Fraught with a claustrophobic tension that propels the audience into a continuous state of discomfort, Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007) is a fascinating examination of the difference between faith and moral myopia. While many critics have commented upon the zealotry of Mrs. Carmody and its seeming indictment of religious fervor, the bulk of that analysis fails […]
I am going to be frank. I really wanted to write about The Neverending Story (1984). Even though it is a fantasy film, I believe it uniquely contains adult themes of horror which culminate in one of the most horrific monsters of all time…The Nothing. The next few paragraphs are a brief justification of why […]
Published in 2002, The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge was written by Michael Punke, a lawyer, western historian and, currently, U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Punke was not involved in the creation of the film. In fact, as a Washington Post article reported in late December, 2015, he cannot even […]
I’m going to be honest with you; I really just wanted to watch Beetlejuice (1988). What emerged was completely unintended. As horror reviewers and academics we tend to read into things for postmodern interpretations of the world around us. As horror fans, sometimes we just want to sit back and indulge in some of our […]
John Carpenter’s first three horror films—Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982)—are not only exceptional films, but, taken together, they constitute a kind of trilogy in their similar exploitation of the horror of formlessness. Halloween may be the film least self-evidently about formlessness (its monster is “human,” after all), but I would suggest […]
The corruption of childhood by adults, both neglectful and deranged, is a predictable staple of American horror films. Throw in a murderous Santa Claus and a whip-wielding nun and the moral depravity gets ratcheted up ten-fold. Such is the case in Charles E. Sellier, Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night. Residing between ridiculously quotable dialogue and […]
Eden Lake, released in 2008 and directed by James Watkins, has been generally classified as “hoodie horror”—a British sub-genre that exploits middle-class fear of hoodie-wearing, underclass youth.[i] Mark Featherstone aptly describes the way in which “feral youth” become stand-ins for the “poor or underclass,” forming the central “evil other” of “hoodie horror.”[ii] While there is […]
On the eve of Crimson Peak’s opening day, Guillermo del Toro tweeted, “One last time before release. Crimson Peak: not a horror film. A Gothic Romance. Creepy, tense, but full of emotion…” Before seeing this film, I had read all about its Gothic, particularly literary, influences, and most particularly the influence of Ann Radcliffe. But, […]
SPOILERS BEHIND THE CUT There is an obvious danger in trying to suss out the success or failure of a season of television that has only reached the midway point. Not only are arcs halfway developed, but things we assume to be true often turn out to be something wholly different. When I initially sat […]