Demons (1971) begins with the sun’s burial. It sinks beneath the horizon, like the circle leaving a Japanese flag. This brief color sequence is the overture to a monochrome samurai nightmare, unfolding on the fringes of Chushingura, the 18th-century Kabuki drama cycle about the 47 ronin.
Birthed during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta's 1979 feature Arrebato erupts like a massive discharge of so much repressed anxiety and despair.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
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BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
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BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
Adapted by Network scenarist Paddy Chayefsky from his only novel, Altered States (1980) is an unusual work of mainstream...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | April 15, 2024
Audiences and filmmakers alike can’t seem to get enough of body horror. The Soskas went for it full-throttle with their 2019...
BY LAURA KERN | April 19, 2022
Angel Dust (1994) is an energetically bleak film about the terrific ease with which we surrender our minds.
BY TOM PHELAN | November 30, 2023
“Horror” and “musical” are two terms that don’t exactly go hand in hand. Aside from the everlasting midnight phenomenon...
BY LAURA KERN | December 30, 2024
Lars von Trier has always been quietly obsessed with genre trash that his audience would find distasteful. Antichrist is more in the tradition of The Evil Dead...
BY LAURA WYNNE | February 19, 2025
I recently visited Queen Hatshepsut, the model for the mummy in The Awakening and the novel it’s based on: Bram Stoker’s...
BY KEVIN McNEER | November 9, 2024
In the discussion of the ’80s being the golden age of horror, Bad Dreams is far too often left out of the conversation. Granted, the film has its competition...
BY LAURA KERN | March 28, 2025
Beast is a lot of movies in one package—fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama...
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2021
Zhae-won (Ji Seong-won) works at a bank in Seoul, a hyper-competitive and male-dominated space that leaves her stressed...
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | November 11, 2024
Even after the financial success of Tim Burton’s 1985 feature debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Warner Bros. rejected his vision for...
BY ANN OLSSON | March 17, 2023
The camera floats just a little behind and a little above the figure of a man running through Central Park. In this, Birth’s overture...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 31, 2022
A paragon of queer perversity, Edgar G. Ulmer’s unfathomable Universal horror hit gave major stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff two of their greatest...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 13, 2022
There are horror movies in which Christmas is present, as if incidentally, and there are horror movies in which Christmas is the crux.
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 23, 2024
Mario Bava was a living embodiment of Italian genre cinema, working credited and uncredited on nearly a hundred films.
BY LAURA WYNNE | April 5, 2024
Blue Beard is a glutton. He likes food and female orifices, in that order, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a major thing for...
BY COLIN FLEMING | February 16, 2025
It’s a lovely day, and there you are motoring with your lady on the way back to your laboratory, where you keep hunks of flesh...
BY COLIN FLEMING | February 18, 2025
The shadowy figure of Rondo Hatton creeps appropriately over the opening-credits sequences of both House of Horrors and...
BY LAURA KERN | October 27, 2024
The premise alone is cinematic gold. It’s the early 21st century and Elvis (a heavily made-up Bruce Campbell) is alive, unwell, and confined to a dilapidated...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 25, 2024
Four years after he put aside the satirical, political experiments that defined his early career to make his first true thriller, the macabre and meticulously...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 14, 2022
For all of Hammer’s reliance on its tried-and-true monsters, the studio did a fair amount of foraying. Hammer horror could take myriad forms beyond...
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 31, 2024
Directors love Magritte. William Friedkin modeled the iconic...
BY LAURA WYNNE | October 17, 2024
For all the freaky poltergeist activity and vivid visions of murder to come, The Changeling (1980) dispatches its most abysmal horrors in its opening...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | January 24, 2024
After the relative success of American International Pictures’ 1963 release of Roger Corman’s The Raven, the studio quickly...
BY ANN OLSSON | October 23, 2024
Not just a key figure in the emergence of the J-horror movement, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is also a contender for the most important filmmaker...
BY LAURA KERN | July 15, 2022
At this crazy moment, when film history is caught in the grip of multiple clichés that grind on...
BY KENT JONES | September 10, 2023
A rare case of a film striking the perfect horror-comedy balance, The Day of the Beast is also an extremely rare example of...
BY LAURA KERN | December 30, 2023
Legendary Amicus anthologies like Freddie Francis’s Tales from the Crypt (not to mention TV shows like The Twilight Zone...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2022
It’s so strange that Dario Argento’s 1996 movie called The Stendhal Syndrome is really about post-traumatic stress disorder when nearly all of his classics...
BY LAURA WYNNE | December 27, 2024
Every so often, an actual reputable film materializes from Troma’s output of zero-budget shlock. Despite its nonsensical title...
BY LAURA KERN | June 19, 2024
With its theatrical origins—Piotr Rowicki’s play Adherence—Demon might be stagey in its limited setting, but there’s so much...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
Her name, brilliantly chosen, is Purificazione: Purification. Scapegoated, slut-shamed, and viciously abused, Purif is...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 17, 2025
Outside of the occasional action blockbuster or turgid documentary about the history of women’s sports, there are few spaces for female...
BY VIOLET LUCCA | November 7, 2024
Andrzej Żuławski will be your guide through hell, giddy as Virgil his first day on the job. He conceived his second...
BY TOM PHELAN | December 30, 2023
Well, here we have quite the farrago: Tod Browning’s penultimate film, Lionel Barrymore in drag, enslavement, telekinesis...
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 20, 2024
A peculiar pre-Code concoction of horror, sci-fi, murder mystery, and slapstick romantic comedy, Doctor X was filmed simultaneously...
BY ANN OLSSON | March 17, 2022
In 2009, Sam Raimi, the beloved cult-horror auteur of the Evil Dead films turned idiosyncratic mainstream genre director...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 14, 2022
An American doctor arrives in a French village. He’s come to wed the niece of renowned local scientist Dr. Renault, but a storm forces...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 30, 2024
Movies don’t save lives, but they do relitigate memory and imagination. The beloved suddenly reappears in frame, reanimated through some alchemical bargain...
BY FRANK FALISI | April 21, 2025
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...
BY LAURA KERN | November 30, 2023
Though recent events have redefined masks as symbols of caution and courtesy, their role in the horror pantheon...
BY STEVEN MEARS | November 2, 2024
It’s an unfortunate fact of life: even super-smart women sometimes end up with terrible boyfriends. This, along with a very different tragic, universal reality—everyone’s...
BY VIOLET LUCCA | October 31, 2022
The charismatic actor Bill Paxton made his feature directorial debut with 2001’s Frailty, an unsettling, twisty thriller with noir underpinnings.
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | November 14, 2024
It’s been regularly cautioned that The Golden Glove isn’t for the faint of heart, and while that might be a fair assessment, such warnings may needlessly scare...
BY LAURA KERN | November 23, 2023
To love Hammer horror films is to love the look of them and probably also have an abiding affection for the fall, given that it always seems to be autumn in the world...
BY COLIN FLEMING | October 29, 2024
Joe Dante, who got his start in show business cutting trailers for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, has always placed a premium on the momentary turbulence that exists...
BY FRANK FALISI | December 24, 2024
The question of possession looms over The Haunting (1963), with regards to both Hill House, the labyrinthine Victorian mansion in which most of the...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | September 10, 2023
There is a particular allure to the silent horror movie—the sense that, as a viewer, you haven’t merely stumbled upon something but...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | November 30, 2023
Insects are the worst kind of people. With all the venom-pumping, eye-gouging, and...
BY TOM PHELAN | February 26, 2024
While 1981’s My Bloody Valentine may rightfully be the go-to Valentine’s Day slasher for anti-romantics who prefer their...
BY LAURA KERN | February 14, 2022
We speak of unreliable narrators, but what of an unreliable film? That is, a movie that purports to tell one story but may in truth be...
BY COLIN FLEMING | November 10, 2024
The shadowy figure of Rondo Hatton creeps appropriately over the opening-credits sequences of both House of Horrors...
BY LAURA KERN | October 27, 2024
Though recent events have redefined masks as symbols of caution and courtesy, their role in the horror pantheon is steadfastly sinister.
BY LAURA WYNNE | November 5, 2024
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape-revenge scenario in horror-movie history, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on a young woman...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
Part of the Channel 11 Saturday Afternoon Movies canon, I Come in Peace (released outside the U.S. as Dark Angel) is the third-best Al Leong Christmas movie...
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | December 29, 2024
Jack Clayton’s masterpiece of narrative ambiguity The Innocents begins with a time-honored tableau: Deborah Kerr, hands clasped devoutly...
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2022
The rub for makers of American movie horror through the bulk of the 1950s was to make sure...
BY COLIN FLEMING | October 19, 2024
It begins with an immense, creaking ship emerging from a silver fog and closes with an island on fire, the myriad...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | November 8, 2024
One of the grimiest movies ever made, Isolation is the ultimate in contained, farm-set horror, perfect from its attention-grabbing opening titles to...
BY LAURA KERN | November 1, 2024
A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | March 17, 2023
No other horror movie has ever matched the elemental perfection of Jaws. There are the avowed summits of the genre, for sure, but even such cornerstones of...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
Suckers for crazy-ass voodoo curses that travel down female family bloodlines should delight in The Kiss, a film that got lost...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2022
Item 1 on my list of demands to be met before returning to regular Mass on Sundays is the canonization of Ken Russell.
BY TOM PHELAN | January 5, 2024
It’s both a mystery and a shame that Joel Anderson has directed only one feature, emerging out of nowhere to unleash a film that has slowly gained cult status...
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | October 31, 2022
There is a deep sense of overwhelming sadness that pervades Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter. Oil workers for...
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | December 30, 2023
Like the best fairy tales, which often portray darkness through the lens of childhood innocence, Laurín tells...
BY LAURA KERN | March 17, 2022
Four brave souls accept the offer (and sizable amounts of cash) from its new owner to spend one week at Belasco House...
BY LAURA KERN | December 26, 2024
While it predates the entire Italian zombie phenomenon, the Spanish/Italian co-production...
BY LAURA WYNNE | November 16, 2024
Jean Rollin’s debut, The Rape of the Vampire, was the only film to premiere in Paris during...
BY LAURA WYNNE | February 15, 2025
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger—an expansion of her short story of the same name—has been an enticing proposition for filmmakers...
BY COLIN FLEMING | June 3, 2025
“On the rare occasion, a special child appears…” I first watched The Lords of Salem in an empty multiplex in Easton, PA, in 2013.
BY LAURA WYNNE | October 26, 2024
“This is a living nightmare!” archaeologist Michael Radin (Martin Lavut) frantically spills to his shrink, Dr. Allen Barnes...
BY LAURA KERN | October 21, 2024
The cold open to Messiah of Evil (1973) promises first-rate grindhouse, grimy as you like: a man running for his life down a suburban sidewalk collapses...
BY TOM PHELAN | October 31, 2024
Love—or what we call love—produces a lot of lip service, which isn’t a reference to kissing. We proclaim our dedication to another...
BY COLIN FLEMING | February 13, 2025
This rarity by the director of Logan’s Run and Orca may be one of the silliest slasher films ever made, but it’s also irresistible fun...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
One of the most unheralded of Universal’s 1930s horror films, though perhaps the purest example...
BY LAURA KERN | November 13, 2024
After a curiously cutesy opening-credits sequence featuring Murders in the Zoo’s cast...
BY LAURA KERN | April 19, 2022
“There’s more than one way to lose your heart,” states the catchiest of the many taglines attached to the original, and best, Valentine’s...
BY LAURA KERN | February 14, 2025
The close of the ’80s brought a consummate entry in that decade’s trash-horror cinema. Nightmare Beach takes a...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
An interesting piece of Australian horror history is that one of the first examples of the genre wasn’t meant to be a feature film at all. Night of Fear was originally...
BY LAURA KERN | November 23, 2023
When Noroi: The Curse was released in Japan in 2005, it quickly became a word-of-mouth must-see, deemed one of the scariest found-footage films.
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | March 22, 2024
Now that the fear economy is booming, you may be kicking yourself for investing...
BY TOM PHELAN | November 12, 2024
Uniting his powers of visual storytelling and his understanding of human foibles, Hitchcock served up a top-notch melodrama and spy thriller...
BY ANN OLSSON | June 13, 2022
The opening images of Kaneto Shindo’s exquisite, dread-drenched, medieval Japan–set Onibaba (1964) are overlaid with telegraphic fragments of text...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | November 15, 2024
One of the few great, truly original ghost stories of the 21st century, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others somehow manages...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
Paperhouse has many frightening scenes, but one stands out as particularly scary for its brevity and almost inexplicable terror. The film’s young protagonist...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
If ever a film’s reputation preceded it, Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage is that film.
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 18, 2024
Planet of the Vampires is a film you haven’t seen at all if you haven’t seen it in the wee hours, with the lights off...
BY TOM PHELAN | April 5, 2024
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was: “What?” This syllable, spoken by Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), shock jock in decline, is in response to...
BY TOM PHELAN | January 3, 2023
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.
BY LAURA KERN | January 19, 2023
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...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | July 8, 2025
Seen from the vantage point of the present, any film with the barest hint of a quarantine narrative can only remind...
BY NICHOLAS RUSSELL | March 22, 2024
Sometimes, when feelings of déjà vu extend beyond a fleeting moment, it’s enough to make a nonbeliever consider...
BY LAURA KERN | November 6, 2024
There are three prevailing mindsets behind horror-movie sequels. The most typical goes something like...
BY COLIN FLEMING | November 4, 2024
Sébastien Marnier’s second feature may be cursed with a generic English title, but the film immediately dispels any any semblance of the ordinary...
BY LAURA KERN | October 8, 2023
Though it’s not as widely known as some of the other B-horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
No one who made 1972’s Silent Night, Bloody Night had much of a clue what the story was supposed to be...
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 28, 2024
In theory—well, maybe—one is not supposed to laugh while watching the events of Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) unfold, but damn...
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 20, 2024
There’s so much to love about ’80s horror, especially for those of us raised on the films of that era. They routinely feature endearingly predictable plot...
BY HANS SMITH | April 19, 2022
Beware the autumn people. You know who you are.
BY TOM PHELAN | October 31, 2023
There’s no crueler fate for an inventive, well-crafted film than being remembered solely for its twist ending, especially with...
BY STEVEN MEARS | March 1, 2022
The guilty mind passes the time by inventing new escapes and tortures. Song Il-gon’s Spider Forest (2004) is the story of a...
BY TOM PHELAN | October 22, 2024
John Carpenter has often turned to the horrors of science fiction, most brilliantly in The Thing (1982) and They Live (1988), and also in...
BY LAURA KERN | December 14, 2024
Co-directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer on a crowdfunded budget, Starry Eyes is a nasty...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | November 3, 2024
Writer/director David Koepp paid the ultimate tribute to an author he reveres, the oft-adapted Richard Matheson, with a...
BY LAURA KERN | January 24, 2024
Coulrophobia—the fear of clowns—is no joke. Pennywise, that damn clown hiding under the bed in Poltergeist, and just...
BY LAURA KERN | April 19, 2022
Everyone’s got their pet peeves. My biggest movie one happens to be the use of chapters. Films are not books, so they should be able to tell a story...
BY LAURA KERN | February 11, 2025
“Because you were home.” That’s it. The best home-invasion movie ever made is built on a foundation of senselessness.
BY LAURA WYNNE | May 22, 2024
This pre-Code offering packs a lot of story into its typically brisk running time, with several plot threads weaving together...
BY ANN OLSSON | October 31, 2021
Two thousand and three was a weird year for Korean cinema. Hard on the heels of the paradigm shift...
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | October 30, 2024
A woman’s experience of empty-nest syndrome manifests as a supernatural return of the repressed in Robert Zemeckis’s...
BY STEVEN MEARS | December 22, 2024
The horrible miracle of John Carpenter’s The Thing is that it manages to absolutely terrify the viewer while also being patently, grotesquely absurd.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
Of all the myriad films titled Thirst, Rod Hardy’s 1979 feature stands out as a multi-genre wonder, a horror/sci-fi hybrid with a dash of action and...
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | June 19, 2024
Behold the power of Myrna Loy! In Thirteen Women, she propels a man to throw himself in front of a moving subway train using only her intense gaze.
BY ANN OLSSON | November 30, 2023
Trouble Every Day (2001) opens with Tindersticks’ swooning, doomy song of the same name enveloping the image of two...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 20, 2024
One of the most beloved horror movies of the 1940s that didn’t have the name Val Lewton attached to it, Paramount’s The Uninvited is a classy...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
Unfairly remembered more for his staggering innovations with makeup than for his equally staggering dramatic skills, Lon Chaney is the absent father of horror cinema.
BY STEVEN MEARS | July 15, 2022
Two young lovers travel by car through a foreign country. They quarrel, then make up, pledging their love by burying...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 12, 2025
It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies…
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 12, 2024
In 1966, two Moscow film students pitched a horror feature based on a classic Slavic witch tale, Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1833).
BY KEVIN McNEER | August 6, 2024
When Bette Davis as Jane served Joan Crawford’s Blanche her pet...
BY STEVEN MEARS | April 19, 2022
A woman’s experience of empty-nest syndrome manifests as a supernatural return of the repressed in Robert Zemeckis’s...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | January 24, 2024
The tale of an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) lured by seemingly amiable rural folk into a sand pit from which he...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 31, 2022
People who peruse vintage TV programming schedules are used to seeing horror movies billed as something other than “horror”...
BY COLIN FLEMING | October 24, 2024
A woman’s experience of empty-nest syndrome manifests as a supernatural return of the repressed in Robert Zemeckis’s...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | January 24, 2024
The tale of an amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada) lured by seemingly amiable rural folk into a sand pit from which he is unable to escape, Woman in the Dunes would seem to generate its particular strain of terror from our primal fear of sequestration and austerity.
