Erin Harrington In the early 1980s, first Mrs. Voorhees and then her damaged, homicidal son hacked and slashed their way along the shores of Crystal Lake. Fifteen years later, in New Zealand, my friends and I – all members of the VHS generation and beneficiaries of the Scholastic book club – spent our fifth form […]
Shown at festivals in 2019 and released widely in March 2020, Vivarium is the second feature by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley. It’s a brilliant, albeit devastatingly bleak film that also happens to echo—as so many horror films do—one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone. Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature, […]
Home is where the horror is. Some of the most iconic horror settings are homes, whether single-family houses in movies like Halloween and Poltergeist, sprawling estates like Manderley in Rebecca or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak, or inhabited hotels like the Bates Motel or the Overlook. The residence of interest in Marjane Satrapi’s 2014 film […]
Blacula (William Crain, 1972) is an interestingly complicated watch; unlike many films at the time, Blacula was the product of a black director and was born out of and into the 1970s political terrain and within the explosion of “blaxploitation” as a subgenre. Blacula is arguably a pioneer of black horror, which might be thought […]
George A. Romero’s classic zombie trilogy, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985), is the ultimate example of the zombie as a social metaphor. Countless articles have been written about each film, especially the racial undertones of the first film. In the age of the […]
Lady in a Cage (1964) is a deeply disturbing film. I was, to put it bluntly, shocked that a film this dark was made in the early 1960s. It anticipates some of the more nihilistic horror films of later decades—notably Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997 and 2007), […]
In one of the most memorably sublime scenes of Danny Boyle’s zombie masterpiece, 28 Days Later (2002), a nonplussed Jim (played by a young Cillian Murphy) wanders the deserted streets of London in scavenged hospital scrubs, having just awoken from a coma. Extreme long shots of Jim on an empty Westminster Bridge, in front of […]
I happened upon Kingdom during a particularly gloomy Saturday afternoon. It was in some post-lunch delirium that I picked it out from one of Netflix’s algorithm-generated line-ups, titled “Korean Thrillers”—generated entirely from my recent viewing of Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan—fully intending on drifting into my afternoon siesta during the opening credits. Little did I […]
Much like Jordan Peele’s Us, Max Pachman’s deliberately provocative debut feature Beneath Us presents the viewer with the subaltern- the dispossessed, those without power or a voice and forces us to question who we identify with. The title functions both literally and metaphorically. Four undocumented immigrants, Hector, Alejandro, Homero and Memo (Roberto Sanchez, Rigo Sanchez, […]