A Clown Without Pity

Dismissing a work as repellent is easily done. Content is important especially in our culture where we are much more aware of sexism, violence, and other elements that can reduce and marginalize. Terrifier is a work repellent enough to be dismissed outright. A low-budget slasher, what it lacks in clever plotting it makes up in...

The Never-ending Story

Moving on is hard to do. After all what does it mean to leave? What does life look like without us. Many zombie movies ask that question, how do we survive when the soul evaporates and the essential grotesque proportion of flesh and blood are left as our only signifier. Every movie about supernatural forces...

The Raw and the Cooked

There’s an interesting moment in the French cannibalism movie Julia Ducournau’s Raw when the main character Justine (Garance Marillier), opines to her friends that eating meat is cruel because animals have emotions. The moment is particularly compelling because the action of the film takes place at a veterinary school where students are being trained to...

Witch Finder

Found footage with its anti-aesthetic filmmaking offers an interesting type of the horrific, one conceptualized not only by horrific material, but bound with how the audience experiences time. Although The Blair Witch Project was far from the first found footage horror film, it’s wide dispersal in the culture makes it a touchstone. Looking back at...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...