Film | by Shane “Family Friendly” Hnetka
It’s October and that means that I’ve been writing another 31 Days of Horror on the blog. This year’s theme is Family Horror Fun. Families being hunted by monsters and killers! Families hunting and killing unsuspecting wanderers! Families moving into haunted houses! Families haunting houses! All sorts of family fun.
Family Horror Fun
I never realized how much families show up in horror movies. My girlfriend suggested the topic to me, and after quickly looking at what movies would fall into the category I was shocked at the plethora of cinema that has families facing their worst nightmares. Well, yes, there are a lot of horror movies featuring masked killers with warped families hunting down promiscuous teens. But there are so much more about a family forced to face some sort of horrifying evil.
If you want to really freak out your audience, you go for familiar surroundings. And the family dynamic is ripe for threats, drama and horror. It’s for the most part more relatable than a bunch of one-dimensional teens running for their lives and doing something stupid that gets them killed.
There are so many movies that I would like to touch on for this year’s that sadly I think a lot are going to be left out that I would like to include. We will have to see. The month isn’t over yet.
What is Cinema?
A little while ago, legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese was asked what he thought of the current pop culture phenomenon of superhero movies, particularly the Marvel cinematic universe. He responded by saying that they’re not cinema. This caused a nerd uproar.
Francis Ford Coppola jumped in and agreed with Scorsese, and went a step further calling the movies “despicable”.
I don’t think superhero movies are despicable, I happen to enjoy them. But yes, they’re not cinema. At least not the kind of cinema Scorsese and Coppola helped define. And getting mad at two filmmakers who helped create masterpieces of cinema is silly. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. You don’t have to agree with them.
Or you could agree with them and still like super-movies. It’s working for me.
Shane Hnetka is a made-in-Saskatchewan film and comic book nerd. His column “Sunday Matinee” appears weekly on Dog Blog.