A lot of old movies are boring. That admission may cost me my credibility as a film nerd, but it’s true. But there are classic films that even my limited attention span can wholeheartedly enjoy, and very high on that list are the horror movies of Val Lewton.
It’s a strange feeling to stare into the void of a Zoom loading screen, waiting for a two-time Oscar winner to join the call. But that’s what I did one Sunday morning, counting the seconds until my interview with Cate Blanchett began.
Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those articles about how superhero blockbusters are awful compared to classic movies. No, I’m here to explore the weird commonality between Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and modern blockbusters. Linking these different approaches to film will be a strange journey, but at its end lies an intriguing idea: that reality and fiction may be one and the same.
To examine these films side by side would be insane. But insane ideas aren’t always bad ones, and I was curious whether Snyder might be on to something with this comparison.
My pandemic summer was spent staring at a computer, but these were a startlingly productive and educational few months and, as with most exciting things in my unexciting life, it starts with a blank page.
"Modern academics are reexamining genre fiction, helped by a number of critical movements breaking down literary elitism, and there’s a world of horror which is intelligent, complex and, most importantly, terrifying."
