ESSAYS

A description of what the user will find here eg Musings and other good things
REVIEW

Arrebato (Rapture)

(Iván Zulueta, Spain, 1979)

Birthed during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta's 1979 feature Arrebato erupts like a massive discharge of so much repressed anxiety and despair.

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BY  LAURA KERN  |  Month 00, 2021

GUIDE | MODERN SLAYERS

Beast

(Michael Pearce, UK, 2017)

Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.

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BY  STEVEN MEARS  |  Month 00, 2021

REVIEW

Humongous

(Paul Lynch, USA, 1982)

In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.

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BY  LAURA KERN  |  Month 00, 2021

GUIDE | MODERN SLAYERS

Beast

(Michael Pearce, UK, 2017)

Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.

READ MORE >

BY  STEVEN MEARS  |  Month 00, 2021

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Walpurgis Night and the spell cast by 1960’s The City of the Dead.

Just about everyone loves Halloween—and if someone tells you they don’t, you might wish to keep your distance—but few people are aware of the spring’s variant on All Hallow’s Eve.

BY COLIN FLEMING  |  April 30, 2024

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Roman Polanski’s The Tenant as a phantom trans text.

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

ARTICLE | ESSAY
A break from traditional Christmas fare with 1945’s Strange Confession, and the coming together of assorted heads.

Were you to remark that the 1940s represented a peak in American pop-cultural horror, most people would automatically think you were talking about movies. 

BY COLIN FLEMING  |  December 23, 2023

ARTICLE | ESSAY
The holiday-enlivened monster that is Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

The way horror film series typically work is that the first entry is notable, for whatever reason—it’s a great movie, it’s popular, it infiltrates...

BY COLIN FLEMING  |  October 31, 2023

ARTICLE | ESSAY
David Gordon Green continues his assault on beloved horror franchises with a new Exorcist that only heightens the glory of Friedkin’s original.

Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of The Exorcist was published the first week of January 1974, just after the film’s intentionally provocative Christmastime release. 

BY NICHOLAS RUSSELL  |  October 13, 2023

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Quentin Dupieux’s singular brand of outlandish humor reaches gory new heights with Smoking Causes Coughing.

For no apparent reason, at the start of Rubber (2010), perhaps Quentin Dupieux’s best-known film, a sheriff pops out of a car trunk...

BY LAURA KERN  |  March 31, 2023

ARTICLE | ESSAY
The Harbinger, the latest of Andy Mitton’s exquisitely heady—and horrifying—otherworldly explorations, is the only quarantine film we need.

High-concept, no-frills horror is writer-director-editor-composer Andy Mitton’s modus operandi. While his four features (the first two co-directed with Jesse Holland)...

BY LAURA KERN  |  December 5, 2022

ARTICLE | ESSAY
The cannibalistic Bones and All fortifies, and darkens, Luca Guadagnino’s habitual seductive scenarios, in which heightened stylistics often cloud sexuality.

Bones and All—Luca Guadagnino’s latest monument to ill-fated love, based on the 2016 young-adult novel by Camille DeAngelis—begins with a slice of the quotidian... 

BY KELLI WESTON  |  November 23, 2022

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Cronenberg hallmarks may ripple through Crimes of the Future, but the director’s transcendent return offers fresh flavors of food for thought.

The opening image of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is arresting, enigmatic, exquisite, revealing an enormous capsized...

BY JOSÉ TEODORO  |  June 7, 2022

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Looking back on the experience of Darren Aronofsky’s divisive masterwork and questions of misogyny in horror from a world unimaginably more surreal than the one we inhabited five years ago.

Over 20 years ago I made an agreement with Darren Aronofsky to never write about his work. It was the very end...

BY LAURA KERN  |  June 7, 2022

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Acclaimed stars’ forays into horror roles are always revealing, and sometimes revelatory.

“You can lose everything else, but you can’t lose your talent,” proclaims “Baby” Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), a former child star plotting a doomed comeback. Robert Aldrich’s 1962 “Grande Dame Guignol” masterpiece...

BY STEVEN MEARS  |  October 31, 2021

ARTICLE | ESSAY
Julia Ducournau’s feral serial-killer genre hybrid Titane seeks salvation in notions of domesticity.

Consider Titane a reverse-slasher: not merely because in place of the usual murderous man-child in gender distress, fueled by psychosexual rage to terrorize mainly (or most enthusiastically) his female victims, we have a gender-bending...

BY KELLI WESTON  |  October 31, 2021