A Desert
Fine art photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), creeping into the haze of deep middle age, wants to go back to the old ways of doing things.
The Shrouds
The year was 1838, when the entire world was permanently overcast, underlit, and draped in smoke, and everyone was unhappy and utterly humorless.
Il demonio
Her name, brilliantly chosen, is Purificazione: Purification. Scapegoated, slut-shamed, and viciously abused, Purif is arrestingly beautiful and sexually appetizing, uneducated and intelligent. Tormented, in a perpetual fever, she prowls her unadorned village and its windswept surroundings, armed with a cursed item, searching for the object of her desire, a lover soon to wed a more dominatable, well-behaved woman.
Nosferatu
The year was 1838, when the entire world was permanently overcast, underlit, and draped in smoke, and everyone was unhappy and utterly humorless.
Island of Lost Souls
It begins with an immense, creaking ship emerging from a silver fog and closes with an island on fire, the myriad beast-men who inhabit it exacting orgiastic revenge on their self-proclaimed creator.
Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone
The dead-eyed political aspirant Greg Stillson in David Cronenberg’s Stephen King adaptation encapsulates Trump-level terror.
Dr. Renault’s Secret
An American doctor arrives in a French village. He’s come to wed the niece of renowned local scientist Dr. Renault, but a storm forces him to delay the final leg of his journey and spend the night at an inn.
Bubba Ho-Tep
The premise alone is cinematic gold. It’s the early 21st century and Elvis (a heavily made-up Bruce Campbell) is alive, unwell, and confined to a dilapidated rural nursing home in Mud Creek, Texas, where the residents slurp, gag, and fart during mealtimes and loved ones only come to visit when you’re dead so they can toss your precious keepsakes in the trash.
Trouble Every Day
Trouble Every Day (2001) opens with Tindersticks’ swooning, doomy song of the same name enveloping the image of two figures—neither of whom are seen again—making out in the back seat of a car, their hands and mouths drifting toward what we imagine to be an inaugural sexual encounter.
The Devil’s Bath
Set in the mist-shrouded woods of Upper Austria in the 18th century, the latest film from writer/director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala opens with a prelude depicting a crime and its subsequent, swift punishment: a woman tosses a baby down a deep, jagged waterfall before calmly turning herself in to the authorities, who fatally dismember the woman and later display her remains in a sort of forest shrine.