Ten Days of Terror!: We Are What We Are

Film: We Are What We Are
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine

When I first thought about why there seem to be so many cannibalism stories in horror movies, I wasn’t sure why that would be the case. There are plenty of stories about people getting eaten by something, but getting eaten by humans is its own thing. There seem to be a few of them every year, and while we will get some set in exotic locales (Cannibal Holocaust, for instance), in a lot of ways things are more disturbing when the setting is more familiar and current. We Are What We Are is a case in point. Admittedly, the cannibalism is a kind of surprise moment in the film, but it happens relatively soon, so it’s not a huge spoiler.

What makes We Are What We Are different is not that it’s a cannibal movie or that it’s a cannibal movie that takes place in the current day. No, it’s the reason for the cannibalism. Most of the time, it’s about need, or about someone being severely deranged, or (as in the case of a movie like Ravenous) about power. In We Are What We Are, the cannibalism happens for religious reasons.

To Think That I Saw It...

Film: Mulberry Street
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

Plague and disease is always a popular theme when it comes to horror movies, and since horror movies tent to reflect the current fears of a population, expect the next few years to be filled with plague movies. Most movies of the zombie subgenre are related to plague movies in one way or another—the zombies are the result of something akin to a plague, after all. Zombie-related films like 28 Days Later (and don’t get me started if this is an actual zombie movie or not) often follow the same basic story as well—true of [REC] and its remake and plenty of other films. It’s also true of Mulberry Street.

Interestingly, there’s a lot here similar to werewolf movies as well. We start in an apartment building in New York and the announcement that it has recently been sold to someone starting to gentrify the neighborhood. The tenants of the building will be given the opportunity to stay, more than likely, but probably with massively increased rents. This is going to be the hidden message of Mulberry Street. This is a movie about gentrification the way that Night of the Living Dead was a movie about racism.

Off Script: Stake Land

Film: Stake Land
Format: Blu-ray from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

I promise I won’t get maudlin here. Many of us, even this far removed from the event, still miss the presence of Chip Lary. As it happens, Stake Land was the last review Chip ever posted, and it was a film I asked him to watch. Truthfully, Chip didn’t like the film as much as I do or nearly as much as I would have liked him to. This is a film that I genuinely enjoy. Stake Land isn’t a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets a lot of things right. It also does a nice job in rewriting many of the tropes of a well-established genre, and also manages to create a believable and interesting post-apocalyptic world.

The monsters in Stake Land are vampires, but these are not the typical blood suckers. The classic vampire has a sense of romance about him. The original Dracula was certainly a romantic character. Even most of the violent and bloody vampires from the films have a certain sex appeal to them. Of course, in the past decade or so, vampires have become genuine love interests. In Stake Land, the vampires are feral. They are classic vampires in the sense that they die when staked in the heart or exposed to sunlight, and they feast on blood. That’s where the similarities stop. These vampires are feral, essentially blood-sucking zombies, operating on instinct and attracted to the scent of blood, but unable to think their way out of even simple traps.