Hai Satan, it’s me, Lars. I got some issues with hartbrake and depression, can you fix me up some Jungian/Neitzschean remedies pls? Gonna do a quick mashup for the cinema/video people. K, bye.

Feel sorry for the critics forced to sit through the dreck that is modern horror. This is only half a decade old, not really an all-time classic, but still superior to most of today’s stuff. It’s intellectually consistent, and it’s a wild trip into the recesses of cult psychology, as poor Freud tries to reason with it like an old lady pleading with her gremlin granddaughter to get off her Smartphone.

After the exploitation reaches its highpoints and we recover, we are given a latent epiphany of absolute madness. The scenes in Eden before the fall of our Eve are quite serene and pleasing by contrast. All said, it’s the mad genius of an artist, giving us probably the hardest-to-digest horror of the past decade or so, but it’s just plain better than stuff like Saw because there’s genuine, honest, existential struggle involved in the process.

Its value for cinephiles now and then is to act as justification and reward for sitting there and sopping up all those disgusting (at worst) and painful (at best) emotions contained in your everyday “psychological horror.”