Empire of Silence
Renowned composer Toru Takemitsu brought his own brand of sonic fear to the soundtracks of many genre highlights from the Japanese New Wave.
Nightmare Scenarios
Longlegs carries forward Osgood Perkins’s ethereal cinema of dark isolation.
Punctured Life
A place where no actual blood was spilled—at least to my knowledge—my grandmother’s house proved strangely—even sagely—sanguinary as it pertained to an important development in my life.
Witches of the Fog
Just about everyone loves Halloween—and if someone tells you they don’t, you might wish to keep your distance—but few people are aware of the spring’s variant on All Hallow’s Eve.
Trans Girl Suicide Apartment
Roman Polanski’s The Tenant as a phantom trans text
James Stewart in Vertigo
In the inaugural entry of a new column singling out enduringly creepy film characterizations, an American sweetheart cast against type emerges as one of cinema’s most unexpectedly chilling villains.
Better Than One
Were you to remark that the 1940s represented a peak in American pop-cultural horror, most people would automatically think you were talking about movies.
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.
No Michael Myers Necessary
The way horror film series typically work is that the first entry is notable, for whatever reason—it’s a great movie, it’s popular, it infiltrates the news cycle/culture—and then subsequent entries get worse and worse and worse, until there are no more.
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.