There’s a worry new trend emerging out of modern horror, something so perverted you’ll be wondering what has happened behind the scenes. We are of course talking about naked old people as villains.
The trend is hard to fully understand the origin of, with it seen as early as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but put on ice and allowed to ferment over the next few decades. Since 2018, there have been at least four big horror movies with naked old people being the villains.
This year alone has already seen four instances of naked old people harassing the young and yearning for their youthful flesh, with Men, X, Hereditary, and Barbarian all leaning into this peculiar new cinematic trend. For years superhero movies ended with a big blue light in the sky, is naked old people the horror genre’s equivalent?
Is Kubrick to blame? We lean towards yes, absolutely. But given other things he’s shown in his films (looking at you, A Clockwork Orange) it’s hardly the most incendiary or shocking.
Barbarian probably had the best use of the naked old people trope, with it managing to actually add some depth to to it with a horrific backstory. However, we still aren’t sure how several generations of inbreeding managed to lead to a super solider. If a geneticist could get in touch and let us know if this is a real thing, that’d be great.
2014’s It Follows also sees another naked old person, although given the film is about a sexually transmitted disease monster which enjoys John Carpenter-esque synth music it seems about right. Well worth noting the monster in the film is an allegory for trauma suffered by sexual assault victims.
If this new subgenre is of interest to you, Old People should be right up your alley. It is nothing else but killer old people letting loose on the young; it’s almost beautifully one-dimensional. There are probably metaphors and subtext to such a plot, but the subtext is for cowards as Garth Marenghi once said.
If you’re reading this Hollywood, may we suggest the subgenre be called Crone Zone? Either that or an octogenarian odyssey.
