The festival has a menu of horror films in the Midnight Section (though that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re showing at midnight), which begins on Thursday night. The same night, the festival is offering a free outdoor treat: a showing of “The Birds,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 creeper about an avian attack.  “The Birds” has had a lot of baggage piled on it. Analysts have found in its relatively simple story a complex Oedipal treatise, a message about nature’s displeasure with humans’ cavalier treatment of the environment, a statement about the mob mentality that produced Nazism and McCarthyism, and more.  Other horror films from that era have undergone the same parsing. Every monster that ever terrorized an urban area or a small town is an allegory for the threat of nuclear annihilation or some such. Overreaching? In many cases, probably. Sometimes a swamp creature is just a swamp creature.  Nonetheless, horror films must be micro-examined to justify all those film school classes, so let’s take a look at what the Midnight Section might be telling us. Beginning with the daffy “Fresh Meat,” a New Zealand comedy directed by Danny Mulheron.  Rina (Hanna Tevita) returns from boarding school to find that her parents and brother have become cannibals. “While you’ve been away, your father and I have had a wee lifestyle change,” her mother (Nicola Kawana), a famous television chef, tells her in the understatement of the season.  That news barely has time to sink in before a bungling band of criminals stumbles into the family’s home and takes everyone hostage. But — think of it as a demented variation of Stockholm syndrome — to this family, kidnappers look like just another meal. Perhaps Mr. Mulheron is commenting on modern-day concerns about the food supply. If you want to be sure you know where your meat came from and how it was processed, just eat your houseguests.  Another offering with a wacky streak is “Frankenstein’s Army,” a film from the Netherlands, directed by Richard Raaphorst with a definite “Re-Animator” vibe. It’s World War II, and Soviet Army troops pushing into Germany discover a Nazi experiment gone haywire. The Germans have been trying to assemble supersoldiers by stitching together body parts and assorted hardware, but the resulting creatures are running out of control.  The effects shop was working overtime for this one, and the actors involved will no doubt long brag about being credited as “Wall Zombot 1,” “4-Eyes Worker” or “Hammerhead.” A particularly tasty moment comes when a thing with a propeller for a face blows up. Feel free to read this wild film as a dissertation on an age when enhancement of the human body is already accepted as standard practice.  “My father said men would be more efficient if they had hammers and screwdrivers instead of fingers,” the mastermind of the nightmare says.  Furniture gets into the act in Marina de Van’s “Dark Touch,” another film (this one a co-production of companies in France, Ireland and Sweden) in which objects become lethal. These are set off by a girl named Neve (Missy Keating), who, like her forerunners in “Carrie” and “Firestarter,” has a mysterious power to summon havoc.  Dressers and silverware turn deadly when she gets riled, but the director isn’t making a flip comment on Ikea in this film, which is perhaps too serious for its own good. She points, albeit vaguely, to child abuse as a source of Neve’s disturbing abilities.  How much of the story is taking place in the main character’s head is unclear, a problem shared by “Mr. Jones,” an American film by Karl Mueller. Scott (Jon Foster) and Penny (Sarah Jones) take up residence in a remote cabin, where Scott hopes to make a documentary about going back to nature, but soon the pair stumble on the workshop, as it were, of a mysterious outsider artist known as Mr. Jones.  The totems Mr. Jones makes exert a strange power. “They get inside your mind and they explode,” is how one character describes it. But we are invited to speculate that some or all of what transpires might be in Scott’s imagination, because we learn that he has stopped taking medication for a condition that is never quite defined.  So maybe Mr. Mueller is saying something about society’s increased dependence on pharmaceuticals. Though it’s more fun to imagine that he’s commenting on pretentiousness in the art world. Or on documentary filmmaking as a career choice.  It’s back to the lab with “The Machine,” a slick British film by Caradog James in which a computer programmer (Toby Stephens) works with soldiers who have suffered brain injuries to try to create human-and-machine hybrids. But the intent here is more serious than it is in “Frankenstein’s Army.” We learn that the programmer is motivated by concern for his daughter, who has a rare neurological condition, Rett syndrome, that affects cognition and muscle control. He is hoping to discover something that will help her.  It’s not hard to imagine “The Machine” as an examination of the odd place we now find ourselves in our relationship to science: the very discoveries that can help us are also ominous. Do we really want to be able to read our genes closely enough to know that we’ll develop cancer at 40? Do we want our employers and health insurers to have that knowledge?  Those are unsettling questions, but for even more discomfort, there is the brutal “Raze,” an American film from Josh Waller. Women are kidnapped and forced to fight to the death in one-on-one battles, which are grimly depicted. They don’t know who is making them do this or why. The stuntwoman Zoe Bell plays a fighter who has bested all comers; Rachel Nichols is among those she beats to a pulp.  All sorts of ideas come to mind. Something about how feminism’s achievements have freed women from one prison only to put them in another? Mostly, though, what comes to mind is that this is a hard film to watch. As any good horror movie should be.
The Midnight Section at the Tribeca Film Festival features a collection of horror films that have more than a little to say.