James Whale’s Frankenstein was released on November 21, 1931—85 years ago. The film not only began the American horror tradition but has remained enormously generative. Its influence can be seen not only in its contemporaries, like King Kong (1933), but also in films of the 1950s such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and […]
Stephen King’s story “The Raft,” published in Skeleton Crew in 1985 and part of the horror anthology Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987), is deceptively straightforward. Near the end of October, four teens—Deke, Randy, LaVerne, and Rachel—have a few drinks, smoke some pot, and decide to swim out to a raft in the middle of a […]
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I ran across Michael Moore’s prescient article predicting Donald’s Trump’s victory. Moore described a possible “Rust Belt Brexit,” claiming that Trump would do well in four traditionally Democratic states—Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—home to many “angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people.” And indeed, against all expectations, Trump won all […]
One of the films I am most excited about screening at the upcoming Brooklyn Horror Festival (October 14-16) is the 2016 French documentary directed by Fabien Delage called Fury of the Demon (La Rage du Démon). This is how IMDb describes the film: “A documentary investigation on the rarest and most controversial French movie in the […]
In Murray Leeder’s provocative short book Halloween, published in 2014 as part of the Devil’s Advocates series, he points out that for “a film called Halloween, there is remarkably little trick or treating depicted in it” (57). Leeder mentions two moments relatively early in the film in which Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) does see trick-or-treaters—as […]
Guest Author: Cayla McNally Please forgive my lateness with this post, dear Reader; I was blindsided to discover that Penny Dreadful’s season 3 finale was, in fact, its series finale, and have been spinning my wheels trying to write a proper send-off ever since. In my last post, I said that wherever this show goes, I will […]
Hands play a huge role in the horror film: there is the shot of the hand (alive or dead) grasping for its victim, the severed hand lying inertly on the ground, the detached hand crawling across the floor, with a life of its own—and the hand that has a life of its own even though […]
The opening lines of the 2016 box-office hit, Don’t Breathe, directed by Fede Alvarez, summarize the plot: “Wait, is he blind?” “That’s kind of fucked up to rob a blind guy, isn’t it?” “Just ‘cause he’s blind don’t mean he’s a saint, bro.” The scene in which these lines are said appears in every trailer […]
Easter is a short film in the Holidays horror anthology, released in 2016. Written and directed by Nicholas McCarthy, it tells the tale of a young girl (played by Ava Acres), who is conflicted about the Easter holiday; having just learned of Jesus’s death and resurrection at church, she has a hard time reconciling the […]