Given how dismal it has become, I very well couldn’t have expected K-Pop to single-handedly save my summer this time around. Good thing Horror is always there when you need it! So, here’s a look at some of the horror-based content that has been helping K-Pop do the heavy lifting of keeping my mind off of all the “bleh” this summer has been throwing at me.
With Gourley and Rust
In this podcast, Matt Gourley (Drunk History) and Paul Rust (Netflix’s Love) take deep dives into horror franchises. Previous seasons have covered some of the biggies: Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Aliens. This summer they switched it up a bit with their “Shark Weeks” season, with the first half devoted to the films of the Jaws franchise, and the second half blocked off for stand-alone shark and shark-adjacent films like Deep Blue Sea and Piranha.
The duo are genuine fans of the genre and overall, they succeed at creating an enjoyable horror-themed “cozycast” (their term). And the average episode length of 3 hours is perfect for people who just want kick back and listen to some dudes talking in the background about their fave horror films. Except that’s not quite the case. Due to the duo’s penchant for frequently going off on tangents, recognizing that they’ve done so, but then doing nothing to course-correct it, the average percentage of a film’s episode spent talking about the actual film hovers around 55-60%.
Case in point, it was at the 1 hour 27 minute mark of a recent episode where Gourley announced “Okay, so should we dive on into the movie?”
But now that I’ve adjusted my expectations, I can enjoy the podcast more, and this summer’s Shark Weeks episodes have even managed to do the impossible: Make me seriously reconsider that Jaws: The Revenge isn’t all that bad (not counting the whole “shark follows Ellen Brody from the Northeastern U.S. coast all the way down to the Bahamas” and how she keeps referring to it as the original shark from Jaws…the one Roy Scheider blew up into a billion chum chunks).
Fear Street Trilogy (Netflix)
Arriving without almost any fanfare, Netflix’s Fear Street Trilogy did something kind of unprecedented for a film trilogy. Each fully-realized entry was released a week after the previous one. And by fully-realized, I mean they were very much separate films, each with their own characters and storylines, but they all wove together to tell the bigger story of Sarah Fier and the death curse she placed upon the town of Shadyside before being hanged as a witch.
Very loosely based on the late 80s/early 90s teen horror novels of the same name, the Fear Street movies take a reverse chronological approach to their storytelling, as evidenced in their titles: Fear Street 1994, Fear Street 1978 and Fear Street 1666.
What’s great about these films is that each one gives us a different, era-specific horror experience. 1994, which also serves as the wrap-around story, is our Scream-esque entry, full of horror-savvy teens stalked by a familiar trope (the masked killer who may or may not be someone they know), 1978 serves up some original Friday the 13th “summer camp massacre” madness and 1666 takes us to a village in the pre-Salem witch trials era, where superstition and demonic paranoia have already begun take root, and hide an even deeper evil bubbling below the surface (…literally).
I did find each installment to be a tad overlong, some details of the overall story muddled, and was dismayed by the lack of likeable characters (even those you should be rooting for). However, there was still a lot to love, including a fun slasher free-for-all sequence, some inventive and surprising kills, and in the end all three entries provided me with some mindless popcorn-munching fun (Best: 1978).
American Horror Story (season 10)
AHS has always been a bit of a hit-or-miss with me, and seeing as how season 10 just launched, the jury is still out on this one for me. So far, it’s reads like a collection of familiar tropes:
A husband, wife and their young daughter temporarily move to a serene, but eerie, small town where their futures are dependent on them staying put for an extended period (he’s a screenwriter who needs to get over his slump and deliver a script for a new pilot, she’s launching her own interior design business, and redecorating the house they’re staying in is her first job). Their precocious progeny is a violin-playing perfectionist, and while she looks like a cute tween, her personality is very much “weary 35-year old who missed her last therapy session”.
The town also seems to have a rather large vampire population, noticeable due to their identical bald and be-fanged looks, their shared preference for dramatic overcoats, excessive hissing, and their tendency to stalk, chase, and attack this family with the goal of ripping out their throats.
We’ll have to see how it plays out over the next few episodes, but for now, it’s on my Summer Screams list.
Resident Evil 7
My Xbox backlog is so massive that I’m usually a full game behind when it comes to franchise installments, and Resident Evil is no different. RE 8 has been out for a while now, but I’m currently only a couple of chapters in on RE 7. But this is definitely a case of “better late than never” because RE 7 is all about going back to the basics of the survival horror genre, with you creeping around creepy houses looking for creepy clues while avoiding death at the hands of creepy creatures. Much scarier and more satisfying than the action/shooter-driven campaigns of RE 5 and 6, I’ve been playing this one bit by bit, so I can savour its scares over time.
Hammer Horror Puzzle
And then there were those times when I just wanted to chill out and do a jigsaw puzzle. And even then, Horror was there for me.
Pop Culture Problems 