Gold Metal
The directorial debut of veteran character actor Charles Martin Smith, Trick or Treat (1986), tells a story grounded in rites, rituals, and rock.
The Velvet Vampire
It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies. She studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California, became the first woman to be awarded a Directors Guild of America fellowship, and went on to work as a valued assistant for exploitation titan Roger Corman (also, as it happens, a big Bergman fan).
The Haunting
The question of possession looms over The Haunting (1963), with regards to both Hill House, the labyrinthine Victorian mansion in which most of the action takes place, and the film’s story, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s now-canonical 1959 Gothic The Haunting of Hill House that’s remarkably faithful in plot, if not in spirit.
The Changeling
For all the freaky poltergeist activity and vivid visions of murder to come, The Changeling (1980) dispatches its most abysmal horrors in its opening minutes, when its protagonist witnesses the deaths of his wife and child under the wheels of a truck, in the sort of scene that inevitably impacts older viewers more profoundly than younger ones.
Onibaba
The opening images of Kaneto Shindo’s exquisite, dread-drenched, medieval Japan–set Onibaba (1964) are overlaid with telegraphic fragments of text: “THE HOLE. DEEP AND DARK…”
The Vanishing
Two young lovers travel by car through a foreign country. They quarrel, then make up, pledging their love by burying a pair of coins beneath a tree. Then, at a petrol station through which thousands pass daily, the woman vanishes.
Enys Men
It is springtime 1973, and the days are bright on a small island off the coast of Cornwall. A horticulturist (Mary Woodvine), known only as the volunteer, is the island’s sole inhabitant. Or is she?
I Walked with a Zombie
A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals before encountering the towering, shirtless, dead-eyed Black man who grants them entry to a private outdoor religious ceremony…
Skinamarink
We go to the movies to see ghosts, whether they be the likenesses of long-gone actors, objects, or edifices, or the suggestion of specters imprinted in the gloom of otherwise benign images.
Nr. 10
From its opening image of ocean waves stuttering slowly behind a sheet of steely rain to its final vista of human detritus turned into cosmic junk, Nr. 10 seems determined above all to enter and exit every scene in medias res.