Horror films

This month in culture: January 2025

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl January 3, Netflix The panic that gripped the McMorris household in November 2023 was rivaled by that of the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. Greater even, for this crisis could not be solved with a credit card and the willingness to fight hand-to-hand against fellow Costco members. Aardman Animations, the last bearable producer of children’s entertainment, was running out of clay. The sole remaining British factory that produced the stuff behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep had shuttered. Only a pitchfork would suffice. The advent of CGI has fried parental eyeballs with neon ever since Toy Story and only Aardman has resisted the trend, delivering us stop-motion Stan and Ollie routines.

culture

The lamentable rise of VFX in horror films

The Thing is not a monster movie. Sure, John Carpenter was remaking the 1951 The Thing from Another World, itself an adaptation of the 1938 pulp-sci-fi novella Who Goes There? — but it’s not a shlocky B-movie horror. It’s too vicious, cynical and psychological for that. Rather, it’s the ultimate paranoia thriller. For the unfamiliar, the 1982 flick is about a group of researchers, stuck in an Antarctic base, who discover a strange shape-shifting alien, which consumes its victims and then mirrors their look, smell, speech and manner. They’re all marooned together, being hunted down by an unearthly terror, and any of them — friend, stranger, dog — could be it, waiting to strike.

vfx horror films