By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
The Onion Axes Smart Questions About Horror
The Onion’s AV Club writers (Noel Murray, Scott Tobias and Nathan Rabin) do a political reading of some horror films you may or may not have thought twice about, including the best of Showtime’s MASTERS OF HORROR series, Joe Dante’s “Homecoming.”
In What Monster Could Have Done This? Horror Movies For Left Wingers, Horror Movies For Right Wingers, the critics write that this genre is often a “better gauge of what’s making the country anxious than opinion polls are.”
Both DEATHDREAM (1974) and HOMECOMING (Showtime, 2005) carry echoes of H.H. Monro’s short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which traumatized soldiers, more dead than alive, come marching home from foreign wars–to the horror of the homeland.
The essay mentions Abel Ferrara’s surprisingly effective 1993 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, set on a military base. The most chilling moment: when pod person Meg Tilly reminds her still-human stepdaughter that no one cares about the alien takeover because “There’s no one like you left.”
Paranoid yet? Another remake is due in 2007. INVASION stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. The director is Oliver Hirshbiegel, who’s best known for making DOWNFALL, the about living and working in the dead heart of the Third Reich in the last days of Nazi Germany. The most chilling moment: when Goebbels refuses to agreea surrender to British and American forces, even though it will mean sparing civilian lives. No, he says, the very young and the very old should be prepared to die in the streets. “It’s their own fault. The people gave us the mandate.“
