One thing I don’t really touch on in my piece about Jeremy Gardner’s fucking excellent new movie, After Midnight: It’s hilarious. Not that I’d bill the thing as a comedy, but if you’re going to play coy with the component parts of a niche as close to my heart as the creature feature, you might as well go all the way and make a good human drama that hits on just about every emotional cylinder possible.
After Midnight is sweet, sad, funny, thoughtful; it’s also scary when it’s time for it to be scary. If you read me on Twitter and you see me bitch and moan about “elevated horror*,” then you might be surprised to find me so fond of a movie that actively tries to deny the audience some of the pleasures of its own genre. But I don’t really think Gardner is “denying” us anything, because he gives so much in exchange for his restraint (including our first full view of “the monster,” which, I don’t know if you remember the swordfight filmed in darkness in Ryuhei Kitamura’s Aragami**, but it’s something like that).
Anyways. I’m gushing. You can read the full article over at Mic.com.
*Hey! I do that in the article, too! Weird. It’s like I really really hate fart-sniffing pretense in my genre entertainment.
**Narrator: “They do not. Nobody does. Ryuhei Kitamura doesn’t even remember Ryuhei Kitamura’s Aragami, c’mon.”
A Constant Visual Feast 