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…
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…
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.…
“I see so much, burns my eyes.” – Godflesh, “Xnoybis” (1994) “I can see, I can see, I’m going blind.” – Korn, “Blind” (1994)…
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…
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…
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…
Sympathy for the Devil rehearses a familiar thriller conceit that is unsurprising from the outset. It opens with the affable everyman protagonist, the Driver…
“If they echo our sense that our bodies are liable to become dead, intractable objects, […] puppets also play out a fantasy of surviving…
In the summer of 2001, Lionsgate distributed two brutal films about young adults carrying out murderous conspiracy plots against their friends. The first, Larry…
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…
The Sadness delivers cartoonishly gory entertainment, but is less successful in delivering the Romero tradition of meaningful societal indictments. Canadian director Rob Jabbaz shot…
Midnight is a solid piece of horror escapism, but suffers from a tendency toward familiar narrative and psychological shortcuts. Kwon Oh-seung’s debut feature Midnight is…
Preceded by Ripe, Parlour Palm, and A Woman’s Block, Eve’s Parade is filmmaker Rebeccah Love’s final entry in a quartet of films depicting women who struggle against societal…
Detention recommends director John Hsu’s future efforts, but this debut effort falls mostly short of the mark. John Hsu’s debut feature Detention isn’t so much…
Black Sabbath are generally credited as the leading pioneers of heavy metal music, and rightfully so. They took some definite cues from outfits like…
Writer-director Sidharth Srinivasan’s Kriya intelligently inhabits two familiar horror setups: first, the unease of a mysterious seduction; and second, the narrative of the hapless…