Angel Heart (Angel's Heart, 1987) is based on a multifaceted metagenre game.
The semantic and iconographic weight of the narrative figure of the private detective - the entire system of references, quotes and associations that always makes such plots symbolically potent and indicative - logically led to the expansion of implications, which necessarily led to the metaphysical terrain: Angel Heart, based on the novel Fallen angel Williama Hjortsberga, is certainly the most intriguing Parkerovo realization.
Combination of film elements Blackand horror was a well-chosen framework for another dramatization faustovskog motive: when Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) hires private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) to look for his old debtor, the plot that is already inscribed in the names of the main protagonists becomes for Parker an (un)conscious search for identity that ends in the horror of realization: a man, without even knowing it, searches for his own soul only to discover in the end that he has long since sold and lost it. Is this, in fact, an essential insight or revelation to which the private detective, a hero who investigates the corruption of others, is destined, only to discover the same corruption in himself and in a world that has long since lost its social innocence?
Opting in Evil Dead II (Evil Death 2, 1987) to interpret the sequel primarily as a remake, raimi actually 'clarifies' its own authorial intention by shifting the accent more obviously towards the comic pole: the intervention and reconfiguration of the predecessor is carried out precisely in the re-balancing of horror and laughter. Therefore, both the bloody spectacle and the timed humor take on the characteristics of comic absurdity and 'debauchery', which was also the tendency that the third sequel Army of Darkness (Army of Darkness, 1992) logically and purposefully led in the direction of 'irresponsible' farce.
And in The Lost Boys (The Lost Boys, 1987), Schumacher effectively mixes horror with carefully placed humor. Horror motifs are often used as convenient metaphors for reinforcing and systematizing existential themes, especially in a teenage setting. Thus, in The Lost Boys, the vampire narrative and iconography (which has already become part of popular culture, which is mostly aimed at young people) encompass various aspects of teenage rebellious, renegade confrontation with the world of adults and 'normals', which does not lead, in the director's intelligent decision, to major changes in the ideology of the genre.
In the eighties, the once powerful vampire mythology was devalued, and in near dark (Near Darkness, 1987) Bigelow has pointed to possible ways out of creative paralysis, in a way that is different from the one offered by Schumacher. In her version, the vampire film can be renewed if it intersects with other generic frameworks, if its signs are applied in a different context: near dark has combined horror with road film, especially westerns.
In this combination, standardized tropes were ingeniously deployed, which not only revealed the essential connection between horror and Westerns (in drawing parallels between vampires and Indians or the classic figure of the outlaw), but also brought in the necessary fresh symbolism. Among other things, the author will in near dark to elaborate through metaphor clean blood.
Rubenov The Stepfather (Stepfather, 1987) is, in genre diachrony, not only one of the most important horror films of the eighties, but also a work that used the generic framework for an in-depth examination of specific family dynamics, which is the focus of both a branch of melodrama and horror and thriller narratives that take place in the domestic space. The main focus is Shadow of a Doubt (1943) in the treatment of the province, but with an important difference: Hitchcock's The villain arrives in the town to bring evil and corruption, thus showing that the world is a terrible place and that it won't be long before the last oases of peace will disappear. Ruben's antagonist, on the other hand, comes to once again seek and achieve the sought-after traditional values, to once again try to start a happy family.
The director emphasized the overall behaviorism of the title character (an excellent role) Terry O'Quinna) that the conservative functioning of the family is crucial to the concept of normality. As long as his family is together and as long as family considerations and care are maintained, the Stepfather has no murderous impulses: Ruben has constructed a powerful metaphor that finds the source of violence not in conventional genre etiology, but in an extremely interesting - in this respect, The Stepfather It also brings indicative sociological conclusions - a stance on the imbalance in the existing social constellation where violent eruptions are taking place precisely because there is no longer enough 'normality' that could prevent it.
In strictly generic terminology, Stepfather has the qualities of both Same and Other, which produces fruitful disseminations in a seemingly simple story, brilliantly realized in a short sequence in which the villain longingly observes the happiness of another family, and then the girl turns to him before entering the house and waves: the right address.
This year, a star director was also promoted, who will perhaps take the most emphatic path from the obscure to the auteur within the framework of low-budget extravaganza to mainstream Oscar-winning: Jackson's luxuriously ludicrous Bad Taste (Bad taste) is an ingenious mix of various trash elements, from provocation and irritation to visual excesses on the trail John Waters, to a plot that comes as if it were 'borrowed' from some third-rate sci-fi film from the fifties.
But these low-genre games turn the film into a hilarious parody of an alien invasion that wants to use humans as a weapon. fast foodIn such a 'surrealistic' context, it is not illogical that the main hero would become the very character (then a thin and bald Jackson) who is left literally without half a brain! Which is, of course, both a metapoetic comment and a supremely teasing proof of the director's brilliant comedic intelligence.
However, the most prominent place in 1987 belongs, of course, to the greatest Master: Prince of Darkness (Princ tame) Yippee Carpenter's the most esoteric (masterpiece): where in other films there is suspense, claustrophobia and horror, here there is (meta)physics and (meta)poetics.
The rhythm is unusually slow, the exposition long, the atmosphere a dominant expression of horror that increases with each subsequent clue, discovery and event, because the director finds the source of evil in the realm of atoms and particles: it is inscribed in the very 'order of the universe'. The green water/slime is the habitat of a demonic agent, but it can also be the primordial substance from which all life developed: every phenomenon has its anti-phenomenon, just as every human being has a reflection that is not identical to him. The membrane that bursts, the border that collapses, the demarcation that is suspended, are embodied in the mirror, the screen from which darkness and shadow arrive, which reflects the combined forces of religion and science, but also opposing forces.
Precisely because it speaks of the birth of a new life, a new diabolical incarnation (has pregnancy ever been presented more hideously?), Prince of Darkness tension is replaced by repulsion, flight from the monstrous - by recoil from the abject, terror from thanatological certainty - by the thrill of a new beginning.
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