glitter_n_gore

Happy Black Panther Weekend!

I went last night and it was a million times better than I even expected it to be, and my expectations were HIGH. All my fellow film geeks have been talking about Black Panther for what feels like eons. This is a historic moment in cinema. Along with last year's Get Out and the still upcoming A Wrinkle In Time, black protagonists are finally getting a significant spotlight in mainstream cinema. It's a drop in a very large, very overdue bucket, but it's a step in the right direction.

One of the horror and sci-fi films with black protagonists from last year that you may have missed, along with The Transfiguration, Sleight, and It Comes At Night, is one of the finest zombie movies out there, and a stunningly faithful adaptation to boot: The Girl With All the Gifts.

Watch on YouTube

I am going to spoil a few things here, so tread carefully if you haven't seen it yet.

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It is Women In Horror Month once again, and I picked a theme: Man-Eating Monster Girls. Transformative horror has always been one of my favorite types of horror, the kind of story that lets the characters change and grow. Sometimes that means growing into a flesh-eating monster of some kind.

My original plan was to look at dark coming-of-age stories in general (Stoker, The Witch, The Blackcoat's Daughter, etc.), but I decided to dig into women who take on the mantel of adulthood by consuming human flesh. It's a surprisingly vast sub-genre for something so specific, which makes me wonder exactly why it's so common. What about growing up makes us feel not just different, but downright inhuman?

First, let's run the numbers and see what dominated the box office for 2017. As usual, I'm looking at films that grossed $25 million and higher domestically, with female leads, using Box Office Mojo and The Numbers as my main sources:

Annabelle: Creation - $102.1 million
Alien: Covenant - $74.3 million
Happy Death Day - $55.7 million
Atomic Blonde - $51.7 million
47 Meters Down - $44.3 million
Ghost in the Shell - $40.6 million
The Shape of Water - $39.2 million
Underworld: Blood Wars - $30.4 million
Rings - $27.8 million
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - $26.8 million

The most successful horror movie of the year was IT, which got a cozy $327 million domestically. Right behind it was Jordan Peele's exceptional Get Out, clocking in at over $175 million. (The most successful movie of the year was The Last Jedi, surprisingly absolutely no one, I’m sure.) Get Out and The Shape of Water are killing it in both box office numbers, and awards nominations. May they win all of the things! I do sometimes conflate horror with action and sci-fi, depending on the overall vibe I get from it, but we are in a new golden age of the genre. Remakes and sequels notwithstanding, people are showing up for these movies in force. More importantly, they’re showing up for movies with female leads, and that is heartening and fantastic.

Now, as I mentioned in my year-end roundup, one of the new variables in film releases now that we're deeper into the digital age is many of them come out on streaming platforms. How do I judge the "success" of a film like Gerald's Game or I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House when they don't have any box office numbers to crunch? Do we go by number of clicks? Positive user reviews? Star ratings? What's the consensus for how to break that down? One of the greatest strengths of the streaming format is the wealth of foreign films or limited releases that are more widely available than they ever have been before. But I am curious to see how those filmmakers are compensated and recognized, and what leads someone to choose a smaller screen as their main purview.

Next time, I’m talking about one of the movies that showed up on almost all of my friends’ year-end Top Whatever lists, which barely cracked $3 million worldwide, and didn’t reach my eyeballs until it appeared on Netflix: Raw.