Nobody is calm. Nobody is comfortable. Gone were the optimistic and vitalistic stories. A piercing sensation of fragility spreads throughout the world. And culture is not immune to all this: in 2024 that famous Shakespeare phrase will be exemplified: “What I am afraid of is your fear.” This new year, the world of culture will return to the vampires, ghosts and demons that have populated our nightmares for centuries but, fortunately and creative as it is, the world has mercilessly planted new fears in our psyche. Global warming, artificial intelligence, drugs, totalitarianism, all these impacts filter into the collective unconscious and (in addition to depressing us) crystallize in works with a common element: terror.
Classic fears will materialize on the big screen. And, like this, the alien will return in Alien: Romulus (fear of the beast, of the unknown), the Joker will return in Joker: Folie à Deux (fear of the insane), the creatures in front of whom we cannot make a sound in A quiet place 3 (fear of violent invasion); the always interesting Robert Eggers will dare to take on the classic vampire with his remake of Nosferatu. And he is not the only classic monster returning: Yórgos Lánthimos will revisit the myth of Frankenstein with Poor creatures! But to these ancestral fears we must add the new fears from which cinema is nourished: the deserts of Dune II either Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga they will remind us of the threat of climate change; kingdom of the planet of the apes will remind us of the pandemic and the war, and if this year The Creator put before us a battle between humans and artificial intelligences, 2024 will do the same in a chaotic scenario like Borderlands.
In 2023, not only has fear crept into the world's culture, but the dangers of the world have crept into culture in the form of terror. So, in the same way that Mike Flanagan used his series The fall of the House of Usher to honor Poe but also to denounce the opiate crisis that causes so much havoc (this year, in the United States it leaves almost 80,000 dead), tell meone of the best horror films of this vintage, drew a mirror metaphor between the ouija and drug use. That line will continue in 2024 with series about drug traffickers like Griselda.
Speaking of series, the year will premiere with the new season of True Detective, with its portion of murders and its existential tone. Of murders it will also go Red Queen, the adaptation of the best-seller by Juan Gómez Jurado. The dragons will return House of the Dragon and his metaphor about weapons of mass destruction. And the Trisolarians of The three body problem. Totalitarianisms grow and The Area of Interest will adapt the novel by Martin Amis that takes us to a concentration camp during the most famous of all totalitarianisms. Oh, and we will obviously have a portion of zombies, who return with The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. The infected already triumphed in the year just dismissed with The Last of Us, which adapted the video game of the same name; Well, in 2024 the series fallout will adapt the great video game that is set, of course, on an Earth devastated by a nuclear apocalypse. The shadow of war overshadows everything.
Speaking of video games—perhaps the medium that conveys terror the most and best today—2024 is loaded: Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines II either Little Nightmares III They will try to overcome a bar that 2023 left very high with Alan Wake 2waiting for the most desired (and feared) game: the new version of the classic Alone in the Dark. But the terror does not end on the screen: there will be exhibitions (until today, January 7, you can visit in Madrid the interesting and terrifying Fake News: The factory of lies) on one of the hottest and most terrifying topics: technology as a threat. About this, about misinformation and artificial intelligence, there will also be an avalanche of fiction books but, above all, essays (and, for the first time, with the well-founded fear that one may have been written directly by ChatGPT).
Wars, pandemics, mechanical intellects that attack humanity and, ultimately, monsters. Perhaps that is the word that best defines culture at the start of 2024: monstrous. Although well thought out, this year to feel dread it will be enough to close the book, leave the cinema or turn off the television and open a newspaper. It almost doesn't matter which section we start reading.
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