“I’m a wreck – what did you expect?”

Yeah, we get it. Iggy Pop is old. However, so much of the build-up and reaction to Post Pop Depression has either previewed, or filtered, Iggy’s seventeenth studio effort through this lens that it is easy to forget that this is a damn fine album – not a damn fine album for his age, or when compared to recent Iggy Pop output, but a damn fine album full stop.

So much of this is due to this album’s musical backbone, which the LP’s own artwork puts front and centre – a list consisting of Joshua Homme, Iggy Pop, Dean Fertita and Matt Helders is hardly one to hide in the liner notes. With two Queens of the Stone Age and an Arctic Monkey, the fact that the record is imbued with a tantalising darkness, both musically and in the latter’s production, is no surprise. However, it is a testament to the band’s balancing of talents that this has not become a QotSA album – from the deep, drawling delivery of his lyrics, to passages bordering on spoken word poetry, to the same propulsive energy which has always powered his discography, this is certainly today’s indie rock giants backing Iggy Pop, and not the other way around.

Be thankful, then, that Iggy Pop doesn’t waste this musical base – indeed, he builds upon it. Barbed ruminations such as “This street is as cold as a corporate lawsuit” and “I followed my shadow and it led me here / What is the problem if I disappear?” envelop the darkness, while building arresting motifs of cynicism and legacy. Indeed, both music and vocals, the latter as much intoned as sung, intertwine to create some startlingly catchy hooks – see ‘Gardenia’ and ‘American Valhalla’. This retooled sound is thus far more poppy than the title would suggest. While Iggy and his crew do sometimes surrender to the temptation of repeating these musical phrases just a little too readily (it’s hard to make constantly shouting the word “vulture” meaningful) it’s hard to resent such infectious riffs and choruses.

In short, Post Pop Depression marks both the birth of an unlikely pop supergroup, and the rebirth of a titan, a work which stands on its own two feet whilst being a worthy addition to the discographies of the creatives involved. Just don’t mention Iggy’s age. To quote ‘Chocolate Drops’: “it’s just some old excuse, hanging on. Let it go.”

With a tight budget of $1 million and a terrifying vision, Robert Eggers proves himself to be a natural-born film maker, intelligent and ambitious enough to create a truly immersive viewing experience that will linger long after you leave the movie theatre. The Witch is a ‘folklore tale’ about a zealously pious family who were excommunicated from a Puritan community, now living in self-exile on a farm somewhere in New England. When the youngest of the clan mysteriously disappears, fear and paranoia set in and the family begins to unravel. It soon becomes clear that something unnatural is at work and not long before accusations of witchcraft put the family on a road to no return.

What is so striking about this horror film is that, well, it’s pitched as a ‘horror’ film at all. The Witch defies all the exhausted conventions of the genre that audiences have become begrudgingly accustomed to. Thankfully, a recent new-wave of horror has emerged from arthouse directors and Eggers debut serves as another welcome addition to the trend. Film makers are increasingly ditching the tired methods of the genre and are instead opting for a deeply psychological slow-burn approach that tends to negotiate the horror inside us all.

The renovation has experienced success at Sundance, with The Babadook, It Follows, Goodnight Mommy, and now The Witch – for which Eggers won best director – all being met with an overwhelmingly positive critical response and an equally appreciative horror audience. Presumably both were desperate for something a little different from the jump-scare drivel that has clogged the genre for a while. Whether it’s the American teen gore romps (Cabin Fever,the Hostel series,) or uninspired, lazy found-footage fluff (was The Blair Witch Project really that good?), the slow-burn is emphatically distinct, with thematic substance, style and mood satiating the horror fan’s desire for intellect as well as thrill. This brand of film demands patience, but the pay-off is much more substantial.                  

This certainly applies to The Witch. Eggers’ ability to create, stimulate and toy with a certain mood and then to sustain it from the opening titles to the explosive finale is one of the films many impressive feats. The entire picture is characterised by an overwhelming gloom, largely created by a subtle greyness in colour and the long sliding shots of the vast rural landscape. Both the farm-house and the sorcerous woods that lie beyond are seen and discussed so frequently that they become another character, a tempestuous presence that has an unspoken dark power. This is coupled with an intelligent use of silence beneath the rough Northern accents and seventeenth century dialect, further saturating the piece with melancholic heaviness.

This is intersected, however, by violent bouts of suspense, drama and terror. Eggers creates seamless transitions from the pensive quiet into a nightmare of cacophonic violins, religious Omen-esque choirs and even a meshing of screams at particularly tense moments. Whilst the miserable tone is sustained, Eggers skilfully uses such techniques to energise the film with blood-curdling fright, never letting us forget that this is indeed a horror movie and that yes, we should be scared.

Yet unlike much of mainstream horror, Eggers ensures that style is matched by thematic substance. At its very core, The Witch is a harrowing drama. The viewer is a voyeur, observing a family in crisis who are battling the demons within the domestic space more so than any external evil. Mother and father William (Ineson) and Katherine (Dickie) are adjusting to a new environment with their little tykes Thomasin (Taylor-Joy), Caleb (Scrimshaw) and twins Mercy (Grainger) and Jonas (Dawson). Performances from all involved, particularly Ineson and Joy, are convincing enough to transport viewers into their nightmarish world of Puritan filial hell. We see them try their hardest to make profit, but their best efforts are dogged when all their produce withers. Amidst this instability is the puberty problem of little Caleb, whose wandering eye leads him to quite literally eat the apple, his sexual repressions culminating in a disturbing exorcism and/or orgasm. Exacerbating the situation is a religious fundamentalism that is shaken by a sequence of ‘ungodly providence’. Oh, and of course, there’s the missing baby. Whilst the language, location, dress and beliefs in the film are markedly distinct from modern life, these family problems are certainly not exclusive to their seventeenth-century world.

The same can be said for the films treatment of gender. Accusations of witchcraft in the early-modern period and beyond were overwhelmingly directed toward women. More often than not, the witch in question would be over 40. Having lived their lives caring for their husband and other dependents, these women were unlikely to reproduce. In her Witchcraze, Lyndal Roper argued the concept of a witch ‘assaulted the very possibility of life’. Many of the stories that circulated in village communities would involve witches slaughtering animals, destroying crops and committing infanticidef. This reflects a cultural and political mind set in which woman was synonymous with fertility, the witch figure embodying the anti-mother archetype – supposedly attacking fertility itself.

Images and symbolism of fertility and motherhood are everywhere in The Witch, from the blood squirting from the goats udder to the dead baby chick in the hatched egg. Whilst Thomasin is on the brink of womanhood, the likelihood of her bearing children is hindered when she expresses unwillingness to live with another family in a different village (a woman marrying and reproducing was dependent upon her integrating with other families). Thomasin’s ultimate rejection of society’s definition of womanhood is confirmed in the visceral closing scenes where collective female liberation trumps the social and cultural norm. We suddenly see the film in a different light, one that negotiates female power and implicitly explores feminism. As Eggers himself admits, in The Witch, ‘feminism rises to the top’.

The Witch has already gathered a lot of buzz from critics and audience alike, and it’s not hard to see why. Eggers has marked himself as the front-runner of an up and coming league of arthouse horror heroes. He does this whilst encouraging us to question aspects of modern life, like the role of family and woman. I’m sure the horror world will eagerly await his next artistic venture.

Thrillers today have seemingly no new ground to tread. If you attempt to imagine the most fearsome or twisted scenario, the most intensely action packed violence you can, odds are it has already been portrayed. Still, it’s hard to see the public, yet to tire from the continuous barrage of superhero movies, ever getting bored of watching these endless formulaic narratives. After all, Jurassic World and The Force Awakens – both sequels of a sort to movies made decades earlier – topped the charts for the highest grossing films last year. So what is it then about the most financially successful movies that really keeps people coming back?

Since its recent release, viewers have been widely speculating about the new J.J. Abrams produced 10 Cloverfield Lane. It’s message – and who’s to say that there absolutely has to be one – is entirely elusive. Any interpretation of the two monsters in the film – one being the actual beast and the other Goodman’s character – as allegorical is likely completely invented. But it’s often ambiguity and room for invention that captivate audiences much more than explicit moral or political judgments.

Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken wrote the film as parallel rather than sequential to Cloverfield (2008), in which a similar beast runs rampant through Manhattan, captured on personal cameras which act as the viewer’s only set of eyes. Beyond the monster takeover, which comprises only a small portion of the latter film, the two have little in common, at least in terms of plot.

10 Cloverfield Lane opens to Michelle being run off the road whilst dodging calls from her fiancé, voiced by Bradley Cooper, only to awaken to find herself chained up in an underground bunker built by Howard, an eccentric and short-tempered man, and his boyish neighbour, Emmett. The three exist peacefully, if a little tensely, in the bunker together for an unspecified amount of time – though the close-up shots of the deterioration of Michelle’s nail polish seem to suggest only a matter of weeks – until Emmett and Michelle make a terrifying discovery about Howard’s past. Michelle is then faced with the decision to remain with one monster in the bunker or face another unknown beast up above.

The film lacks the usual star-power that would drive many films up the billboard, and its casting is somewhat unexpected. Howard is played by John Goodman, best known for playing gruff characters, as the husband to Roseanne in the ‘90s sitcom of the same name, or as the Vietnam-obsessed Walter in The Big Lebowski. Here Goodman was brilliantly cast, arriving at something not unlike the villain in The Lovely Bones, who seems almost pitiably odd and shy until reaching a final, long-anticipated breaking point.

John Gallagher, Jr., who plays Emmett, is a rather anonymous actor in comparison to his co-stars, and he seems very purposefully to remain unremarkable. His relationship with Michelle looks in some senses like the early relationship between Glenn and Maggie in The Walking Dead, and Goodman’s character resembles the various incarnations of power-hungry leading men in the same series.

Michelle, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, takes her place amongst a new grade of strong female leads more commonly found in television. I would liken her most to Krysten Ritter’s broodingly moral character in the Netflix series Jessica Jones. As someone often put off by overly exaggerated action sequences, Michelle won me over only toward the end with her partial aside to the audience of exasperation and disbelief at facing yet another threat.

As for speculation about the film’s potential political connotations, I indulged myself perhaps much more than the actual content allows. While Howard’s status as a war veteran might more plausibly be read as an indictment of the U.S. system of mental health care for those returning from war, I am not alone, I think, in immediately associating Howard with the famous fear-monger with an ambiguous history of sexual assault and childlike vocabulary that is currently running amok in the U.S. presidential race.

The original Cloverfield called up images of the 9/11 attacks at a time when the daunting beasts of terrorism and financial recession seemed at their most insurmountable, reflected also in the much less optimistic ending of the first film. Where choice may have seemed absent from the public in 2008, in the current political situation, choice itself is the crisis. The film’s catchphrase declares that “Monsters come in many forms,” and the decision Michelle must make – between remaining with her captor in what seems like an immediately safe situation and braving the potentially toxic air outside – is not unlike the one testing voters in the United States currently. Americans today can either remain isolated within the ideologically regressive universe that Trump has invented or support those who want to find real solutions to the world’s problems as they actually are. Perhaps it is because people can relate to the gravity of having to make such a decision that 10 Cloverfield Lane has been so compelling to audiences across the United States.