Spring (2014)

Always on the lookout for monster movies that venture outside the norm, writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Spring caught my eye—it even received plaudits from Guillermo del Toro, who referred to it as a “Lovecraftian film.” I personally think you’d have to have a pretty broad definition of “Lovecraftian” for this to fit the label, but I guess I can also see where he’s coming from—this is dealing with things strange and ancient that span across human history, things with a certain inexplicable nature, and things that really blur the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy (which is sort of theme in the movie itself.) Despite what some websites will tell you, though, this is definitely not a horror movie, even with some of the grotesque imagery and violent moments (this is the same sort of dispute with online resource genre tags I got into with Lamb—why must these massive websites be so very wrong all the time!), but a fantastical romantic drama, which is certainly unique, and is totally up del Toro’s alley given his own monster filmography.

Creature Classic Companion: It Follows (2014)

It Follows managed to crack a certain critical barrier among horror movies when it was released, garnering the kind of widespread praise that these things only rarely get. Not being a horror fan, but reading a lot of movie websites at the time, I heard a lot about it, and saw it held up as a new sort of innovative, self-aware (but not self-parodying) fright flick, one of the select few from the middle of the previous decade being touted. I can imagine this was at least partially due to it straying away from the found footage-focused paradigm that proliferated back then. I also imagine that it has to do with its efficient pitch, one with a primal meaning at the centre of it that still allowed for a depth of symbolism: a sexually-transmitted curse that puts you in the sights of a methodically murderous shape-changing entity, one that only the cursed people can see and that will not stop until you are dead or you pass it on to someone else…but with the possibility of it going back to you once its current target has been dealt with. It’s a gimmick for sure, one that comes with its set of rules—and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s a subset of horror fans who love rules—but it also intelligently plays with the fears of its adolescent target audience, and director David Robert Mitchell uses the camera to show all the the ways that the gimmick can sow paranoia.