We are 3 installments into this shorter Week of Review as American Horror Story: Hotel looms ever
near, rumbling towards us all like a kind collective, television based prostate
cancer. Today I’ll be looking at
another 2007 horror film, because apparently that was just a really good year
for hotel horror. However, unlike
Saturday’s 1408 today’s topic skews
much more in line with the key trends and themes of horror in the
mid-2000s. As much as I like to
talk about the amazing 4-year period of 2007-2010 as the time when the 2010s
truly began I’m thoroughly aware that change doesn’t happen over night.
As I mentioned 2007 was a horror landscape dominated by the
twin success of Saw and the
blossoming trend of horror reboots.
Texas Chainsaw and Amityville Horror had both come out in
2005 and made a ton of money with Rob Zombie’s Halloween picking up steam to complete the hat trick that same
year. Haunted house movies
wouldn’t pick up again till the twin success of Paranormal Activity and Indisious
and zombies didn’t fully enter the mainstream till 2010. Combine all this with the still
lingering impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel,
also from the truly terrible year of 2005, and horror was in bad shape. Which makes it all the more impressive
that Vacancy, which conforms to all
the horror tropes and standards of the day, is really good.
