Mask-wearing, axe-wielding murderers and a cast progressively downsized in a creaky old mansion. Not the stuff of horror revitalisation, but Adam Wingard's You're Next does succeed in organising well-worn elements into an interesting shape. Mixing black comedy, minimalist brutality and self-awareness for infrequent rewards, a standard slasher formula is proven effective for what one hopes is the last time.

We open in black with the screams of a women in distress, screams revealed to be carnal rather than homicidal in nature. This is one of the smarter tricks the film plays, so, if it doesn't deliver, you have your early waterline. This cold-open couple is our introduction to the murderous villainy afoot. Intruders clad in plastic animal masks (fox, sheep, tiger, if it matters) write YOU'RE NEXT on the window in the woman's blood as a message to the man, which is promptly reaffirmed when he is macheted in the face. The fact that this message faces outside toward the camera rather than inside towards the intended reader is a stylised touch of titling that I found bothersome. Perhaps these psychos didn't practise backwards writing on their notebooks in school like I did.

Cinema motefävet was a revolutionary development in 1960's Iranian cinema that borrowed poetic tropes from Iran's New Poetry and set the course for a cinematic renaissance. Led by Nima Yushij, Shi'r-i naw, or New Poetry, was a response to a perceived remoteness in the traditionalist poetry of the 19th century, the so-called Return Movement. The New Poets argued that the Return Movement fetishized medieval poetry and produced imitative works that said nothing of the present-day issues in Iran, using language which was difficult for ordinary Iranians to understand. Still influenced by historical works, but seeking to bring poetry closer to the common man, these New Poets began to explore more contemporary social themes with a sense of social consciousness and deep sympathy for the down-trodden, rather than a preoccupation with the continuation of poetic precepts. With a revised thematic focus, the New Poets articulated the realities of poverty and repression with novel poetic language that brought together literary and common modes of speech.

The Cow, produced in 1969, was a pioneer in this artistic insurgency, in which Iranian filmmakers, influenced by Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, presented social realist themes in a codified film language adapted from Persian poetry. Directed and co-written by Dariush Mehrjui, the film concerned a poor rural villager’s mental breakdown following the death of his beloved cow and marked an artistic turning point in Iranian cinema, highlighting the complicated relationship between the state and the artistic film community in Iran that continues to this day.

A poetic-realist, working-class fable, adapted by Mehrjui and the popular writer Gholam-Hossein Sa'edi from Sa'edi's short story, The Cow expresses a bleak outlook on the socio-economic situation in Iran, rebelling against the self-congratulatory modernism of the Shah. The narrative of the film exemplifies Sa'edi's interest in the rural poor, and the complex psychology of characters, translating the themes from Persian literature and folklore into a modern mode, much like the New Poets.

​Mehrjui and Sa'edi's film presented the poverty of the Iranian rural underclass in realistic terms, contrary to the desires of the Shah, who pushed for cinema to convey a propagandistic image of a modernised Iran, and the more conservative Islamic authorities, who considered aniconism in art haram (forbidden) – especially representations outside of the idealized image of the eternal Quranic man. Ironically, the film was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Arts as an effort to produce a home-grown cinema that could display the modernisation of Iran to the outside world. The film was subject to a ban following its completion and was only released by the censors after being smuggled to Europe and winning international acclaim, such as the critics' award at the 1967 Venice film festival, with the Shah being inclined to capitalise on any Western approval of an artistically mature Iran. However, the censors did hedge their bets by adding a note, preceding the film, which reconfigured the story as occurring before the modernisation project of the Shah.