Kuroneko
A swarm of samurai emerge from a bamboo grove in firefly patterns, arriving at the threshold of a humble hut. The scene is nearly silent, false tranquility preceding a torrent of savagery.
The Leopard Man
A lipstick and makeup mirror slip from fear-frozen hands, a sack spills corn flour along a grassy trail, a ball floats atop a geyser of water, the rattlesnake whir of castanets, blood seeps in from below a heavy door: The Leopard Man (1943), the third in auteur producer Val Lewton’s cycle of low-budget horror films for RKO, and his last collaboration with the great B-movie director Jacques Tourneur, brims with such haunting, often eerily erotic sounds and images.
Ms .45
Stripped to its essentials, the story could be an especially bleak, brazenly sleazy fairy tale. Thana, a young seamstress working in Manhattan’s Garment District, is raped not once, but twice, in the space of perhaps one hour—this is the New York Taxi Driver warned you about.
Possession
Everything is either fractured or in the process of splitting apart. It is the final decade of the Cold War, and Mark (Sam Neill), a spy, returns to West Berlin, the more prosperous, though eerily vacant, half of a divided city, where his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), is inexplicably asking for a divorce.
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.