Horror is a genre in constant conversation with itself. Faced with the challenge of scaring an audience (a task as uniquely utilitarian in its own way as producing laughter with comedy or titillation with erotica and pornography), filmmakers will naturally turn to the things that scared them. This process of borrowing, recycling, and refining is as integral to horror as sampling is to hip-hop.
Are there cases in both genres where an artist takes advantage of copying rather than reinterpreting the original material? Absolutely, since Strange things to Sean Combs. But more often than not, the exchange between the past and the present is fruitful. Them: the scare has already played with the grainy aesthetics of VHS ringu and The Blair Witch Project through home video recordings made by the killer’s two young Korean-American victims, and with The Texas Chainsaw MassacreEdmund’s signature shot, a scorching sunlit silhouette of a howling madman, during the panic following Edmund’s “audition,” just to name a couple of examples.
In the season’s riveting fifth installment (“Luke 8:17”), the riffs are fast and furious. A sequence in which Edmund rings the doorbell and Dawn answers it deceptively crosses two separate incidents to make them look like the same scene when they are not, as Jonathan Demme did in The silence of the lambs. Edmund’s Raggedy Andy doll speaks to him with a voice that is somehow both absurd and incredibly menacing at the same time, the way the neighbor’s dog speaks to David Berkowitz in the Scorsese-esque serial killer drama that is overlooked by Spike Lee. Sam’s Summer. A supernatural killer who stalks the sleeping, tucks children into their beds and kills while he is invisible to everyone except his victims, who is on the loose, like a slasher none other than Freddy, the damn Krueger from a nightmare on elm street. A murderous moron beats a man to a pulp in the middle of nowhere while he begs for mercy, then disposes of the battered and mutilated body, like it was straight out of Scorsese himself. casino – a gangster movie, sure, but one that pes deeper into horror than all but a few of the modern masters’ films.
The reason this all actually works, rather than looking like someone’s Pinterest horror board, is because creator Little Marvin, director Guillermo Navarro, and writer Tony Saltzman are filtering all of this previous work through a sensibility. and a very own story. Incorporating the aesthetics of Demme, Lee, Craven and Scorsese (the horrors of Buffalo Bill, Son of Sam, Freddy Krueger and Frank Vincent) into the framework of early ’90s Los Angeles black culture is a powerful statement. . It’s a way of giving the existing culture the shape you choose, which is what the greats do.
There’s plenty more to recommend this episode, too. Pam Grier’s performance as Athena, Dawn’s mother, is almost revelatory; If you’ve ever seen your own mother get really sad for messing up something, you’ve seen this woman. (“She’s coming for me and my family, and I’m going to pay for what I did,” she tells her pastor; that doesn’t sound right.)
The revelation that Edmund’s history predates Dawn’s by two years is exposed when he shows up at her house, meets her still-husband, and sees her looking absolutely resplendent in her 1989 best. (I’d feel dishonest if I didn’t admit that the outfits and hairstyles they have been wearing on the truly stunning Deborah Ayorinde are very unfair to those of us who went through puberty during the George HW Bush administration.)
In addition to being terrifying, the scene where Edmund infiltrates young Dawn’s home also helps explain why Dawn porced the father of her child. He is a good guy, handsome and loving and obviously proud of his beautiful wife and her important job. At the same time, however, he repeatedly ignores or downplays her completely accurate instincts regarding Edmund, to which she reacts with what is clearly a resentment built up over some time and repeated practice. It’s not easy to work with the character so skillfully in the context of a confrontation with a man who murdered someone several hours earlier.
So we are left with these revelations: Edmund and Dawn are brother and sister. Edmund is becoming a Raggedy Andy-style serial killer. And whoever he is killing these people, he can and will do it right before Dawn’s eyes.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
