Editorials
Best of 2022: The Year of Unforgettable Horror Monologues
A subtle pattern emerged when reflecting upon the year’s standout horror moments and performances: it’s been one hell of a year for knockout monologues. A monologue relays vital information about the story or the character relaying it and supports its central themes, but there’s an art form to its delivery. Some of the most unforgettable performances of 2022 belonged to actors that delivered uncanny, showstopping monologues that glued us to our seats and left us in rapturous awe.
Writer/Director Andrew Semans’s Resurrection explored the psychological toll of abuse via dread-soaked horror. Rebecca Hall stars as Margaret, a savvy career woman with a sturdy head on her shoulders. She’s single-handedly raised an independent teen, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), on the cusp of leaving the nest for college. But Margaret’s carefully assembled life begins to untangle from her grasp when David (Tim Roth), a menacing man from her distant past, shows up out of the blue to reclaim her.
Margaret might be two decades removed from her toxic relationship with David, but his sudden arrival erases that time with ease. Margaret’s unmooring, from calculated control to frantic paranoia and fear, provides fertile ground for Hall as a performer, and she more than rises to the occasion.
Resurrection 2022
Of particular note, Hall commands the screen in a roughly seven-minute-long monologue as her character delivers harrowing exposition on her past relationship with David to an unsuspecting intern in her office. Semans lets the background fall into the darkness around her, giving his actor the deserved spotlight to wrap the audience around her fingers. It’s a steady escalation as Margaret unloads the trauma she endured with David piecemeal, bringing those long-buried emotions to the surface. It’s a jaw-dropping scene showing how dangerous David is for her and how shallow his afflicted wounds have lived in her psyche since Margaret left him. It informs us as much about David as Margaret and how it shaped her in the present.
X star Mia Goth, meanwhile, reteamed with director Ti West to co-write and star in Pearl, a prequel set in 1918 that explored X’s killer in her youth. In the prequel, young Pearl longs to escape her family’s farm. Her husband is away at war. She lives with her strict German mother (Tandi Wright) and is forced to care for her sickly father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl is a dreamer; she spends her time shirking responsibilities, sneaking off to the movies, or dancing around the barn and at home. She wants to break free from her small town and the family farm. But Pearl is a bit broken inside, and her killer instincts take over when things don’t go her way.
The last straw for Pearl comes when she fails to impress at a local dance audition; the rejection slams the door shut on her planned escape. Sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro) takes the inconsolable Pearl home and offers to lend an ear in the hopes of soothing her friend.
Enter the film’s climax.
The camera focuses on Pearl’s tear-streaked face for ten minutes as she relays a single-take speech that extensively lays out Pearl’s fragile state of mind, her shattered hopes, dreams, and the horrific mistakes she made along the way. Goth commands attention on screen the entire time as she effortlessly shifts through a gamut of emotions, from sorrow to remorse to envy. Because this is Pearl’s final breaking point and a less showy climax, so much hinges on this moment, and Goth makes it seem so effortless. That it’s done in a single shot highlights how tricky it is to perform on a technical level.
If there’s a reigning champion of the monologue in horror, it would be Mike Flanagan and frequent collaborator Robert Longstreet. Longstreet already established his uncanny talent for delivering deeply affecting monologues in “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass,” and “The Midnight Club” continues that streak.
Longstreet’s appearances as the Janitor of Brightcliffe Hospice in the Netflix series are brief but purposeful. Natsuki (Aya Furukawa) encounters him in episode three, “The Wicked Heart,” when she inquires about his cleaning of a recently deceased patient’s room. The Janitor imparts a short but comforting monologue on the transition to death. Death, the Janitor says in a calm, soothing tone, is a release from pain. It’s less an enemy than feared and more of a friend. The Janitor again shares similar reassuring words of wisdom in episode seven, “Anya.” The character’s brief appearances hint toward something more profound in mind for Flanagan had the series continued, but even still, Longstreet’s incredible performances stand out.
No matter the length, each powerful speech elevates its respective feature or series. For Resurrection, Hall conveys the death grip David’s hold still has on her character as if no time had passed. Pearl sees its central character lay her desires, motivations, and abnormal psychology bare as she shifts from distraught to acceptance of her fate in real-time. And “The Midnight Club” gives us a warm, cozy hug in response to death’s frequent heartbreak in the form of another impactful portrayal by Robert Longstreet.
In all three standout scenes, the world goes quiet as the camera focuses solely on the performer, letting them breathe life into their words in a compelling way. The intricacies and effectiveness of the monologue are beautifully captured by all three incredible performances.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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