Grapefruit

Film: Bring Her Back
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Some movies are hard to write about for a variety of reasons. It can be that the film doesn’t have a great deal of plot, which for me is problematic, since I tend to be concerned with narrative more than anything else. In the case of Bring Her Back, the problem is one of the actual story. There’s a lot here that I don’t want to reveal, not even under a spoiler tag. This is a movie that everyone should go into as cold as possible, and I don’t want to be the source of even potentially ruining that. So, I’m going to be talking more in generalities here, and won’t be exploring that far into the movie—even some of the details should be revealed here in the film itself, not on a blog.

What you should know (and probably do know, based on the title and the knowledge that this is a horror movie) is that this is a film about bringing someone back from the dead. If we’ve learned anything from literature based on this theme, we know that it’s always a terrible idea. We learned this from The Monkey’s Paw, Pet Sematary, and pretty much any book or film that involves bringing back the spirit of someone who has died. With the possible exception of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it’s pretty much a universal.

Give 'Em a Hand

Film: Talk to Me
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

Every time it feels like I’m going to get back into blogging more regularly, life seems to happen, and sadly I don’t see this changing until the start of next year. I’ve had Talk to Me recommended to me several times, and I had it sitting on a table for more than a week before I finally got the chance to watch it. Seeing it, I’m starting to wonder some things about my movie watching. Talk to Me is very much everything you likely want in a horror movie, and yet there was something about it that left me very much wanting.

What this has done, though, is given my some perspective on the horror genre, something that I am embarrassed to say has taken me until now to realize. Many, many horror movies deal with younger protagonists and friend groups. I always assumed at least at some level that this was because horror movies are often seen as kids’ fare, the sort of movies that are made to appeal to teens and 20-somethings. This gives the intended audience protagonist that they can feel connected to, and this is almost certainly a part of the truth. However, upon watching Talk to Me, I have realized another truth about character age in this genre: younger people are often used in these movies because many of them require the characters to make decisions that are clearly wrong, and that would clearly not be made by someone with even a little experience at life.