Tag: Horror Film
In the Fall of 2022, the horror movie community got a jolt when the trailer for director Gerard Johnstone’s and screenwriter Akela Cooper’s sci-fi/horror film, M3GAN, dropped. The trailer’s creepy, dancing doll, at once recognizable both as human-shaped and unhuman in its weird movements and affectless face, became a viral sensation. M3GAN is more
Life is a Train Wreck In the final days of 2022, most of us were looking toward 2023 with hearts full of hope, and faith that the moment those glittery balls dropped around the world, we would finally be free of the hellscape our lives have become. The new year couldn’t possibly be as
Audition (1999) is the scariest movie of all time. I say that without hesitation or hyperbole. No other director is as effective with their imagery as Takashi Miike is here, and no other film elicits fright as consistently on a tenth viewing as the first. The film is a delightful descent into madness executed nigh
It’s understandable why Japanese filmmakers focus so often on the feudal era in their horror cinema. It’s a setting so naturally horrific in the plight and pain of the peasant class that few supernatural elements are necessary to invoke dread in audiences. The stark reality of daily life alone is enough to make the viewer
It has now been 24 hours since I watched Pulse (2001), and I still find myself at a loss. It was a movie that I desperately wanted to enjoy, a cardinal sin for a reviewer who should go in with a blank slate and little expectations. The weight of preconceived notions can hang about the
If Ugetsu is what kickstarted the Japanese tradition of Edo Gothic, Kaneto Shindo may have perfected it with Onibaba (1964). It’s a horror film that doesn’t resort to horror, a ghost story with no ghosts. Its evils reside in all too familiar sources: resentment, human nature, and religious hypocrisy, all woven seamlessly through its narrative
Christmas Bloody Christmas is an over-the-top slay ride of holiday cheer fear! Writer and director Joe Begos (VFW, Bliss) always delivers a combination of good storytelling and delirious, gory violence to audiences. Digging deep into genres like horror, science fiction, and heavy metal music, each one of his films is unique in content. Viewers can
Aspiring millennials and their first-world problems are inherently absurd, particularly when their bourgeois existence is challenged, or at least that’s what Who Invited Them relies upon as it attempts to mix comedy and horror in the affluent L.A hills. Writer/director Duncan Birmingham’s first full-length feature was shown during the 2022 FrightFest, arriving on Shudder shortly
Final Edition The scariest movie I saw this week was the HBO documentary Four Hours at the Capitol. The powerful documentary shows what happened when an angry group of protesters attempted to disrupt the certification of the presidential election by storming the Capitol on January 6, 2022. Horror movies provide a safe space for viewers
Week Two Nineteenth-century American author Edgar Allan Poe was my introduction to horror. Literary scholars consider him to be a key foundational block of the genre and his works are ubiquitous, certain to be found in any library or bookstore. Even my elementary school had a copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination that I