Essays · Movies

What If? ‘The Graduate’ as a Horror Film

A fan trailer reimagines Mike Nichols’ classic coming-of-age story.
The Graduate
By  · Published on March 27th, 2017

It’s always fun to reorient a film’s narrative based on elements of other genres. For example, I once wrote at length about why What About Bob? isn’t just a slapstick comedy but also an intense psychological thriller, and I’ve seen fan-made trailers turn films like There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber into psycho-killer flicks.

In that tradition, Alejandro Villareal has reimagined Mike Nichols’ classic coming-of-age film The Graduate into a horror film via this trailer he’s calling Hello Darkness.

From Villareal’s intro:

What if “The Graduate” were a horror movie? The 50th anniversary of “The Graduate” is here. And in honor of this occasion, I created a fake trailer with a slight adjustment in perspective. Imagine “The Graduate” meets “Basic Instinct” meets “Cape Fear” with acne and pimples all over. Mike Nichols’s film is its generation’s grand statement about loneliness. The ’60s didn’t have Hamlet, they had Benjamin Braddock. And the movie couldn’t have been more universal in its themes if Nichols and Buck Henry set out to write the Great American Play. But what they did write was a classic movie. And it is to their credit, and the cast’s talent, that the tone of this film didn’t stray into dark, depressing territory. It’s astonishing to re-watch the movie and see how light the tone is given the complex subject matter.

I think that just about says it all. Only thing left to do now is watch. Enjoy.

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