Horror Films
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Arsenic and Old Lace (Not Rated)
“What’s your favorite film?” It’s the question every cinephile delights to hear, yet also dreads. Delights, because finally someone made this social function less awkward — and besides, who doesn’t want to extol their loves before others? Dreads, because who can pick just one movie?
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Green Room (R)
The recent trailer for the now delayed Dune reminded us that “Fear is the mind-killer.” This mantra is particularly appropriate for the tumultuous year of 2020, as well as the regular Halloween season. As we enter haunted corn mazes to be scared by costumed spooks or social distance at home and watch scary movies, we experience […]
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Fright Night (R)
Here is a terrifying thought: we can’t outgrow monsters. Once they have been breathed into existence, there is no willing them away. They are eternal, the necessary evil that allows us to define better what goodness might look like. Their most frightening feature? The ability to adapt and survive and always find a way to feed off […]
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The Birds (PG-13)
“Consider the birds of the air,” Christ tells us. The birds neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet our heavenly Father feeds them, and so the birds remind us to depend on God, in faith, for our provision. Man is good at finding ways to provide for himself, though. Faith is something of […]
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Nosferatu the Vampyre (PG)
Twilight aside, the most ubiquitous images of the vampire hail from the black and white era: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, he of the endlessly parodied accent, and the elaborately gothic sets and shadows of F.W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Murnau’s 1922 film is an odd beast, though. As Dracula, Klaus Kinski is […]
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The New Mutants (PG-13)
It may be three years late, but The New Mutants is finally here. Getting to watch what is now officially the final X-Men film made under 20th Century Fox’s banner was nothing short of surreal because, at one point, I really thought it might never be released.* Last summer, I wrote about how Disney absorbing 20th Century […]
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The Invisible Man (R)
In the early days of cinema, just after the introduction of sound, many of the cinematic genres we’re familiar with today were crystallized by particular studios who focused their efforts on certain niches. Universal Pictures had the horror market cornered with their adaptations of late 19th century literature, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and HG […]
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Black Christmas (R)
It’s fitting that, about three-quarters into Bob Clark’s yuletide chiller Black Christmas, I almost laughed out loud when a character exclaims in a panic, “The calls are coming from inside the house!” Before watching, I’d been unaware that the iconic line now synonymous with the horror-slasher genre had originated here, knowing it only as an […]
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Black Christmas (2019) (PG-13)
Further proof that studios think that any intellectual property is better than having no intellectual property, Black Christmas, the second remake of the original film, actually doesn’t benefit from its namesake since it bears very little of that infamous, incredible proto-slasher from 1974. The idea to update what was an incredibly socially relevant and quite subversive […]
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Dr. Sleep (R)
In Dr. Sleep director Mike Flanagan manages to weave together disparate threads skillfully, delivering a film about hauntings and reconciliation that is both faithful to its origins and strong enough to stand on its own.
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Prince of Darkness (R)
It’s an extremely unfortunate bit of irony that John Carpenter’s magnum opus, unquestionably The Thing (which itself is the pinnacle of 1980s horror, but I digress), was a huge commercial failure. Misunderstood at the time and subsequently written off, Carpenter’s greatest work almost became his biggest downfall. His career would stabilize but never fully recover. I often think […]
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It: Chapter 2 (R)
As Stephen King writes his way through his fifth decade, he holds the most credible claim to the title Greatest Horror Writer of the 20th Century. Others may have reached greater heights (say, for instance, William Peter Blatty), but those who did cannot match King’s prolific output. Those who have published comparatively often (this time we […]
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Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (R)
Mistah Kurtz – he dead. This bleak pronouncement closes Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, and opens T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, completes the circle by following the outline of Conrad’s novella – a voyage up a river to find a madman named Kurtz – and […]
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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (PG-13)
As humans, we are predisposed to relate through stories. Considering that some of the earliest forms of recording history itself came from cave drawings and hieroglyphics, which recorded events through broad illustrations that predate storybooks, it makes absolute sense that a proclivity towards storytelling is something ingrained into our subconscious. Maybe that’s why we’re able […]
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Midsommar (R)
Apparently the horror genre needed to be saved. That’s what I keep hearing whenever people refer to modern era horror directors like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. As if the genre has never truly been smart or introspective or about society at large. Of course the genre is mostly looked down upon as some cheap form […]
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Annabelle Comes Home (R)
Annabelle Comes Home does not attempt to rewrite the rules of a good horror movie. It does not even attempt to rewrite the rules of a good Conjuring movie. Instead, the film shows its merits by demonstrating the continuing vitality of both jump scares and horror movies where unabashed good stares evil in the face without flinching. There is a future for this franchise indeed.
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Child’s Play (2019) (R)
Someone, somewhere, I don’t know who, once said that instead of Hollywood choosing to remake movies that were considered classics or were fondly remembered, they should do the exact opposite and remake the movies that failed to work the first time around but still had some considerable promise to their premises. Great idea, and an […]
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Brightburn (R)
The text of Psalm 130:3 is familiar to Christians everywhere, even if the reference isn’t. In this verse the Psalmist, anonymous but speculated by generations of commentators to be David, asks a timeless question: If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? Commenting on this verse, Matthew Poole writes, “This […]
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The Curse of La Llorona (R)
Syncretism has come to the Conjuring universe. Quite obviously, The Curse of La Llorona is a story rooted in Mexican folklore, dating back to the 19th century, about a mother who does the unspeakable, killing her own children in a fit of jealous rage. Considered as a piece within the Conjuring universe, however, the film functions much […]
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High Life (R)
Space wasn’t always scary. At first, it was simply the stars and little else. As time went on, humanity began to learn more about the solar system, but I doubt many thought to be afraid of it. In the early 20th century – perhaps even sooner than that – writers began to speculate about the cosmos in a less strictly academic manner. Science-fiction was born. By and large, these writings were optimistic and more than a little naïve.