We can go back to the movies! Sorta. Kinda. Whether it’s through the festival circuit or the theatrical studio releases, 2021 has delivered a number of films that were held in reserve over the awkward year that was 2020. The studios held back some of their most proven titles, and when the theaters opened up a slew of them hit the theaters, and several of them were worth the wait.
2020 was a torturous year for most movie fans. We ended up having to stick to our living rooms and stream the scares as opposed to getting the group experience of going to a horror movie in the cinema. Comedies and Horror movies are the movies best watched with a big audience, it’s group catharsis. And sometime this spring, as the vaccinations started getting distributed, hopes ran anew that we could go back! And we have… albeit in a limited way, but the horror movies have been coming out in a steady stream, and many of them have been GOOD.
The festivals earlier in the year continued with the streaming version of their festivals, but by the time summer hit, several of the festivals were able to open to live audiences. The COVID Delta variant still looms over the attendance, but it has been wonderful to get back to screens bigger than a living room. The return to the communal experience of the scares of a horror movie are back… complicated with the real horror of potential pandemic issues Fun!
How many of these films will remain at the top of our list at the end of the year? Well, we haven’t yet hit the prime Halloween season, and there are still a number of important film festivals (Popcorn Frights, Nightstream, Fantasia Fest, and the H.P. Lovecraft FF to name a few.) so there will be plenty of great horror films for us to see. But, those films will have their work cut out for them, as the first half of 2021 had some pretty strong materials. You’ll just have to stick around for a few months and find out how much of this list holds!
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