J-horror is often used as shorthand for Japanese horror, but that “J” is a bit limiting. It’s also required for Jewish horror, a subgenre that’s coming into its own. In 2012 the Jewish possession movie titled, well, The Possession presented the world with a Hasidic exorcist. Directed by Ole Bornedal, the film had a substantial budget and wide theatrical […]
Privileged paranoia is rarely as enjoyable as in Halina Reijn’s English language feature film debut – a sharp, sarcastic slasher stabbing away at the elite’s self-obsession and self-loathing. A devastating lack of meaning serves both as the origin and outcome of a hilarious horror that is simultaneously physical, psychological and parodistic. The Danish director’s genre […]
In the Director’s Statement in the Press Packet for his new film, Enys Men (2022), Mark Jenkin writes that the film emerged from “images” he had “in my head.” These images arise from the land and the history of Cornwall – from the moors, sea, standing stones, mines and miners, bal maidens (female mine workers), […]
In October of 2019 I had the good fortune to attend and write about the first iteration of Halaloween, a production of the University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Studies Center. With so many good horror films coming from outside of the US in the last 20 plus years, a film festival providing exposure to horror […]
The poignant opening scene of Carlota Pereda’s provocative horror drama Piggy establishes that the Spanish director hasn’t just expanded but elaborated the troublesome themes her 2018 short film of the same name addresses in merely 14 minutes. Sociable sadism, passive power, and the confusing ability of revenge to be both cathartic and contaminating are at […]
Published by Puppet Combo’s Torture Star Video, Jordan King and Henry Hoare’s post-apocalyptic video game Night at the Gates of Hell embodies a zealous homage to zombie cinema and survival horror games of the past. Like Bloodwash, Torture Star video’s preceding game, Night at the Gates of Hell pays tribute to Italian horror cinema – […]
Picture this: you are playing a video game about a zombie outbreak. Perhaps your avatar is struggling to survive as undead enemies hunt them in claustrophobia-inducing environments, like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine in Resident Evil (1996). Then again, maybe your avatar is the one doing the hunting, slaughtering hordes of zombies with relative ease […]
From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster, edited by Melissa Emdundson (Handheld Press, 2022). There’s a strange irony in the fact that while the names of Weird authors may be known to fans of the genre for their strange and unsettling visions, many of them were also widely popular for more mainstream […]
Casual cruelty and playful perversion make up the slow-burning scares of writer-director Eskil Vogt’s sophomore feature, The Innocents (De uskyldige), whose child characters convey a creepy conception of ethical sentiment. Privileged protagonist Ida (excellent as her young co-stars: Rakel Lenora Fløttum) vents her frustration about her parents’ move to a bare concrete complex by torturing […]