While Yellowjackets does certainly represent traumatic events—a plane crash, wolf attacks, a year and a half in the woods—it seems more interested in the formation of a collective identity in the future through this shared past.

I’ve found myself unable to figure it out completely, to write this film off as “bad.” Do the stylization and the splitting of the film’s narrative, telling two stories in one, guide us to read this film as a criticism of grindhouse movies?

Red Tide remixes vampire lore with crazed artist myths, breeding this notion that some people are born with talent and others aren’t—eschewing the common MFA adage that writing is a war of attrition, and those who ultimately publish are those who never give up.

It’s been a spooky October for the books, and I have the Cinemacabre Month of Mayhem to thank; For this final week, I combed through Twitter-sourced slasher recs. Here, I offer something of a Cinemacabre horror movie marathon guide. Watch if you dare.

In 1992, the camera looks from the sky, an aerial view tracking the highways that divide the city, the impeccable minimalist score by Philip Glass underscoring a general unease. If the white gaze emphasizes the divide of the city, in 2021 the camera flips the urban landscape on its head, projecting views from the ground up on prominent Chicago landmarks, vanishing into the clouds.

Ginger Snaps is a feminist hit, equal parts horrific and ironic. John Fawcett brought screenwriter Karen Walton on “to write the film she’d like to see.” What emerges is horror wielding some of its best tools — a certain level of genre-awareness, monster elements poking holes in our society, some parody that sinks us into the developing terror of the film.

Crisp, understated drama prevails in Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning, an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami story “Barn Burning.” The film operates in a tradition outside of horror, slowly mounting dread.

In bad horror, people get stuck in elevators with the devil. A cop that looks like P!nk tries to find a lost child in a town cursed by mine fires. Bad horror movies are so much more fun to watch together. They’re an event, a drinking game. If you ever actually feel afraid, then sure as a jump scare, there will be some line, some cheesy edit or low-rent demon to make you laugh in a minute, just you wait.

Robert Eggers’s The Witch dramatizes the family’s dissolution and the drudgery of early Massachusetts with Pantone’s 2021 color of the year — Ultimate Gray.

Los Espookys feels like this joyous playtime, operating in a surreal mode of scam artists and lowkey magic.

On David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows, and the sense of being caught between a familiar childhood and an adolescence that’s slowly becoming known.

Yet there’s something massive-feeling about a world grown inaccessible since lockdown, best encapsulated by washed-out black and white shots of tree branches and the sky. The world has gone on, and how do we step back into it?

Aster has pulled off (or gotten away with, depending on where you fall) the sort of masturbatory film bro drivel that’s quick to translate to cocktail party eye rolls. Oh, you saw Midsommar twice? Please tell me more about how it reminded you of Coachella.

Yet, in 2009, we weren’t all in on it. Critics called out a kiss the girls share as exploitative, just making Seyfried and Fox make out for an audience of teenage boys. Had I watched this in high school in 2009, I might have missed it too.

For many episodes, I held my breath, expecting Dani and Jamie to be caught together and subjected to the Lady of the Lake because of their relationship.

The first episode of American Horror Story: Cult, which originally aired in 2017, begins with footage of Trump and Clinton on the campaign trail, followed by the election night reveal as it’s received by a group of well-to-do liberal friends, a fanatic, and a Vassar-dropout in Michigan.

Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake unmoors from time, marking the days instead by shots of Franck’s car pulling into a dirt lot by the woods. Every day, he walks down the same paths, reaching the beach where gay men lay naked and prone on the shore like sunning seals, penises flopped out, bellies bulging over the water as they glance at the latest arrival.

The Invitation inhabits this space of obscured certainty, of seeing just enough to dread the worst, using it to explore the anxieties of changing times and growing apart from friends you've once known.