The meaning of "hello"

Question

Goodnight Mommy: hello chilly Austrian matricide horror

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/goodbye-mommy-hello-chilly-austrian-matricide-horror-venice-review

This is the title of the movie review. Could you explain to me the meaning of the word "hello" in it.

Answer 1

"Hello" here means the same thing as it usually does: a greeting.

"Hello chilly Austrian matricide horror" is meant to summarize the movie: viewers will encounter "chilly Austrian matricide horror", so the sentence suggests that they will "greet" it. This is a fairly common idiom. Besides being used to literally greet people, hello can be used to call attention to something else that one is encountering, as in the opening line from the Simon and Garfunkel song "The Sound of Silence": Hello darkness, my old friend.

This is also meant to mimic the film's title Goodnight Mommy. The phrase good night is commonly said when saying goodbye to someone (at night), so this is placed in contrast to the greeting hello.

Also, a sentence of the form goodbye X, hello Y is sometimes used to mean "X is ending and Y is beginning". So this headline plays on that form as well.