The 2018 version of The Haunting of Hill House reminds me, in many ways, of another favorite ghost story of mine, Lake Mungo.  I wouldn’t dare spoil the similarities they share in common, but suffice it to say that both have a scare that affected me in a deep way.  It wasn’t a simple scare.  It was something much more than that.  It hit me right in the bottom of the soul.

And that’s the best way to be scary, I think.  Any idiot can jump out of a dark corner and yell “BOO!”  But it takes a sophistication and a nuance to make your audience ponder the implications of life and death and be troubled by it in an existential way.  If you really want to scare an audience, make them remember that we’re all afraid of death and, much more than that, we’re afraid of what might (or might not) be waiting for us.

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The Predator movies and I go way back.  I was really young when I saw the first one, probably way too young to be watching it, but my parents were always letting me watch hard-R type stuff with severed limbs and blood.  Naturally, I loved Predator.  One of my favorite memories of being a kid is asking my mom after the finish of the movie if there was a Predator 2, and she said yes, but it just finished filming and it wouldn’t come out for a long time.  I was disappointed, but I understood.  But then she said, “Just kidding!  It came out on video today and we’re watching it next!”

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NOTE: This review will contain some mild spoilers.  This, I feel, will be a place where I can explore some of the themes of the film without spoiling any of its surprises.  I want this to be a review specifically for people who are curious about the film and are weighing the decision as to whether or not to actually go see it.

There’s a scene in the Dudley Moore film Crazy People where the main character comes up with a tagline for a horror movie that promises, “This movie won’t just scare you, it will fuck you up for life,” and based on that tagline alone, people come out to see it in droves, setting record box office records.  In a way, that’s how I feel about a lot of horror movies these days, whether it be The Babadook, It Follows or The VVitch and even, yes, Hereditary.  With each of these movies, critics have promised film-goers and experience unlike anything they’ll ever see, an experience in terror so grueling and unforgiving that grown adults might need to sleep with the light on.  With Hereditary in particular, the critical scuttlebutt was that buying a ticket was some sort of Faustian bargain with audiences that might have dire consequences–that going in simply for a good time, you might be buying much, much more than you bargained for.

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Munich is the anti-James Bond movie.  It has a classic set-up for espionage, intrigue and globetrotting assassinations, and then quickly eschews those tropes to show the viewer an uncompromised vision of what revenge truly looks like:  It looks like complete and utter madness, with no end in sight.  The moral, if the film has one, is uncharacteristically cynical, offering no real glimpse at hope or progress, but rather tells us that the situation in the Middle East is in need of a remedy that at this point does not yet exist.

In 1972 during the Summer Olympics in Munich, Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped eleven Jewish athletes from Israel and then murdered them.  In retaliation, Israel sent a team of Mossad agents to find and kill the people responsible for the massacre.

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