The Rewind

In case you haven’t heard, horror belongs to the content creators now. With Curry Barker and Kane Parsons making their theatrical debuts this month, the YouTube-to-multiplex pipeline is all anyone wants to talk about. So you might be forgiven for missing Passenger, André Øvredal’s wide-release horror movie that slipped into theaters last week with little fanfare.

It may not be as good as Obsession or Backrooms, but as we endlessly look to the future of the genre, I find myself comforted by the fact that movies like Passenger prove there’s still life in horror’s past. I’m talking, of course, about old-fashioned directors-for-hire like Øvredal.

For a long time, my personal poster child for work-for-hire directors has been Brad Anderson. Anderson’s got a few certified bangers under his belt – The Machinist and Session 9 are probably the works that will withstand the test of time – and a whole bunch of second-tier titles like The Call or Stonehearst Asylum that have earned a few devoted fans.

(And in case you doubt the truth of that statement, I checked on Letterboxd, where user flaviapedia wrote, in their review of Vanishing on 7th Street, that “if me and Hayden Christensen were the last two people on the whole planet earth, I wouldn’t complain that much.” Three-and-a-half stars.)

But over the last few years, Øvredal has come on strong as a horror journeyman, too. There are a few things that Anderson and Øvredal share in common that stand out to me in the current business landscape of Hollywood:

Two decades ago, this would have been the bare minimum of a Hollywood career. These days, though? It seems like most of the directors who don’t write their own stuff have been relegated to television, with film reserved for the visionary auteurs and/or the legacy names. Those talents who do continue to work in the medium - who avoid becoming the in-house talent for streamers like Netflix - are worth celebrating, especially when their movies aren’t half-bad.

So while Passenger is not going to set the horror community on fire – especially when wedged between the theatrical releases of Obsession and Backrooms and their wunderkind talents – it’s still a sign that the old systems still work a little. Here’s hoping Anderson and Øvredal have many more $10 million dollar horror films in them before the whole industry gives way to prompts.

Matthew Monagle

It’s a shame that “underseen” is so often synonymous with “international,” but we live in a world where there’s too much to watch even before we get to the copyright laws that make foreign films hard to catch. That’s part of why we love having freelance film critic Rob Hunter write about Asian horror cinema for us every month. Based on the resurgence of ‘90s titles in the horror canon, odds are that some of the movies Rob writes about will be mainstays in years to come. Yes, maybe even Killer Karaoke.

Smarter writers than I have connected the dots between David Lynch and the new wave of liminal horror. But with the aforementioned Backrooms hitting theaters this weekend, now’s a good time to revisit Inland Empire, one of the rising stars of Lynch’s ouevre and an oft-cited inspiration for liminal horror.

Quick hits from around the world of horror and indie journalism.

Want more? Certified Forgotten also offers a weekly podcast series featuring some of the biggest names in the horror genre. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast platform of choice.