While there are surely some angry people on the internet who use the word “woke” as a pejorative, we mean it as a compliment. These films pack all the terror you’d want in a horror movie while also smartly (often subtly) delivering insightful commentary on contemporary social issues.
1. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
OK, so this one isn’t super subtle. But it’s a (still) much-needed rumination on the grotesque and truly horrific legacies of slavery in America, including day-to-day moments of white privilege involving gentrification and interactions with the police, as well as a larger-scale societal norm of treating Black bodies and Black lives as disposable. (Also, on a separate note, you’ll never look at TSA agents the same way again.)
2. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
The protagonist of this Persian-language horror film is a young, female vampire on a skateboard. Per the film’s title, she stays out late at night (something many women and girls are not able to do, for fear of their personal physical safety). This skateboarding vampire chick identifies bad men and punishes them (i.e., drinks their blood). She also, eventually, learns to identify good men, and the possibility of romantic love for herself. This is a film that challenges traditional genre definitions of who and what a vampire is—and why.
3. The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2015)
Anya Taylor-Joy was so young when she starred in this movie as protagonist Thomasin that you may not even recognize her compared to the starlet gracing red carpets and sweeping awards shows this year. The VVitch (The Witch) is subtitled, “A New England Folk Tale,” and it’s brilliant because—unlike most films on the subject, where the witch is an agent of evil and terror—the film is largely scary because viewers sense Thomasin’s innocence as her family begins to accuse her of witchcraft. Knowing our history as we do—knowing what happened to women and girls accused of witchcraft in 1600s New England—we become increasingly fearful of what’s going to happen to her.
Whatever is going on spiritually with this family is also clearly sinister and supernatural—and utterly terrifying—but the film dares us to figure out exactly what that is. (Though if you’re familiar with old New England superstitions—e.g., the belief that a witch is physically incapable of uttering The Lord’s Prayer, to name one—there are subtle clues embedded throughout.) The film ultimately presents the question: if living “righteously” means being tormented and abused and threatened with death by everyone around you, are there perhaps better ways to live?
4. Evil Eye (Elan and Rajeev Dassani, 2020)
A mother’s suspicions about her daughter’s new partner become increasingly obsessive. She suspects that the young man is the reincarnation of her own violently abusive partner. She fears he has returned to kill her, and her daughter as well. As the mother-daughter relationship begins to unravel, the unsettling exchanges escalate all around.
There are some plot holes, and some unavoidable camp; but the narrative presents itself as an allegory for women helping each other, generationally, to survive domestic violence. In some ways, elder women can recognize abusive men early on—because they have, indeed, already met them.
5. Tigers Are Not Afraid (Issa López, 2017)
Set against a backdrop based in reality and woven through with elements of magical realism, this film has an almost mythological feel. The story centers around five orphans who band together in an attempt to survive the horrific violence of cartel drug wars. Much of the horror comes from the constant nature of the lethal dangers they face, and viewers’ implicit knowledge that these drug wars and the demonic humans behind them are all too real, creating new trauma and new ghosts every day.
6. Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, 2019)
This is a zombie film in which First Nations people on the Red Crow reservation in Quebec, Canada, are protected from zombification by their indigenous heritage—but other people are not. White people largely comprise the film’s populations, respectively, of zombies and of refugees who show up to the reservation pleading for sanctuary. The director has stated openly in interviews that this film is about colonialism. The zombie-killing violence is enough to satisfy any zombiepocalypse film fan.
7. Gaia (Jaco Bouwer, 2021)
Christened an “eco-horror” film, this movie achieves what M. Night Shyamalan’s 2008 B-movie The Happening may have hoped to accomplish. It explores the horror of environmental degradation and its fallout by setting up a narrative in which the earth fights back against her destroyer—us. Natural imagery has never looked so spiritual, or so terrifying.
8. You’re Next! (Adam Wingard, 2011)
If you’re fed up with the genre traditions of half-naked women running helplessly in high heels or running directly into confined spaces where there’s obvious danger waiting, you’ll be delighted by this flick. Its main character, Erin, was raised on a survivalist compound in the Australian outback until the age of 15.
Now a bartender and college student, Erin accompanies her boyfriend home for a holiday visit with his weird, estranged family. Several people invade the gathering and begin a campaign of wholesale slaughter. Erin keeps her wits about her, killing several attackers at close range (steak knife to the skull possibly the most bad-ass), while also helping her boyfriend set up traps around the estate to destroy the invaders. It’s like Home Alone for adults. With lots of stage blood.
9. His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)
In this story about refugees seeking asylum, the “night witch,” or apeth, that haunts them is a mythological figure in the South Sudan, from which they’ve fled. Ostensibly, the apeth that torments them as they try to begin a fresh life together in England is a specter of the trauma they’ve endured as refugees—the violence, the threat of death, the xenophobia, the displacement, the estrangement from family and friends left behind, the homesickness. As the film progresses, however, it becomes evident that she also represents a different kind of horror—and a different kind of viciousness and loss—as well.
10. Bad Hair (Justin Simien, 2020)
In this horror-comedy, an ambitious, intelligent young Black woman named Anna is disparaged in the workplace for having natural hair. Anna’s hair is used as an excuse to thwart her professional growth and career trajectory. She finally caves under the pressure and whitewashes her appearance by getting a weave.
The weave is turned into a metaphor not just for oppressive white beauty standards, but also for something that is literally lethal to Black people. Through the story-within-a-story of the Moss-Haired Girl, viewers understand that the wig is possessed and indeed, the energies of the wig begin to possess Anna, with disastrous results for those around her.
11. The Craft: Legacy (Zoe Lister-Jones, 2020)
For any fans of the original who grew up recognizing some of the storylines as problematic (the stigmatization of mental illness; the problematizing of magick as self-defense for marginalized people; the glossing over of Nancy’s abusive home life; the depiction of young women as unable to handle spiritual power without viciously turning on each other), this is a story that sets out to right those many wrongs, while still including the Goth Girl Misfit Magick that provided the core of the first film. It also normalizes period blood in a way that would have been completely unthinkable in the 1990s. Legacy also features an inclusive core cast, including queer and trans characters, and women of color in the starring ensemble—all of which was lacking in the original iteration.
12. Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)
Part of what makes this film spectacular is how beautiful it is. It was shot almost entirely in bright sunlight, defying genre conventions. Even some of the most hideous scenes—including grisly depictions of human sacrifice—are weirdly lovely. And are they truly horrific, the film seems to ask, or are they something that’s part of a culture we simply don’t understand (or don’t want to)?
Meanwhile, in the core of the action, a young, attractive, entitled white man named Christian screws over pretty much everyone around him, in tunnel-vision pursuit of his own self-interest (Manifest Destiny, anyone)? Women, people of color, pagans, his own academic colleagues—no one is safe. But his vulnerable girlfriend, Dani, bears the brunt of his cruelties and coldness. And, as the film slips into a surrealistic revenge fantasy, Christian finally pays the price for all the innocent lives he’s crushed in his own name.
13. No One Gets Out Alive (Santiago Menghini, 2021)
Cleveland has never been so terrifying. An undocumented Mexican immigrant named Ambar comes to live and work in the USA after her mother’s death. Her rooming house—which is gothic enough to border on something between dreamlike and campy—has about eleventy-billion red flags, but Ambar is in desperate straits and is in no position to negotiate for anything better. As the film unfolds, there is something monstrous in the house; but the true horror comes from the bereftness and the utter lack of agency that makes undocumented workers horribly exploited in our country, even today.
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13 “Woke” Horror Movies And Why You Should See Them
Source: Pinoy Inquirer News
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