Femme

Done right, a movie can conjure feelings you typically wouldn’t have—or, in the case of many dark genre works, ones you absolutely don’t want. The powerhouse Femme brings out the whole artillery of emotions.

The Animal Kingdom

With their numbing sameness, dystopian or end-of-world movie scenarios tend to grow tiresome, and even intolerable now that we have a four-year reference point for how true to life that stasis can be. Pre-COVID, French writer/director Thomas Cailley had been developing a premise involving the spread of a new kind of virus, and as fate would have it, world events gave his ideas new relevancy.

Overlooked Genre Films of 2023

The first edition of a reanimated column rounds up the best in this year’s horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and bloody action.

School’s Out

Sébastien Marnier’s second feature may be cursed with a generic English title, but the film immediately dispels any semblance of the ordinary with one of the most attention-grabbing opening scenes in recent memory.

birth/rebirth

The influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on motion pictures can be traced back to the early years of cinema, and reanimating the dead has since grown into one of horror’s most beloved staples. Laura Moss’s exquisite feature debut is the latest homage to the timeless mad-scientist/monster morality tale.

Popcorn

When we were in our late teens, my best friend had a random VHS collection consisting of just three titles: Night of the Living Dead, Creepers, and Popcorn.

Eye of the Devil

Much folk horror pivots on the sacrifices that must be made for sacred, usually cursed land. And in the case of J. Lee Thompson’s wildly neglected Eye of the Devil, that responsibility falls to the men—which hasn’t exactly boded well for the Bordeaux-bred Montfaucon family.