Scary business: "A Quiet Place," "It"
For most of my adult life, I’ve not been a big fan of horror movies. Well, of a certain kind, anyway – mad slashers with no clear motivation, exercises in gore, movies where narrative takes a back seat to the slaughter of the innocent and the guilty (with both categories including a lot of young people, and a fair amount of sex. Classic horror – where tension was as important as terror – I still embraced. But newer movies would roll out, and I would roll on. Except lately I have not rolled as much. I credit “Get Out” for a renewed willingness to see horror, because “Get Out” was about far more than carving up victims; it used that for a meditation on race and identity, doing so in a way that could still be unnerving – that argued the Old South was still around, and still eager to maintain white superiority. It was a movie for the it’s-OK-to-be-racist times that Donald Trump and his minions have brought back to Main Street. So now I will risk getting the willies, in selected c...