I would like to start by making it clear that The Nun II is not a good movie. I am giving it a good review anyway, because I am very easy mark for a certain kind of dipshit haunted-house atmosphere, so take that as you will. I would also like to point out that this […]
Offscreen space can be an effective tool in movies of all kinds, but horror, more than any other genre, benefits from the suggestion that something terrible may be lurking just beyond the frame’s border. What we can’t see, and thus have to conjure in our imagination, often proves scarier than any razor-toothed monster or hatchet-wielding […]
In Abandoned, we find ourselves in the middle of a marriage in peril. Searching for a reprieve from the chokehold that is mental illness after pregnancy, the couple relocates to a remote farmhouse to somehow cure Sara, a new mother, of her depression and potential hallucinations. This beautiful house full of antiques and mystery somehow […]
Netflix may be emblematic of the accelerating death of culture and the transformation of motion pictures from one of modern society’s dominant art forms into an endless churn of impersonal “content”, but every now and then they use their powers for good. To wit: the new three-part anthology film The House, in which four terrific […]
Of all the rides or other attractions in any of the theme parks operated by the Walt Disney Company, if you were going to make a motion picture based on any of them – in this case, “you” are presumably either Chairman & CEO Michael Eisner or President & COO Bob Iger, and in either […]
My younger readers may not recall a curious media phenomenon, a relic of the ’90s and the period when the Walt Disney Company was expanding its theme parks at a rate unmatched before or since. To promote these new attractions – Disneyland Paris, Animal Kingdom in Florida, various new rides and facelifts to existing attractions […]
2016’s The Boy isn’t a very good movie, but for a horror movie released in January during the 2010s, it’s pretty darned good. For a January horror movie directed by William Brent Bell, who perpetrated 2012’s inhumanly bad The Devil Inside, it’s an I’ll-be-god-damned miracle sent down from the Lord Christ on fucking high. More […]
By 1973, the British horror film industry was collapsing. The smallest of the three main studios focusing genre films, Tigon, released its final film in that year; the largest, Hammer Films, very famously spent the first five years of the decade desperately trying every new idea they could scrounge up, which in 1973 meant a […]
When people speak of Amicus Productions, what they’re really speaking of, I think, is the set of films beginning with our present subject, 1971’s The House That Dripped Blood. Between 1962 and 1970, Amicus produced 15 films on a variety of subjects, and only six of them were horror films (a number that already has […]
So help me, I really do feel sorry for The New Mutants and the poor saps who made it. If all had gone according to plan, it would have slunk into theaters in April 2018, gotten bored reviews comparing it unfavorably to Logan as an example of trying to do a different genre than action-thriller […]
One is practically required by law to start any review of the 1999 version of The Haunting by negatively comparing it to the 1963 version of The Haunting, and how dare I do otherwise. The Haunting ’63 is one of horror’s all-time highest water marks, an immaculate piece of visual storytelling on top of being […]
There has been many a horror film to be completely saved through the intervention of nothing other than a really terrific, atmospheric location. You Should Have Left is not one of these. To be sure, the location is terrific, an ultramodern McMansion with razor-sharp clean lines, tastefully austere appointments, and a profoundly inorganic hostility to […]
