The trailer for Juan of the Dead, Cuba’s first horror film, just blew me away.
There are a couple teasers floating around youtube that play up the entrepreneurial “We kill your loved ones so you don’t have to” aspect of the plot: this one, for example.
Juan of the Dead, like Attack the Block, looks set to play with monster movie cinematic vocabulary using settings that are less comfortable, less upper-middle-class, and, frankly, less white than those of the traditional US-made horror film. I only slept for a handful of hours last night, which leaves me barely competent to write this sentence, let alone discuss the implications of these movies and the ways they’re embellishing, enlivening, and ennobling (what I often think are) tired genres – or to compare them with new American takes on similar material, like Zombieland and Super 8. Let’s just say that Juan of the Dead and Attack the Block have me more excited about horror films than I’ve been for at least a decade.