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.
The Mask
“This is a living nightmare!” archaeologist Michael Radin (Martin Lavut) frantically spills to his shrink, Dr. Allen Barnes (Paul Stevens), explaining that his dreams have become all too real, even murderous.
Def by Temptation
Every so often, an actual reputable film materializes from Troma’s output of zero-budget shlock. Despite its nonsensical title, 1990’s Def by Temptation is one such example.
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.
House of Horrors + The Brute Man
The shadowy figure of Rondo Hatton creeps appropriately over the opening-credits sequences of both House of Horrors and The Brute Man, the two official films in which the hulking journalist-turned-actor stepped into the role of a spine-snapping villain known as The Creeper.