Pit Happens

Hillbilly horror stories aren’t new. Culturally we place our collective fears on the outposts or wild places of the world. Films like Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Wrong Turn, and a million other horror or horror adjacent movies work within this conceit. Chad Crawford Kinkle's Jug Face (2013) operates in an in-between...

Death in a Small Town

Tobe Hooper’s television miniseries Salem’s Lot is an interesting example of the new horror of the seventies interacting with more traditional horror elements, which emphasized Gothic settings like haunted mansions, traditional monsters like vampires and scares built on suspense rather than brutality. Translated from Stephen King’s book about a tiny New England town slowly overrun...

Fathers and Daughters

Fear is an open-ended question, and perhaps one of the essential fears of childhood is parental abandonment. Oz Perkins’s film The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) describes both a spiritual and emotional type of abandonment. The movie begins at a girl’s Catholic school during holiday break. The atmosphere of the school is desolate, the snow of upstate...

Send in the Clown

There’s a strange allegory in the new adaptation of Stephen King’s coming of age story It. I don’t understand exactly what that allegory actually is. I know what it should be, that the alliances we make as children are purer in some ways than the one’s we make as adults. That childhood phobias, fears, and...

Mythic Love

We live in a post-romance era, when sentiment or lust is mistaken for the sensations of the heart. Yet co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring describes a love and a movie for the ages. Horror is not a genre one thinks of when considering great love stories and yet that’s what the directors bring...

The Texas Chainsaw Tribute

Death in the cinematic universe of Tobe Hooper is seldom mundane. People meet their end via meathooks, chainsaws, a soul sucking alien succubus, and homicidal aligator. The departure of Tobe Hooper last week at the age of  seventy-four was not mundane either, it came as a surprise as death always does when an artist universally...

The Candy Everyone Wants

Music is a means of suggestion, a way for sensations, notes, voice and stereophonic sound to affect individual consciousness as a group. Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy uses heavy metal as a means to show how art can both divide and unify a family. The most impressive thing about this film is not the scares...

What Strange Eyes You Have Mother

Cinema heightens and emphasizes, so that in the right hands it can transform the brutality of a death into an object of art. However, the medium still has to uphold the aesthetic precision of formal art. For every pastel rich portrait of murder like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, there are clumsily shot and purposeless gruesome films,...