Absurdism · DIY · Experimental & Underground · Horror
An Enraged Eye: Nathan Schiff’s Vermilion Eyes as Anti-Film
“I felt there was a dead end to the kind of films I was making. . . . I was losing sight of reason in favor of result and so[…]
Category: Horror
The Demiurge in the American Eyesore: Night Tide
If Curtis Harrington had not had the ruined mall of hell unveiled to the world in 1905 as Venice of America as a setting for his occult fable, he might[…]
Body Horror · Horror · Mumblecore · Romance
Lucky McKee’s May and the Retelling of Frankenstein for the Indie Rom-Com Era
Not only does May challenge the tropes of mumblecore and indie-rom com movies, but it also retells elements of Frankenstein, offering a female protagonist who is both monster and monster-maker.[…]
Rate Your Hunch: Women and Intuition in Barbarian
Hinting at women’s complicity in a film plotted around men’s violent treatment of women is, well, ballsy. That Cregger’s script doesn’t delve into the larger cultural conditioning and structures that[…]
Wild Imagination: Forty Years of The Thing
“You just can’t beat wild imagination.” – Bob Bottin * * * It took decades for John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) to find an audience, on home video and cable.[…]
Body Horror · Horror · SF & Fantasy
“A Great Future in Plastics”: Crimes of the Future and Cronenberg’s Story of Evolution
The voice-over tells us that as a result of this neo-venereal disease, his colleague’s body is creating new organs, each one complex, perfect, unique, but without function. Each time these[…]
Family · Horror · Linguistics and Language
Ghost Story: Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil/Gæsterne (2022)
What kind of guests are so pathologically accommodating that their hosts can get away with murdering them? * * * What’s in a name? On one hand, Speak No Evil[…]
Absurdism · African American · Horror · Surrealism · Westerns
What’s Behind That Curtain: The Wizard of Oz and Jordan Peele’s Nope
The theme of exploitation is evident in Nope’s multiple references to a classic film. Not Jaws, The Goonies, or Close Encounters, or any of the Western films nodded at in[…]
Franchises & Series · Horror · Men & Masculinity
Saw and the Danger of Not Talking about Masculinity
We see how Jigsaw can fail, again and again, to help anyone and still blame it on them. We see how people can live through how little his traps teach[…]
Animation · Experimental & Underground · Horror · Splatter & Gore
Splatter in (Stop) Motion: The Gory Animations of Michael Kahlert
There is no question of suspending our disbelief watching Kahlert’s films, but there does emerge a bizarre unease in the inescapable doom of his scenarios. Unburdened by the need to[…]
Directors · Gender · Hollywood · Horror · Men & Masculinity
The Jaws of War: How Quint Decodes Masculinity in the Films of Spielberg
If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror
Don’t Go Near the Water: Revisiting Four ’70s Eco-Horror Films
I’ve detailed each film to convey the strange and strict extent to which they each cohere to one base fear: reproductive control. The only hope for human survival in Phase[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · New Media · Societal Trends · Theory · Thrillers & Action · TV & Streaming
A Spectre in the Participatory Panopticon: The Database Horror of Unfriended: Dark Web
The encounter between the lead characters and The Circle evokes a wider sense of anxiety regarding the extent to which we upload information about every area of our lives into[…]
Eco · Horror · SF & Fantasy
My New Life as Human Fertilizer: Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia (2021)
In his creation of a nonhuman cinematic world that mines horror from its confrontation of human fear of irrelevance and inadaptability, Bouwer ultimately suggests that survival in the era following[…]
Family · Horror · Women in Film
Home Wee Home – It’s Where the Horror Is: Miniature Models, Crime Scenes, and Toxic Femininity in Hereditary and Sharp Objects
A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. – Sylvia Plath, “The Applicant” (Oct. 11, 1962) And they stuck me together[…]
Crime · Gothic · Horror · Melodrama · Photo Essays
To Cut or Not to Cut? The POV Shots in Eyes Without a Face (and how they differ from those in Psycho)
Franju demonstrates how beauty hides pain, until pain becomes beautiful. * * * Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face is a reliably haunting film, a beautiful nightmare[…]
African American · Drama · Dreams · Horror · Urban Conflict
Candymen: Slumming, Scarifying, and Gentrifying in 1992 and 2022
Good mornin’, Mr. Benson, I see you’re doin’ well. If I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell. – Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, “Candyman,” 1970 * * *[…]
Anarchism · Franchises & Series · Horror · Mental Illness · Mystery · Theory · Urban Conflict
Framing the Mentally Ill: An Anarchist-Theoretical Understanding of Two “Jokers”
This article aims to demonstrate the ways in which media interests at the levels of cinematic production through to their journalistic reception work to control and marginalize certain progressive ideologies[…]
Directors · Historical & Epic · Horror · Politics
Five Screenplays by Larry Cohen: Bone, J. Edgar Hoover x2, It’s Alive III, Return to Salem’s Lot
I have been a fan of writer/director Larry Cohen ever since viewing his 1970s classics The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977) and It Lives Again (1978). Cohen was[…]
Horror · Psychology · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming · Women in Film
A Record of Human Matter: John Newland’s One Step Beyond
But that’s not to deny the series’ eerie impact, all the same – starting with the level, assured-past-urgency mortician’s cool of Newland himself and his unnerving, implacable smile. Is it[…]
Links + BSA
