Scream’s reputation as the harbinger of self-aware horror is not entirely fair to its predecessors. The horror genre, and slasher subgenre in particular, had been aware of and commenting on its tropes since they began to solidify in the early 80s. Director Wes Craven himself first…
Alexandre Aja is an exhausting filmmaker. The director, whose ultraviolent, viscerally gory High Tension stands as one of the most notorious films in the infamous New French Extremity canon, has a maximalist style, a sort of throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-hope-something-sticks approach that yields twice as many miscues for every…
Few genres lend themselves as well to a specific holiday as horror does to Halloween. Not every film of the genre directly connects with the holiday (though there’s about 90 Halloween sequels to compensate), but the vibe of Halloween night, the tradition of dressing up like so…