Soul at Peace 

Can we stop this? Can we stop with the cliches and tropes around demons? Spoiler warning (feel free to skip to the next paragraph), but I’m sick and tired of movies where a demon with no actual motive other than “he’s a demon” does a bunch of spooky stuff that doesn’t make any sense and then eventually the main heroes find the secret MacGuffin and barely win and everything’s back to normal. Sorry to “ruin” the ending, but if you’ve seen any demon possession movie ever, you know how this one ends already.

I miss slasher villains. Characters like Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Chucky, and especially Jason Voorhees.  They weren’t exactly Shakespearean, and certainly those movies had problematic portrayals of women, but their antagonists at least had unique personalities and backstories.  People remember those characters way more than today’s throw-away demons.  What I really miss is classic movie monsters, from Frankenstein to Wolf Man to Godzilla to King Kong to even Tarantula.  Those characters, usually without speaking, had complex characterizations that asked us to question societal dynamics and conduct introspection.  You get nothing of the sort in Passenger.