Horror · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Ardel Wray: Val Lewton’s Forgotten Screenwriter
Despite the fact that Wray had no previous screen credits, Lewton hired her to rework the story of I Walked with a Zombie with only two months to go before[…]
Category: Horror
Post-Horror Kinships: From Goodnight Mommy to Get Out
“The aesthetic features of post-horror replicate the mixture of shame, confusion, shock, and anxiety about the future experienced by liberal Americans in the midst of the Tea Party and Trump’s[…]
Galactic Angst: Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy Swallows the Cosmos
The demon-summoning, LED laser-lens flares, medieval weaponry-fetishizing, churning synth and axe rhythms, and the overall simmer of curdling darkness are collective flickers of a recurrent, suffocatingly inescapable nightmare, one fueled[…]
“Family Swallows Everything”: Artificiality and Determinism in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018)
Something hereditary is passed down to posterity, all without their foreknowledge or approval; an unborn child has no say in what color eyes it will have, what its allergies may[…]
Design for Killing: Function Follows Form into the Megalomania of Giallo
Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as giallo-maestros[…]
Directors · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Weird and Pissed Off: Field Notes on John Carpenter’s First Fifteen Years
“It’s better to be a human being than an imitation.”- John Carpenter, on The Thing * * * 1. Begin with sound. Begin with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). A[…]
“Disease with a Purpose”: Ex-Boyfriends, Abortion and The Fly (1986)
But the choice to get this thing out of her body, to have an abortion, is made up of equal parts self-compassion and safety. It is entirely locatable. Ronnie is[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Horror
Watch it Again! Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989)
Yes, Society supplies the body horror, well crafted in all its sticky glory by Japanese effects expert Screaming Mad George, but it fuses it with teen movie, conspiracy thriller, and[…]
Still Life with Cannibal: On Issei Sagawa and the Documentary Caniba (2017)
The notion of the body as entry to the soul becomes a fallacy: penetration is not a portal to another person’s psyche – just as Sagawa’s cannibalism of Hartevelt could[…]
Historical & Epic · Horror · Women in Film
Watch it Again! The Witch (2015)
The Witch is about what is in woman that is presumed not to exist, because it cannot be seen. * * * Robert Altman’s 3 Women is mostly a high-kitsch[…]
Horror · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality
Bella Donna: Lilith, Gaia, and the Spectral Mother in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday
We will go back to our old gods again. – Goethe * * * My eyes. My eyes. I’m seeing again. Across a gulf of how-many years, the light is[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Romance
Cosmic Melodrama: Darren Aronofsky’s mother!
Whatever else it is, mother! is ultimately a woman’s anxious nightmare about what it feels like to put your heart and soul into creating something only for people to take[…]
Horror · Philosophy · Romance
Lonely, but Not Alone: Death as a Collective Experience in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story
Regardless of whether it is worth doing or not, people will continue to rely on memory as a way to create legacy and heritage. People will always leave things behind,[…]
Horror · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Have I Seen the Real World Yet? Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1972)
One of the few indelible images in director Robert Mulligan’s 1972 film of The Other is that of Niles in the freaks’ tent at the 4th of July fair, gazing[…]
Franchises & Series · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Alien: Covenant: Ridley Scott’s Myth of Creation Science
The people we care most about in Alien: Covenant are those we most delight in seeing eviscerated. David gives us his own flair for the ghoulish, cultivating with us his garden of monsters[…]
Family Night: Attacks on the American Homestead in Night of the Hunter and Night of the Living Dead
The two films under examination here, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), would have you believe that nothing harrows the soul like an[…]
God Is Dead but the Shadow Is Long: Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant
Like Prometheus, Alien: Covenant refuses to allow either the religious or materialist viewer to remain comfortable in their own belief or unbelief: for every Christian and Darwinian horror there is seared[…]
Watch It Again! King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933)
With Kong: Skull Island making waves at the box office right now, perhaps it’s time to reintroduce ourselves to the first and, M. C. Myers argues (and we agree), best of the[…]
Activist & Political · Books · Horror
Book Review: Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity
By the mid-2000s, following social unrest and political upheaval in France, and culminating with the emergence of the “torture-porn” horror subgenre in the United States with titles such as Saw[…]
Essays · Horror · Religion & Spirituality
You Say You Want a Revolution? Regan’s Head and The Exorcist
If the evil spirit is “seen,” that is, reflected . . . he is overcome. – Marie-Louise von Franz Unmask Satan, and you vanquish him. – St. Augustine * *[…]
