What is it that we want from a horror film? To be scared, of course. A good suspense film can do that, though. Hitchcock’s camera zooming in on a potentially fatal glass of milk, or the look on a man’s face as he dangles precariously from a national monument. Horror, once we move beyond mere… Read More »
CAVEAT — Damian McCarthy Interview
Click here for the full review of CAVEAT. CAVEAT may be Damian McCarthy’s debut feature film, but he’s been honing his horror skills in short films for several years. When we spoke on June 11, 2021 via Zoom, I made a point of asking him where people can find those shorts, because after seeing the… Read More »
THE LIGHTHOUSE
A dark and twisted fever dream of a film, THE LIGHTHOUSE confronts the anguish of the human condition with suitable horror and an equally suitable dash of absurdity. Rendered in disturbing grades of black and white, it presents two men tending a lighthouse on a desolate rocky outcropping in the middle of nowhere. In the… Read More »
THE DEAD DON’T DIE
THE DEAD DON’T DIE takes the tropes, idioms, and beloved foibles of low-budget zombie flicks and, with a skillful flick of its auteur’s cinematic wrist, recontextualizes them into a stylized gloss on the new normal of 2019. Certainly the “Make America White Again” ball cap sported by the most reviled citizen (Steve Buscemi) of sleepy… Read More »
BRIGHTBURN
What we have here is a dynamite premise fumbled in the execution. BRIGHTBURN gives us a strange visitor from another planet crashing to Earth as a baby and taken in by a good-hearted, infertile farm couple (Elizabeth Banks, David Denman) in the midst of baby fever. As with that other story of an infant from… Read More »
THE NUN
The decline and fall of franchises is a phenomenon that is all too common, and yet still heartbreaking in its own way. For every James Bond or Star Wars, there are countless other series that started strong, usually with a film that was a one-off, the success of which led to studio bean-counters to push… Read More »
HEREDITY
The only thing wrong with HEREDITY is that is bound to spawn increasingly inferior installments in a new franchise that is as inevitable as its protagonists’ descent into madness. That aside, this deeply disturbing horror film does not need the supernatural in order to worm its way into the darkest recesses of your psyche where… Read More »
A QUIET PLACE
Why lob blood and guts when a lamp being knocked over can make you jump out of your seat?
UNSANE
For me, the single most disconcerting image in a Steven Soderbergh film is from CONTAGION. It’s not a panorama of people dying from the pandemic that threatens to end civilization as we know it, instead it’s the silent, dispassionately clinical shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being autopsied. There are people I know who reference the… Read More »
IT
The evil that lurks in the sewers beneath Derry, Maine, has nothing on the evil lurking in the homes of that community.
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