One of the things I enjoyed about this year is that it felt like I wasn’t getting to the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I was watching. 2020 and 2021 felt like a lot of watching because there’s not much else to do and not much being made, but 2022 felt different. It was an excellent year for movies, in case you didn’t hear. After a decade of “The cinema is dead!” I think Everything Everywhere All at Once, Tár, Spielberg getting personal and a bunch of other good films proved that maybe every movie doesn’t have to include a Marvel character. As for TV, I have no idea. There’s so much out there now that my backlog of shows I have to watch makes me feel like I’m providing a government service and the home office keeps sending me more work to pile on top of the old work. So if I don’t like something pretty fast then I’m out. I don’t have a system per se, it’s more of an It’s like a good melon, you just know sort of thing.
But if there was one thing that caught and kept my attention more than anything this year, one trend, so to speak, it’s that 2022 felt like a return to fun “scary” shows and movies. I put the word scary in quotes because the stuff I’m talking about isn’t actually scary at all, it just uses the ghosts and ghouls that we’re all familiar with from the past, either finding new stories or rebooting old ones. And while I’m usually a big-time reboot hater, 2022 offered new spins on two of my old favorites.
First, I should say that two of the shows I loved watching this year have been around. Los Espookys, sadly, ended the year as one of the shows that HBO canceled. But my guess is that you’ll see its influence hanging around for years to come. It was one of the oddest, sweetest and more interesting shows on American television. The other, What We Do In the Shadows, is the one show I tell every single person they have to watch. Right now it’s the funniest show on television.
For movies, the first is Blood Relatives. Like What We Do in the Shadows, it centers on a vampire story and twists it around into something a little different and more interesting than I’ve seen in the last few years. Remember when vampires were the new zombies…or whatever? That was a weird time, but I think it has calmed down and Blood Relatives had an almost classic B-movie feel to it that made it even more enjoyable to watch. That, and the kid in it is wearing a Screeching Weasel shirt.
I’ll admit that with the two reboots, or modern takes on old classics, I was a little on the fence. Tim Burton doing a Wednesday Addams show? When was the last time ol’ Timmy did anything worth watching? Feels like you have to go back to the Bush 2 era to find an answer. And The Munsters? How can you mess with a classic, Rob Zombie?
But it was the Astro-Creep himself (that’s an old White Zombie song, in case you didn’t know) that helped me pull all of these shows and movies together and realize something. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Zombie’s film work. He’s proven me wrong multiple times and I always give him the benefit of the doubt because he’s an auteur. I’m sure there are people who would argue with that or at least screenshot me saying Zombie is an auteur and post it on some social media site being like “Look at this dummy calling Rob Zombie an auteur,” but the guy has a vision. He’s a horror film obsessive with a style that’s intentionally derivative so he can twist around and play with the ideas of what we think we know about the genre. You think you know what you’re getting from a Rob Zombie movie…and then you realize you were wrong.
The Munsters isn’t some gritty, dark reboot. It’s fun, colorful and, most importantly, it’s weird. It’s weird in the way that made me think about being eight and seeing films by the aforementioned Tim Burton, namely Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. The same goes with Burton’s Wednesday, which is darker and more cynical than the original black-and-white show based on Charles Addams’ cartoons, but not totally out of sync with the now-classic 1990s adaptations of them. It’s definitely subversive. I’m actually surprised conservative groups haven’t been kvetching about some of the stuff Wednesday (played brilliantly by Jenna Ortega, who has big-time star written all over her), and almost hope they do because it might get the show even more viewers.
What all of these things have in common is that they’re fun. They remember that, in the end, these monsters, whether they’re vampires or Herman Munster or even the Los Espookys gang, are just outsiders. Even Jordan Peele’s Nope had an element of this. The creature they call Jean Jacket, is, at first, something to be gawked at. And even though Peele’s movie is by far the scariest thing out of all the shows and movies mentioned in this newsletter, it also reminded me of what I liked scary movies, monster movies, whatever, in the first place. And most of all, all of these shows and films made me remember being a weird eight-year-old and finding something to connect with. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but that stuff shaped me. And while I love modern horror, I haven’t seen a ton in the last few years that a parent could put on and watch with a kid. That’s not to say any of these are for children, but The Munsters and Wednesday especially feel like they hit some sweet spot between being something a family can watch and enjoy and even laugh at together. And hopefully, if that happens, the monsters of 2022 could corrupt some young minds and create a new generation of weirdo horror.