster film. Unfussy and unpretentious, the best of these keep the proceedings simple, but their apparent simplicity can cloak the care with which plot details are placed and timed, the way individual moments correspond to each other.