A Year in the Life

In a world of franchise concepts, we wonder where things originate. Art in our society becomes not just about now, but how we got to now, was there a purer time, a place where all antecedents come from,. What does home look like now is a question most fictive worlds try to answer. The adaptation...

Meet the Parent

Implicit in most narratives of monstrosity is how elements foreign and animalistic,  are somehow unfailingly human. We understand implicitly that Frankenstein’s monster is who we are, because it is in the existence of birth that we must begin life accepting the world on its surface. The monster is the child who enters the world a...

He’s Prince and He’s Evil

Commenting on which movie of his fans love, George Romero said something to the effect that some fans tell him Night of the Living Dead is their favorite movie and some say Dawn of the Dead, but the real sickos are the ones that love Day of the Dead. In a sense that is my...

Love in the Time of Mermen

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a film about who we are asked to be and who we actually are. The film follows Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) a cleaning woman working at a military lab. Her inability to speak frames the narrative. Elisa and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins) live in a world...

I’m going to get you sucker

To some degree the portrait of a vampire is an examination of human loneliness. What are Carmilla or Count Dracula, but beings who have lived out of time. The vampire take life to live without time and because of this, along with a host of religious, sexual, and cultural mores, the supernatural figure is as...

Corpus delicti

What does it mean to be a conventional horror movie? When terror and fear are the subjects, then any movie could truly be a horror. All The President’s Men is a horror movie about the goliath of the president running amok, a true serial killer. A Few Good Men is a horror movie about group...

The Shape and the Thing

Generally it’s supposed that Alfred Hitchcock modernized the horror movie, taking films once located in dark castles and European villages into the suburbs and backcountry of America, creating a horror movie that was more concerned with pathology and carnage then the classic tenets of gothicism. Hitchcock’s singular impact can be argued as a film like...

Bound

Every child’s story is how they bury their parents. Whether with a spade full of dirt or years on the psychologist’s couch, growing up means the acknowledgement of who we were with our parents and who we are now. Jessie (Carla Gugino), the heroine of Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel Gerald’s Game...

A Woman Under the Influence

Possession movies are always predicated on bad influence. Often these influences come from an outside malicious force, one that wants to cause death and pain to an innocent person. A good example of this is William Friedkin’s The Exorcist where a little girl is possessed for no other reason than to create doubt and terror....

Great Ape

Bob Goldthwait’s Willow Creek is not only familiar because it mimics the most famous found footage movie of all time The Blair Witch Project, but because it hops on the trend of reality shows based on cryptozoology. The movie tells the story of tourists going on a pilgrimage to see where the Patterson–Gimlin footage was...