Relic, His House and a trend for emotional logic in horror films
Two of 2020's most talked about horror releases - generational dementia tale Relic and Netflix's haunted house refugee drama His House - don't really care about making literal sense. Instead of having metaphor as subtext , it becomes the only logical way of understanding the two movies. Warning: This piece contains spoilers for both Relic and His House Metaphorical layers in horror movies are nothing new, but viewers usually have the option of reading the film at face value. The Entity in It Follows is an otherwordly monster first, a representation of sexual anxieties and an adolescent fear of mortality second. Hereditary may be focused on a family tearing itself apart for the majority of its runtime, but in the third act Paimon and his cult hold centre stage. Not so with Relic and His House, which in their final acts dive head first into dreamlike territory which foregrounds thematic and emotional currents over plot. In Relic, this happens around the time Sam (Bella He...