Douglas Rasmussen Originally released as part of a double feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Death Proof (2007) is a callback to a particular type of cinema that was popular in the post-studio era, namely that of grindhouse films. Grindhouse originated in the 1940s and 1950s but gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s when […]
Gwyneth Peaty The Halloween series has gripped audiences since the original film was released in 1978. The 12th instalment, Halloween Kills, is due for release in 2021 and promises to deliver what fans have come to expect: the return of Michael Myers from beyond the grave. Given the avalanche of successful horror movies released since, […]
Destiny Bonilla As new technological innovations are introduced to everyday living, quality of life improves but generational differences become more apparent–especially with the pervasiveness of the term “millennials” across media. Adam Cesare’s 2020 novel, Clown in a Cornfield, is a slasher novel that critiques the generational divide and presents the shrinking empathy between the older […]
Brian Fanelli In the years following the 9/11 attacks, a slew of horror remakes dominated the genre, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Friday the 13th (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), among others. Of the group, two stand out for their vastly different depictions of a country still […]
Colby D. Johnson The technological revolution of the past half-century has had a greater impact than we have yet to comprehend. The effects are becoming more and more apparent as time passes, especially when it comes to our coping with the trauma of events like 9/11. Such events have created a universal sense of paranoia […]
When Midnight Mass, Netflix’s latest horror hit series, took the horror fandom by storm on social media, I knew I was in for a treat. And I was not disappointed. Mike Flanagan has been producing solid horror projects ever since his powerful and eerie haunted house horror, Oculus (2013). His works tend to explore our […]
Our fascination with cults goes deep. It’s hard to watch crime shows, read thrillers, or horror without a cult or two popping up somewhere along the way. It’s become cliché, a trope, a predictable element of how we scare ourselves. We joke about tight-knit clubs, gyms, friend circles as being cultish, and we laugh. The […]
Mike Flanagan has developed into a writer-director at the forefront of contemporary horror, both in television and film. His work displays a horror auteurism that sets him apart from his contemporaries, with one particular stylistic marker rising above: Flanagan’s devotion to negative space. Negative space is everything around the main subject in an image. Positive […]
In the dead heat of August, I often find myself longing for the depths of winter. With the tail-end of summer upon us, I’ve been satisfying that longing by playing Hinterland Studio’s The Long Dark, a video game set in a seemingly endless Canadian winter on an abandoned island where you are forced to fend […]