Summer Horror Movies
May. 24th, 2023 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI used to watch a lot of movies, and I mean a lot of movies. This isn’t because I had any particular fondness for The Art of Cinema. Rather, I used to go on a lot romance-dates and friend-dates, and going to see movies is just what you did if you wanted to hang out with people in the 2000s.
I’m not sure if this is still the case, but there used to be movie theaters everywhere in Atlanta and its suburbs, from hipster-indie to mega-corporate. There was a thriving culture around these theaters that involved tailgating and indulging in recreational pharmaceuticals in the parking lot.
( For the uninitiated: tailgating is either putting down the tail of your pickup truck or opening the hatch of your SUV and having a keg party out of the back of your vehicle. You do this in a crowded parking lot while playing your radio, while everyone else is also having a party and playing their radio. Sometimes people set up a grill or set off fireworks. Generally tailgating is done in tandem with sports games, the point being to get there super early to avoid traffic and then to build hype until gametime. )
So me and whoever I was with would have a few beers with strangers, maybe pick up some weed, and then go watch a movie. I must have seen every movie that came out in theaters in the 2000s, and it was a good decade to watch movies. There wasn’t yet a Disney/Marvel monoculture of blockbusters, and smaller studios put out a steady stream of horror movies based on everything from literary short fiction to whatever was going on with Snakes on a Plane (which is surprisingly decent tbh).
Horror movies are a lot of fun if you’re young and buzzed and horny, but I gradually lost my taste for them after I moved to Philadelphia, where being visibly intoxicated in a movie theater is generally frowned upon. Watching people get murdered just isn’t as much fun if everyone is sober and no one is yelling at the screen.
Anyway, it turns out that what I enjoy about horror movies isn’t the violence, but rather the way every element of the medium works to establish a spooky atmosphere. So I was thinking, what if I gave myself permission to watch only the opening half hour, and then I just read the rest of the plot on Wikipedia? There have been a ton of cool indie horror movies released over the past few years, and it might be fun to catch up with my backlog over the summer.
I’m not sure if this is still the case, but there used to be movie theaters everywhere in Atlanta and its suburbs, from hipster-indie to mega-corporate. There was a thriving culture around these theaters that involved tailgating and indulging in recreational pharmaceuticals in the parking lot.
( For the uninitiated: tailgating is either putting down the tail of your pickup truck or opening the hatch of your SUV and having a keg party out of the back of your vehicle. You do this in a crowded parking lot while playing your radio, while everyone else is also having a party and playing their radio. Sometimes people set up a grill or set off fireworks. Generally tailgating is done in tandem with sports games, the point being to get there super early to avoid traffic and then to build hype until gametime. )
So me and whoever I was with would have a few beers with strangers, maybe pick up some weed, and then go watch a movie. I must have seen every movie that came out in theaters in the 2000s, and it was a good decade to watch movies. There wasn’t yet a Disney/Marvel monoculture of blockbusters, and smaller studios put out a steady stream of horror movies based on everything from literary short fiction to whatever was going on with Snakes on a Plane (which is surprisingly decent tbh).
Horror movies are a lot of fun if you’re young and buzzed and horny, but I gradually lost my taste for them after I moved to Philadelphia, where being visibly intoxicated in a movie theater is generally frowned upon. Watching people get murdered just isn’t as much fun if everyone is sober and no one is yelling at the screen.
Anyway, it turns out that what I enjoy about horror movies isn’t the violence, but rather the way every element of the medium works to establish a spooky atmosphere. So I was thinking, what if I gave myself permission to watch only the opening half hour, and then I just read the rest of the plot on Wikipedia? There have been a ton of cool indie horror movies released over the past few years, and it might be fun to catch up with my backlog over the summer.
