The best horror films are arthouse.

A series of positive developments rabbit bite start with Sundance Film Festival this year. During the review, the Australian horror film of actress and TV director Dinah Reed was bought by the company Netflix. Usually video streaming companies are hailed at the Park City Film Festival as the possible saviors of independent films, small ones often with minor stars, a paraphrase of “few tickets sold” in recent years. In 2023, hope mixed with fear because everything platformsLeading Netflix is ​​trying to shift focus from subscriber growth to revenue, with all the resulting changes in content purchase costs. This is a different story, partly told here. When they are, acquisitions of streaming players at the Sundance festival fast and directand with the departure of their representatives from the ski resort, a longer and more grueling phase 2 begins, which is handled by more modest distributors.

I opened this bracket to say that rabbit bite it was one of the red enne’s solid signings at the Sundance Film Festival. Another aspect is that several other horror films have had the same luck. There A24who played Ace Taker at this year’s Oscars bought Talk to mein which a group of friends participate in a session while Amazon Prime Video secured distribution rights My mother’s skin, a folk horror inspired by the beliefs of Filipino culture. The second will be paired with platform A. Nanny, a folk horror inspired by the beliefs of Senegalese culture. In 2022 Nanny it won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Drama Competition category at the Sundance Film Festival, becoming the first horror film. History repeats itself, but the question is also different: horror films are watched, loved, commented on, generate fame, the brightest representatives of which are Anya Taylor-Joy, and more recently Mia Goth. They spawn viral TikTok phenomena like Mia Goth screaming “Please I’m a Star” (in a scene from Pearl

Tee West) or ballet M3gun, the latest hypertech incarnation of the killer doll. First of all, the horror brought public attention to two names of young directors who are considered among the most promising at the moment: Robert Eggerswhich definitely helped start it all in 2015 with WitchAND Ari Asterdirector hereditary – Roots of Evil AND Midsommar – Village of the Damned (about which we then published a negative review). The second also laid the foundation for the aestheticized (sunny, flowery) direction of folk horror. And who knows if Nanny AND Talk to me they would have suffered the same fate if not for the attention shown midsummer. Confirming it horror pullsa number of positive developments rabbit bite continued from the first place the film occupied at the time of writing, in the ranking of the most watched by Netflix subscribers, also in Italy.

I typed the word horror, but I could add “sublime”, i.e. elevated: increased horror. A hotly contested definition. Except, probably M3gun, all the films mentioned above could be attributed to a subgenre or direction, not without controversy, with eyes fixed on the sky in a gesture of humility and contradictions of order. First Steve Rose on The keeper circled a number of films, naming them in a 2017 article: “post-horror”. In a text written five years later and published in the same online magazine called I called it “post-horror” – and now I created a monsterthe author recalls that the reaction of the fans was immediately violent: some accused him of elitist snobbery, others began to erase the boundary just outlined, explaining this by the fact that horror had been high since at least 1922 (the year Nosferatu F. V. Murnau, even if in 22 the concept of genre did not exist). It must be said that trying to bring order to the general chaos of the world, even with a definition, is always more difficult than letting us slide back into the unknowable: I’m not saying that all definitions are good, but it seems to me that trying to make one thing more significant than necessary, to break her. In general, the label was created to identify products”arthousewould not have taken root at all if it were completely unrealistic. For Rose post-horror undermines the vague area around the genre that tends to confirm viewers’ expectations, i.e. some writers choose to ignore those expectations to the point of questioning the very categorization of these films as those that frighten and induce disgust. Rose mentions, among other things, It comes at night, a ghost story AND Witch.

The term “sublime horror” carved into the films themselves prefigures the term “post-horror”. It first appeared online on a forum in 2010, then was relaunched by Simon Oakes, the company’s president and CEO hour

ammer Film Productions to capture the feel of some of the London production company’s films. Since 2014 Google Trends Curve associated with the keyword “sublime horror”, the ascent begins: this is the year babadook Jennifer Kent, who during this time has become a symbol of the queer community. 2015 – year Witch (stylized VWitch)will come to Italy in 2016 Should, set in Detroit, in a retro present made even more vague by Disasterpiece’s pixelated soundtrack; then it was the turn hereditary Ari Aster. All these works deal with the themes of a dysfunctional family, mourning, damaged and suffering interpersonal relationships. Moreover, everyone was Shine bright. The same cleaning service was reserved for X: Sexy Horror Story, veteran Tee West, a dirty and evil horror film whose soul does not fit the chosen production, perhaps motivated by the fact that the film was supposed to be released under the banner of A24. I know that this opinion is rarely shared, and I have already quarreled with friends and acquaintances to support it, but no one will get me out of my head that X not only is he wrong in directing, but that his mistake is a confirmation of the continuing trend towards aestheticization.

Sorry if I’ve gone around the universe and all, but it helped me paint the context it fits in. rabbit bitea title that makes me think more of a song for a village festival, like horse dancewhich to the film (in English Run Bunny Run). Bite (sigh) has an invisible but carefully constructed direction, so in the first place, the blood does not flow until it is in color harmony with the sheets. The monsters the protagonist encounters (Sarah Snook, Shiv from succession) he carries inside the same ones that he sees outside, we do not know whether real behaviors and actions are presented or their sublimation on a metaphorical and hallucinatory level. Device dysfunctional family it doubles: going up (the protagonist’s family of origin) and going down (the protagonist’s family), evil flows downstream like a river rising upstream.

Failure in the positive streak rabbit bite were lukewarm reviews, receiving a meta score of 52 on Metacritic. In any case, I liked the film, primarily because it decides not to define what we see, because it is intermediate, on one side or the other, in relation to the dividing line between the configuration of paranoia and reality. But still Bite reminds me that sublime/smart/post/non-existent horror, in short, this way of working in the gray zone around the genre, was an achievement to take with you on auto-pilot, just like Eggers, Astaire, and other representatives of that season they decided to dedicate themselves to more free and personal projects, which I think confirms the thesis of those who considered them non-horror directors and who jumped on the horror train for the chance to make a film. Around reference works such as Witch

or hereditary Meanwhile, a secondary production has flourished, which does not go to the theater, finds success either with critics or with the public, but refers to something previous through a more or less developed procedural, manneristic component. Implicit recognition of the importance of some cornerstones and at the same time a step in the direction normalization a certain way of creating horrorwhich at least will stop generating controversy.