The movie that scared the hell out of Stephen King: “Tense and thought provoking as well as visceral”
We are in desperate need of new weirdos in Hollywood, with the reigning royalty of the film industry being directors who have worked for multiple decades without stopping, and quite frankly, are stealing all the air in the room. But with the rise of auteurs like Julia Ducournau, Luna Carmoon and Jane Schoenbrun, a new era of filmmaking is slowly dawning on us, with beautifully odd and complex stories that showcase the power of a cinema we haven’t previously experienced, allowing for people typically excluded from this world to share their unique voices.
But there have also been new directors on the scene who have shaken up the conventions of other established genres, with one filmmaker in particular being praised by Stephen King for his revolutionary take on the horror.
Robert Eggers has wonderfully disturbed the peace within the film industry with his strange and surrealistic revisions of classical fairy tales, putting a modern twist on conventional story-book images and characters and making something entirely new. Eggers finds true creativity and innovation through careful destruction, breathing new horrors into the tame stories of the past. His 2019 film The Lighthouse was critically praised for the absurd and weirdly sexual relationships between two isolated lighthouse keepers, realised by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.
The film has a nightmarish tint as both men slowly lose their minds within the confines of this island, becoming competitive with each other in their unhinged madness and appetite for physical intimacy and connection. It is one of the more bizarre horror films that exists (if you can call it that), and it marked a turning point in Pattinson’s career as he embraced these types of stories, also starring in Good Time that year.
However, the film that put Eggers on the map was The Witch, released in 2015 and starring Anya Taylor-Joy. Set in 1630s England, it follows a farmer who relocates his family to a remote plot of land near a forest, where strange things begin to happen. It’s immersive and haunting in its portrait of paranoia and religious unrest, creating supernatural tension through the mindset and beliefs of the people at that time.
When discussing the film, Stephen King was quick to praise it, saying, “The Witch scared the hell out of me. And it’s a real movie, tense and thought-provoking as well as visceral”. Given that King is somewhat an expert in horror, his stamp of approval carries a lot of weight, considering his own talent at creating suspense and dread through the supernatural.
Eggers has continued to broaden the conventions and style of this genre with his later film The Northman, which also starred Anya Taylor-Joy alongside Alexander Skarsgard. His next film, Nosferatu, will be released shortly, and is a retelling of the infamous vampire from the perspective of a woman who is the subject of the creature’s infatuation. It will no doubt be told in his signature gothic style, and the project reunites him with Willem Dafoe, with Lily Rose-Depp, Bill Skarsgard and Aaron-Taylor Johnson also starring in the film.
