by Don Hall

Both Tarantino and Scorsese have bemoaned the lack of imagination throttling film these days. Their argument is that Hollywood behemoths like Marvel and the proliferation of tentpole green screen filmmaking, with the amount of money at stake even to get a project green lit, the risk taking required for innovation is squashed. I hear that and, despite my love for all things super-powered beings on screen, I'd further argue that a solid portion of the blame falls on the amazing democratization of filmmaking via streaming.

In the rush for more to watch (hastened by the pandemic), movies have become content and content requires less in terms of innovation and more in terms of, well, more. The result is a parade of half-baked star vehicles that look phenomenal but ask someone to tell you what it was they saw the night before on Netflix and most can't recount the story just the star power. What was the plot of The Grey Man? Or Red Notice? Or any of the Chris's movies about Navy Seals and CIA agents combatting a corrupt system? A benefit of more money shoved into streaming is that we get more film and television created and directed by and featuring Black, Asian, and Latino talent but with more comes the inevitable leveling stick that increased projects from these communities automatically equals more crap, too.

For every One Night in Miami, there's a Till, the first a highly imaginative take on historical fiction, the other a soap opera of long portrait shots of grief surrounded by a story we already knew. For every Parasite we are forced to sit through some other Netflix show from Korea that is mostly an ape of other, better shows but are seriously difficult to distinguish from four others pumped out of the content machine.

The one genre that finds some purchase in the territory of risk (because it simply costs less to make) is horror. Since before the 1980's, horror filmmakers have worked with less resource to create more memories than nearly any other. John Carpenter revolutionized things by cranking out genuinely scary, incredibly successful horror movies, on a shoestring budget. Plainly, horror is the genre where risk is rewarded time and time again.

I'd heard the rumblings about Zach Cregger's directorial debut Barbarian. I saw the trailer with Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård dancing around the Fincheresque premise of two people accidentally being booked in the same AirBnB at night in the rain. I didn't read much about it but the buzz was there and, from my vantage, no one was revealing much except that Justin Long was in there somewhere and the third act was fucking nuts. I put it on my list (but first I needed to watch Andor, The Peripheral, Tulsa King, something amazing with Gerard Butler and his missing wife, and another Netflix show about a true crime.

I did find time for Ty West's X and found it to be a great ride, smartly imitating the grind house movies of the 1970's and an unusual villain boiled down to an old horny lady who murders the young cast of porn stars because they make her feel undesired as if my third ex-wife was 90-years old demanding orgasms from an decreasingly interested pool of clients until killing them is just better than a dildo. Mia Goth surprised me as both the starry-eyed porn ingenue and the homicidal Pearl but I knew going in that it was the old broad doing the murders. It was still incredibly creative and used the now cookie cut tropes of modern horror with a spin and a dip that made it fresh, gross, funny, and unlike many other content available.

According to interviews, Cregger was inspired by the idea that women should trust their intuition when it comes to red flags in their everyday interactions with men. He wrote one scene that used as many of those red flags as possible, settling on the premise of a young woman in Detroit for a job interview who finds herself sharing a rental with a complete stranger. Again, a premise Fincher would run with but Cregger hit a wall. Where to go with this slice of potential toxic maleness that wasn't obvious? He then changed it up and decided that the first act would Fincher and the third act would be Raimi. The result is a movie that comes off as one-third thriller, one-third set up, and one-third monster movie.

In a recent I Like to Watch Podcast, co-host Donnie Smith and I talk at length about one of my favorite scary movies, Victor Salva's 2001 Jeepers Creepers. The first half feels like a standard slasher film, following cliches of that specific narrative but then makes a left turn into straight up monster movie and the switch makes it truly fun. Also starring Justin Long, it remains an annual viewing for me.

Barbarian leaves me with a similar WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE? feeling that I love. Like X, the monster revealed is an old woman but she is preverbal and instead of wanting to get busy with her victims and kills those who deny her this, she wants her victims to be her children and, when they reject her maternal instincts by refusing to be breastfed by a grotesque teet, well, the kid has to die, right? Adding to the second act is Long as a sitcom star recently accused of raping a co-star (and, unambiguously was definitively guilty of the crime) who owns the AirBnB. Cregger thus presents us with a heroine who discovers the horror followed by an idiot who then rediscovers the same horror, the first we're routing for, the second we want to see some comeuppance.

This is a truly imaginative, risky film. The script is great, the performances (especially Campbell) are stellar, and nothing about this smart, idea-driven monster movie is anything but outside the box. I finished it and, instead of then moving on to another movie or streaming show, I just wanted to sit with it, stewing on the concepts, reliving the moments I didn't expect (one of my favorite scenes involves Campbell, having escaped and calling the Detroit police only to have the cops look at her as if she were on crack or nuts rather than rush into the breach like movie cops usually do—her shock at their disbelief feels like reality which is always a solid surprise in a story of fantastical twists), and wishing I could rewatch it for the first time.

Tarantino and Scorsese have a point but it isn't that there is no more imagination happening. With the glut of content, like Nick Cage's pig in the brilliant (and unexpected) Pig, you have to dig in the mud to find those truffles, gang.