Why Blood Quantum Is The Best Horror Movie Of The 21st Century – Screen Rant

Blood Quantum's combination of factual and fictional horrors is just one of many things that make it the best horror movie of the 21st century.

Indigenous horror director Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum (2020) follows a set of characters on the fictional Red Crow First Nations reservation as they try to survive in a world where insatiable white zombies invade their lands and decimate their population. If that sounds familiar, it might be because it's the plot of countless horror movies. It might also sound familiar because it's a part of real-life history and the present day. This combination of fact and fiction is the first of many things that make Blood Quantum the best horror movie of the 21st century.

Blood Quantum is so effective because it expertly combines ingredients from the horror genre (in this case zombie horror) with a real-life horror story that needs to be toldthe story of the very human horrors that marginalized peoples like the First Nations have experienced for centuries, which continues to this day. The movie's implied real-life generational horror is as scary as it getsa people continually facing annihilationand as a part of the movie's plot, it doesn't leave room for a standard horror trope. The same can be said for many other highly effective 21st-century horror movies told from a marginalized perspective, including Get Out (2017), The Invisible Man (2020), and The Perfection (2019). The mere inclusion of such a perspective can enhance a horror movie, but not always. It has to be done right.

Related: How Horror Movies Have Changed In The 21st Century

To be clear, Blood Quantum's First Nations perspective is not the only thing that sets it apart from other horror movies. It also delivers everything that horror audiences have come to expect from the upper end of the genre. The first is horror, which is, quite obviously, the scary parts. The second is commentary, which is what the movie says about horror and the horror genre. The third is character, which is the authenticity and believability of the characters. These are the three main ingredients of Blood Quantum's greatness, and the movie skillfully combines all three while never losing sight of the historical horror in which it's rooted.

It can't be noted enough that what makes Blood Quantum the 21st century's best horror movie is not simply its First Nations perspective. This perspective has a unique ability to contextualize fictional horror with real-life horror, which would make even the worst horror movie that much scarier. However, Blood Quantum doesn't use its perspective as a gimmick. Instead, it carefully constructs its horrific elements alongside an honest portrayal of complex First Nations characters while creating commentary about horror and the horror genre.

Since Blood Quantum is a horror movie, the obvious first ingredient of its greatness is how scary it is. Viewers get substantial doses of what they came for: gore, suspense, thrills, and dread. However, the horrors in Blood Quantum are so immense that they can't even fit on the screen. The movie is set in 1981, but its horrors started during the European colonization of the Americas, centuries before it even begins. Blood Quantumdoes an amazing job of revealing this context visually and through its characters, all of whom are clearly still dealing with the trauma of colonization, some better than others.

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Why Blood Quantum Is The Best Horror Movie Of The 21st Century - Screen Rant

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero