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is Editorial Director at Museum of the Moving Image; cofounder and editor of the online film magazine Reverse Shot, a publication of MoMI; a longtime contributor to The Criterion Collection, where he programs the Criterion Channel series “Queersighted”; and the author of Films of Endearment (Hanover Square Press, 2021).
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...
January 24, 2024
There is a particular allure to the silent horror movie—the sense that, as a viewer, you haven’t merely stumbled upon something something but perhaps you’ve unearthed it.
November 30, 2023
From a pool of strong contenders, Poltergeist emerged as the defining film of an ’80s childhood.
September 30, 2022
Four years after he put aside the satirical, political experiments that defined his early career to make his first true thriller, the macabre and meticulously Hitchcockian Sisters (1972), Brian De Palma...
June 14, 2022
In 2009, Sam Raimi, the beloved cult-horror auteur of the Evil Dead films turned idiosyncratic mainstream genre director, unexpectedly released his best post-trilogy horror film...
June 14, 2022
A paragon of queer perversity, Edgar G. Ulmer’s unfathomable Universal horror hit gave major stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff two of their greatest roles. In the first of many films together...
June 13, 2022
There is a lot of misdirection in David Prior’s ambitious, scary, and exhilaratingly convoluted The Empty Man. For its first 20 minutes it plays like lost-in-the-wilderness adventure horror...
October 31, 2021
No other horror movie has ever matched the elemental perfection of Jaws. There are the avowed summits of the genre, for sure, but even such cornerstones of screen terror as Psycho...
October 31, 2021
One of the few great, truly original ghost stories of the 21st century, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others somehow manages to combine elements and touchstones of classic supernatural horror...
October 31, 2021
Paperhouse has many frightening scenes, but one stands out as particularly scary for its brevity and almost inexplicable terror. The film’s young protagonist, Anna (Charlotte Burke), is having a dream that also functions as a flashback.
October 31, 2021
Though it’s not as widely known as some of the other B-horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946, The Seventh Victim is the cycle’s poetic pinnacle.
October 31, 2021
The horrible miracle of John Carpenter’s The Thing is that it manages to absolutely terrify the viewer while also being patently, grotesquely absurd. A commonly held belief about horror cinema is...
October 31, 2021
One of the most beloved horror movies of the 1940s that didn’t have the name Val Lewton attached to it, Paramount’s The Uninvited is a classy, atmospheric chiller that remains transgressive to this day.
October 31, 2021
The horrible miracle of John Carpenter’s The Thing is that it manages to absolutely terrify the viewer while also being patently, grotesquely absurd. A commonly held belief about horror cinema is...
October 31, 2021
One of the most beloved horror movies of the 1940s that didn’t have the name Val Lewton attached to it, Paramount’s The Uninvited is a classy, atmospheric chiller that remains transgressive to this day.
October 31, 2021
is a writer, photographer, videographer, and cinephile living in Portland, Oregon.
