Hollander: Horror Mania and Short SF Films
According to film directing expert Neil Hollander, film industry and movie making in general have become increasingly revolving around online platforms, thus becoming ever more entrepreneurial, digitalized and trends dictated by the audience. With so many trends rapidly appearing, Hollander decided to select his choice of what he believes will dominate the entertainment industry in the years to come.
The new dawn of horror films began as early as the second half of the nineties, after Wes Craven revitalized the genre with his movie Scream, causing an avalanche that hasn’t stopped to this day. Of course, the genre has not bypassed the utter trend of remakes and reboots, so new opportunities for spreading terror got some legendary heroes like Leatherface, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger. At the same time, as Neil Hollander informs, appeared a new marathon of serials such as Saw, Final Destination or Paranormal, but also emerged a new genre of directors such as Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), whose films are not really for everyone's eyes or stomach. And while on the one hand the bloody slasher-horror genre practically become mainstream, on the other appeared a series of atmospheric genre works with artistic taste, like The Others with Nicole Kidman, or the Swedish vampire film Let the Right, which attracted audience who didn’t even prefer horror movies . These days we have in the spotlight the film It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell, who many people are already calling it a future genre classic, due to its superior filming techniques and subtle, dreamlike atmosphere. Of course, it doesn’t also lack scenes that will make your heart jump.
All film enthusiasts know well that for a good sci-fi movie you not necessarily need huge budget and special effects, and what especially pleases Hollander is the fact that in the new millennium there are more and more film genres that give priority to stories and ideas, rather than pure spectacle and special effects. The recent trend of Short SF films began ten years ago with an ultra cheap example, which is a cool way featuring old theme of time travel, shortly after the District 9 and Moon proved that for visually interesting film genre you don’t always need to set aside a pile of dollars. In the meantime, within the circles of independent cinema, young director Mike Cahill and his film Another Earth attracted considerable attention, while the science fiction wave was accepted by the iconic Lars von Trier, who directed the apocalyptic Melancholy. Predestination, She, Under the Skin, I Origins and Ex Machina are just some of the more recent films which prove that the SF genre is much more interesting when you move away from the Hollywood machine.
