Laughter from the attic: who's afraid of horror movies
Film critic Stanislav Zelvensky told readers about a hundred of the most significant, in his opinion, horror films in the history of cinema — and he did it in such a way that some readers obviously could not help laughing. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.
Stanislav Zelvensky
"100 horrors of Stanislav Zelvensky"
St. Petersburg: "Subscription editions"; Moscow: "Kinopoisk", "Yandex Books", 2025. 256 p.
Having collected 100 fairly different horror films in his book (the chronology of their release also takes a century, for all intents and purposes, from 1922 to 2022), film critic Stanislav Zelvensky complains in the preface about the original flaw of the popular format — lists of all kinds of greatest hits, in which, no matter how hard the expert compiler tries, in an outsider's opinion Inevitably, one finds the absence of something most important or the presence of something completely unnecessary. Intending to "focus on the curious, the underestimated, the undeservedly forgotten," the author of "100 horrors" quite reasonably explains why it makes no sense to include in another collection, for example, the textbook Hitchcock's "Psycho," which has long been gnawed to the skeleton by cultural scientists of all kinds.: "For the thousandth time, digging up the corpse of Norman Bates' mom is unsportsmanlike and will not give me or others any pleasure."
However, the famous and influential exhibits from the golden fund of horror are still presented in the book: fortunately, they managed to do without "The Blair Witch", but there is "The Silence of the Lambs", which Zelvensky, according to his confession, regularly reviews every couple of years. But the "status" of the film does not affect either the volume of micro-essays devoted to it or the depth of analysis. All selected samples of the genre are given three paragraphs each, briefly outlining the plot, squeezing out the semantic and stylistic quintessence, and in the finale offering an aphoristically formulated philosophical "moral of the fable", a key remark from the film reflecting its essence, or even a paradoxical admission by the author why he could not resist the picture of God knows what kind of artistic like Paul Schrader's "Cat People": "No one would think of calling "Humans" a good movie, but falling under his spell is even easier than getting a job at the New Orleans Zoo."
In this sense, all the selected films — both national hits and marginal works familiar only to narrow specialists — are in an equal position with the democratic Zelvensky, who often focuses not on objective authorities, but on personal, subjective "fascination". Therefore, it is often more interesting to find out the opinion of the author of a book about some little-known film than about the same "Silence of the Lambs". In Zelvensky's personal opinion, "Silence" has become more and more interesting over the years, "because the conversation here is on the hottest topic — identity issues. <...> "Silence" offers a uniquely sober and hard look at the subject of self-search and the transformation necessary for this: not only poor Buffalo Bill, but also Starling is trying to turn from an ugly maggot into a butterfly."
An image from the movie "The Silence of the Lambs"
In contrast to the "Silence", which is covered in a multitude of film science identities, one of the most intriguing is the note about David Pryor's film "The Empty Man" (2020) — it makes you really want to see what was annoyingly missed by both viewers and critics against the background of the covid movie distribution convulsions. Now Zelvensky draws attention to this film as "one of the most original, clever and simply scary horror films in many years," although, to be honest, the fleeting analogy with The Matrix is a bit alarming, even if it is formulated not without grace: "The antagonist here, almost like in The Matrix, is not a monster." although it also exists, it is an imaginary order of things, a philosophical concept, an abstraction that has become reality, a "noosphere" poisoned by the idea of evil."
A frame from the movie "The Empty Man"
Zelvensky in "100 horrors" slowly weaves his own inner plot, moving from film to film not just alphabetically.: This is an external, formal principle of composition, in which certain films are not adjacent by chance and not only because they are named with the same or adjacent letters. Although perhaps this is only too apophenic, the reader will be able to discern the deep semantic relationship between Jacques Tourneur's "Night of the Demon", where the main trigger of horror is that the hero learns the date of his death, and Michele Soavi's black romantic comedy "About of death, of love." The idea of this film, according to the critic, is that "true love is possible only in the cemetery — both metaphorically and in the most direct sense," and speaking of the "most tender poetic finale," Zelvensky touchingly ends the description of the film with the word "nyah," which conveys his thoughts and emotions to one of them. characters, a cemetery gravedigger with a developmental delay.
Perhaps the only thing I want to find fault with in "100 horrors" and what I'm tempted to object to is the predictable general theoretical reasoning that the horror genre is more alive than ever, because "the surrounding reality definitely does not favor romcoms." First of all, when did she, by and large, endear them? Secondly, with mass entertainment like movies, it probably works exactly the opposite: from geopolitical turbulence and apocalyptic premonitions, it's good to hide your head in the sand of romcoms or good fairy tales with songs and dances, and in stagnant times, when the "comfort zone" envelops the average person in a too stuffy cocoon, you want dissonances, the hidden corners of the human soul, something creepy and tickling the nerves, so as not to suffocate from boredom.
In general, all such vulgar sociological hypotheses are worth one another, but the class of a film reviewer is determined not by the ability to produce them (it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to get your hands on this), but by individual optics and the ability to reflect it in witty combinations of words. And in this, Zelvensky has few equals among those who write about cinema in Russian, despite all his modesty, with which he calls his collection a "book", refuses to claim membership in the club of real, serious horror fanatics and declares only a timid attempt to "look, flattening his nose on the glass, into this magical a world where laughter can be heard from the attic, chains rattle from the basement, blood flows on the wall and a ray of sunlight is never seen."
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