#i wanna make pretty renders of the kill box dude

[littlebittyginge]

Tubes? Tubes.

(animation WIP! 🎉)

[delusion-of-negation]

On another note Lucifer is actually pretty enjoyable in a campy way as long as you don’t think too hard about it being related to sandman

I haven't watched that yet, so I'll check it out! On the subject of supernatural shows, I'd recommend Diablero on Netflix - it's really good, probably the best of that kind of show out at the moment (better than the more recent Supernatural series), and it reminds me a lot of the Constantine movie that had Keanu Reeves in it (which I really like). Also, Love Death and Robots is really good, and I especially liked Sonnie's Edge - that episode was dark and really well crafted; the sound, the imagery (idk if metaphor is the right word, but y'all know what I mean), the twists, the writing, it was really well put together.

On a massive tangent (but since we're talking about watching things on Netflix), I'm still looking for a good horror movie that either isn't pretentious or is good enough to carry its pretentiousness. This new wave of pretentious horror films (alongside boring cookie cutter ones and so many sequels and remakes and spin-offs) is getting really tiresome, because they seem to think that if you just say it's a horror film and kill a few people in the few brief breaks we get from having depression or philosophy forced down our throats, then that makes it a horror film... it's like no dude, you've got to make it scary. I clearly don't mind having metaphors, deeper messages, etc (again, Sonnie's Edge, and Love Death and Robots as a whole, uses that stuff well, and I like other stuff that does too, like Annihilation and The Night Eats The World), but I just don't want that stuff to come at the cost of what makes a film good.

Like, Annihilation was good because it actually managed to be creepy and unnerving (honestly, that film genuinely triggered some really specific OCD shit I have, and that was great, haven't been genuinely scared by a horror film in years... like, sometimes I just wanna feel like clawing my skin off after watching a horror film, is that too much to ask), and the characters were good, and when the weird fight happened towards the end it was a little anticlimactic, but it was still alright because you had actually invested time in her character growth and it was interesting to watch her figure out what was happening and come up with a solution; also it didn't spell shit out for you, like it had enough faith in the audience to expect them to notice tiny details on their own. The Night Eats The World was pretty good too because even though it was slow and quiet, you could feel the build up, you cared about the character, etc.

But then you had Bird Box that had such a good premise but then let you down at every hurdle - the character growth was completely missing, the jumping between times just caused spoilers, the creatures were inconsistent and absolutely shit (like you can have an unexplained monster but you need to do it right, inconsistency ruins immersion, these monsters just did whatever was convenient for the plot, for example, you can't look at them through a video but the news footage at the beginning didn't kill anyone and you could still see shapes and colours through the blindfold, and one person was willing to immediately crash a car to kill themself and someone they've loved for their whole life but another dude could resist it for long enough to protect some people he's known just a few years, it didn't make sense), the ableism was annoying (legit a friend said to me "The mentally ill can't go crazy because they're already crazy." and it's like dude the creatures made people suicidal by showing them something that would push them to suicide, mental illness doesn't render you incapable of being pushed to suicide, and they literally did "go crazy" if they were already "crazy", mentally ill people became dangerous and sporadically deranged, while mentally sound people killed themselves), and the worst thing was the sound design (look, if you have a movie where you can't see and you're being guided by sound, fucking get the sound right, make it get louder and quieter based on closeness, use the speakers to give it some direction, but instead some fucking wind-chimes were just as loud across a river and down the path as they were right next to them, and the birds were just as loud all the way through the forest except quiet when the creatures started talking... which makes no sense because the movie was literally named based on the fact that the birds made noise when the creatures were about). Also Ravenous/Les Affamés was SO BAD - if I wanted to watch people sit solemnly in silence for hours, only broken by the occasional bad joke, I'd go work in an office, and there was absolutely no substantial plot or tension, it just dragged on and on while you sat there wishing the zombies would just come in and eat these shitty characters.

I'm starved man, I need good horror, but Hollywood and Netflix are just churning out either cookie cutter plots, endless sequels, or pretentious shit that lacks any of the things that make a horror movie good. And don't even get me started on found footage films, I am so tired of people sacrificing a lot of quality when it comes to character building and cinematography and basically every aspect of the movie, just to have it be found footage style - like, that style can work, but not if you are fucking up everything else about the movie and not even using that style right. Cloverfield did it right. Apollo 18 did it so badly, and had such a shit plot, that I feel like it should be a criminal offense to call that atrocity a film.

EDIT: I forgot to add that The Purge series is good, it takes the slasher formula and does something new with it, and it manages to get political points across without preaching to you or being full of itself. And despite having messages and stuff, it still manages to be a good horror film - they don't detract from the film, and they didn't sacrifice the quality or horror for the sake of having a message.