The holidays I love the most are Halloween and Christmas—as I’m sure many others would choose—and Easter, which gives the other two a competitive push. It’s also a day whose spirit I seek to keep in my heart all year round—as Scrooge learned to do with what became his treasured Yule.
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
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
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
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
When it comes to ghost stories—the foundational texts, be they written or oral, of horror—the Irish are tough to beat. Fear is a spirit. A ghost may take the form of what we’ve allowed ourselves to miss out on.
BY COLIN FLEMING | March 17, 2025
Upon initial considerations, lovers of horror films might not strike us as romantics. They seek tension and fear, and while both qualities...
BY COLIN FLEMING | February 10, 2025
Evil father figures account for some of the most memorable characters in genre films and beyond. And, well, if you happen to have a shitty dad in real life, it’s strangely therapeutic...
BY LAURA KERN | December 31, 2024
Before we assess the villain, let’s begin with the hero—and “hero” is the correct appellation for Johnny Smith…
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | November 3, 2024
Anyone can watch a hearse-load of scary movies at Halloween—and lots of us do—but how many of those people try and seek out the films most indebted to, or representative of, the holiday itself?
BY COLIN FLEMING | OCTOBER 15, 2024
After he’d fundamentally abandoned Hollywood moviemaking and cast his lot with the nascent medium…
BY STEVEN MEARS | August 20, 2024
Consider the Dies Irae. Eight dire notes to remind you that you are going to die. his musical phrase from a 13th-century...
BY TOM PHELAN | July 26, 2024
About a decade ago, an intriguing new contender stepped into the horror arena. It wasn’t so much a grandstanding moment as a quiet entrance from out of the blue, subtly sneaking into...
BY LAURA KERN | July 12, 2024
A place where no actual blood was spilled—at least to my knowledge—my grandmother’s house proved strangely—even sagely—sanguinary as it pertained to an important development in my life.
BY COLIN FLEMING | June 19, 2024
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
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
Sometimes all it takes is one sentence to demolish everything you thought you knew about a person.
BY STEVEN MEARS | February 7, 2024
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 22, 2023
Years ago, on Film Comment’s website, I introduced a column called Streaming Pile—one that, as its tagline stated, was “dedicated...
BY LAURA KERN | December 22, 2023
The directorial debut of veteran character actor Charles Martin Smith, Trick or Treat (1986), tells a story grounded in rites, rituals, and rock. Its inaugural sequence, a bravura portrait of...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 31, 2023
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...
BY COLIN FLEMING | October 31, 2023
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
Last night I watched myself sleep then I flew away, a young boy named Dalton writes in crayon shortly before his spirit leaves...
BY NICHOLAS RUSSELL | Updated July 11, 2023
A horde of diabolical children have preceded Esther of Orphan (2009), directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, but she has secured a place among horror cinema’s most memorable enfants terribles, even before its long-awaited...
BY KELLI WESTON | April 28, 2023
For no apparent reason, at the start of Rubber (2010), perhaps Quentin Dupieux’s best-known film, a sheriff pops out...
BY LAURA KERN | March 31, 2023
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
Bones and All—Luca Guadagnino’s latest monument to ill-fated love, based on the 2016 young-adult novel by Camille DeAngelis...
BY KELLI WESTON | November 23, 2022
In 1983, JoBeth Williams appeared in the ensemble of Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, thus immortalizing herself as an avatar for white baby boomery. As emotionally dissatisfied, professionally stunted Karen...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | September 30, 2022
Of the many recurring horror villains, Freddy Krueger is famously distinguished by his crispy face and razor claws, Jason Voorhees by his hockey mask and machete, and Leatherface by his human-flesh mask and chainsaw. They all...
BY LAURA KERN | August 17, 2022
One need only watch a few moments of Peter Strickland’s films to realize that the British-born, Hungary-based director is...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | June 24, 2022
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
Over 20 years ago I made an agreement with Darren Aronofsky to never write about his work. It was the very end of the last century...
BY LAURA KERN | June 7, 2022
Horror stories know something that other stories don’t. William S. Burroughs named his book Naked Lunch after that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
BY TOM PHELAN | March 17, 2022
Despite all the Universal, Toho, and Hammer monster movies I’d been introduced to on Channel 48’s Creature Double Feature, nothing had prepared me for the moment when a friend’s older brother popped in a VHS copy of...
BY HENRY MILLER | February 1, 2022
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...
BY KELLI WESTON | October 31, 2021
“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
One of the earliest memories I have is of my father pointing to an abandoned rowboat in Dublin’s River Tolka and quite matter-of-factly stating that “a monster lives in there.”
BY GLENN McQUAID | October 31, 2021
Within Michael Mann’s oeuvre of slick urban crime dramas and thrillers, his lone horror-fantasy film The Keep is an overlooked outlier, virtually ignored since its initial release...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | October 31, 2021