Last night I started watching a 2022 anthology horror film called Tales from the Other Side. It was, to be frank, pretty ropey: cheap, corny, and often ridiculous. But I fell asleep watching it and I'll finish watching it today. I love horror anthologiy films so much that I will (fairly) happily watch even the worst ones. I would rather watch a fifth-rate anthology horror anthology film than a second-rate gangster film, war film, or melodrama. Beside, it had some nice moments.
I came across it on Amazon Prime. This service seems to have a bottomless cauldron of cheap horror films-- most of them made within the last few years. The sort of films that don't have a Wikipedia page or any other kind of online footprint, aside from an occasional capsule review, and that will certainly never become widelly known.
I say "cheap" rather than "bad", because not all of them are bad. For instance, The Curse of Crom: The Legend of Halloween was pretty good, and there have been others.
Presumably this avalanche of horror films-- and, I assume, other genres (Christmas movies, for instance)- only exists because of streaming. Is that really such a bad thing? The people who make all these flms are getting paid, and they are also getting to do creative work. That seems like an admirable thing to me. They only exist because they meet a demand, so somebody is getting something out of watching them. (Me, for one.)
Even if you subscribe to an elitist outlook that only creative works of permanent value matter-- well, you need a mountain of mediocrity to achieve a pinaccle of excellence. The bigger the mountain...
Meanwhile, cinemas still exist, and still exhibit all their usual fare: big budget movies, not-so-big budget movies, and obscure little movies that still get a theatrical release.
I'm not often enthusiastic about cultural developments, but this seems like a good one.
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