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The premise, like the ambient air of fatalism, owes as much to film noir as it does horror. A man wakes in a place he can’t remember arriving at, his body bearing the ravages of some misadventure, his memories a dense fog yielding no clues save a lingering sense of grave culpability.
Adapted by Network scenarist Paddy Chayefsky from his only novel, Altered States (1980) is an unusual work of mainstream psychedelic science fiction, one that posits the unfettered mind as an engine of radical corporeal transformation.
FRESH BLOOD
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BY VIOLET LUCCA | October 31, 2021
One of the earliest memories I have is of my father pointing over to an abandoned rowboat in Dublin’s River Tolka and quite matter-of-factly stating that “a monster lives in there.”
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BY GLENN McQUAID | October 31, 2021
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BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | October 31, 2021
The TV is always on in Fatal Pulse. Set in 1991, the underground horror legend Damon Packard’s latest film is drenched in pinkish-bluish gel lighting, a movie-world glow enveloping all in its path—especially antihero Trent Dupont...
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BY CHLOE LIZOTTE | October 31, 2021
Mario Bava was a living embodiment of Italian genre cinema, working credited and uncredited on nearly a hundred films. He was a cinematographer, a special-effects artist...
BY LAURA WYNNE | April 5, 2024
Planet of the Vampires is a film you haven’t seen at all if you haven’t seen it in the wee hours, with the lights off, and its hypnotic sound turned way up.
BY TOM PHELAN | April 5, 2024
Done right, a movie can conjure feelings you typically wouldn’t have—or, in the case of many dark genre works, ones you absolutely don’t want. The powerhouse Femme brings out...
BY LAURA KERN | March 29, 2024
Drawing inspiration from the special bleary-eyed ambiance of vintage witching-hour television, this found-footage curio…
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | March 22, 2024
Seen from the vantage point of the present, any film with the barest hint of a quarantine narrative can only remind its audience of the COVID pandemic.
BY NICHOLAS RUSSELL | March 22, 2024
When Noroi: The Curse was released in Japan in 2005, it quickly became a word-of-mouth must-see, deemed one of the scariest found-footage films ever made.
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | March 22, 2024
With their numbing sameness, dystopian or end-of-world movie scenarios tend to grow tiresome, and even intolerable now that we have a four-year reference point for how true to life that stasis can be.
BY LAURA KERN | March 15, 2024
There is nothing quite so destabilizing as being told again and again that you are someone you are not.
BY LAURA WYNNE | March 8, 2024
A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home. But the young woman, credited simply as “the interviewer”—we learn her subjects’ names but never her own...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 16, 2024
RAVENOUS
Clocking in at a swift 87 minutes, Andrew Cumming’s feature debut is a slick, beautiful genre piece best suited for the big screen. Partially reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Annauds Quest for Fire (1981)—another prehistoric...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | February 9, 2024
Sometimes all it takes is one sentence to demolish everything you thought you knew about a person.
BY STEVEN MEARS | February 7, 2024
A woman’s experience of empty-nest syndrome manifests as a supernatural return of the repressed in Robert Zemeckis’s cathartic ghost story, an exercise in classical Hitchcockian tension and plotting that...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | January 24, 2024
Years ago, on Film Comment’s website, I introduced a column called Streaming Pile...
BY LAURA KERN | December 22, 2023
At this crazy moment, when film history is caught in the grip of multiple clichés that grind on and on and on—puerile revenge...
BY KENT JONES | September 10, 2023
I’ve reached a place of acceptance where I can admit without shame that I watch scary movies between my fingers...
BY MELISSA LYDE | January 31, 2023
