Brock Bodell’s directorial debut, Hellcat, begins with a wounded and frantic woman, Lena (Dakota Gorman), waking up in a moving camper trailer. A drawling voice…
Director Sun-young Chun’s feature debut, A Girl with Closed Eyes, begins with a deceptively simple setup: a woman named In-seon (Minha Kim) shoots and kills…
An overwhelming sense of familiarity clings to Mikhail Red’s Lilim, which liberally deploys Gothic and folk horror tropes without grasping their inherent power. The film…
Taweewat Wantha’s Attack 13 is unabashedly commercial entertainment — a horror movie made with the kind of cleanness, galloping pace, and pulsing score typical of…
Ryota Kondo’s debut feature, Missing Child Videotape, begins 13 years following the disappearance of the protagonist, Keita’s (Rairu Sugita) younger brother, Hinata. When Keita’s mother…
Daihachi Yoshida’s black-and-white character study Teki Cometh follows the daily routines and ruminations of retired French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka). Divided into four…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space…
Detective fiction has deep roots in Gothic horror — look no further than Poe’s seminal “Murders in the Rue Morgue” for confirmation. Horror has expanded…
Twixt (2011) closes the gap between Francis Ford Coppola’s Corman-produced horror debut, Dementia 13 (1963), and his 21st-century excursions into low-budget experimentation, Youth Without Youth…
Director Alexandre Aja’s latest film, Never Let Go, occupies a deliberately liminal space. Its threadbare plot suggests a post-apocalyptic near future, but its central family…
Horror and comedy share much in common. Both are affect-driven genres that hinge on build-up and release while helping us navigate through cultural taboos. For…
“I see so much, burns my eyes.” – Godflesh, “Xnoybis” (1994) “I can see, I can see, I’m going blind.” – Korn, “Blind” (1994) In…
Any discussion of the 20th century’s most brutal novels in American literature must include Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho…
Film adaptations of Stephen King’s work often suffer from genre misidentification. This isn’t to say that filmmakers mistakenly read King’s work as horror fiction —…
What sets Eli Roth apart from other contemporary American horror directors is his unique braiding of current issues with high genre literacy. This holds true…
Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s terrific new documentary, Satan Wants You, focuses primarily on Michelle Remembers (1980), a nominally “nonfiction” book co-written by Michelle…
Sympathy for the Devil rehearses a familiar thriller conceit that is unsurprising from the outset. It opens with the affable everyman protagonist, the Driver (Joel…
“If they echo our sense that our bodies are liable to become dead, intractable objects, […] puppets also play out a fantasy of surviving so…
In the summer of 2001, Lionsgate distributed two brutal films about young adults carrying out murderous conspiracy plots against their friends. The first, Larry Clark’s…
I read the original Dell Abyss paperback of Kathe Koja’s classic debut novel The Cipher in my early twenties. Koja’s voice immediately reignited my excitement…