A collection of our best posts of the week in film 2 / 12 Ever since Jason Voorhees skulked across Camp Crystal Lake, the slasher has long been obsessed with the aesthetic constraints of the forest, treating it as the basis for endless nightmarish scenarios. They are insulated hellscapes, places where gore and screams are absorbed. In slashers, death keeps the woods buzzing with anonymous life.
Chris Nash’s feature film debut, , immediately involves the audience in the shifting mire of the slasher’s ecosystem, with its protagonist Johnny (Ry Barrett) crawling out from a layer of silt and dead leaves after a fairly innocuous conversation between disembodied voices (and the stealing of a cursed amulet, of course). It’s like the woods themselves are possessed, blurring the line between setting and characters–all of which is characteristic of Nash’s unusual filmmaking. Background bleeds into foreground, action into inaction, violence into natural serenity.
- Anna McKibbin 3 / 12 During the press tour for , filmmaker George Miller was asked repeatedly how the film connected to the previous three installments in the . It was a fair question, prompted mainly by the fact that Tom Hardy, an actor in his 30s, was recast in the title role originated by Mel Gibson, who’s about 20 years his senior. Was it supposed to be a sequel? A reboot? A reimagining? Miller danced around the question time and time again, most often coming back to the term “revisiting.
” What that means .
