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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 roles. In the first of many films together, the erstwhile Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster play a pair of intensely bonded frenemies locked in an epic sadomasochistic pas de deux.
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.
READ MORE >
BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
Audiences and filmmakers alike can’t seem to get enough of body horror. The Soskas went for it full-throttle with their 2019 remake of Cronenberg’s Rabid (an early work by one of the subgenre’s originators).
BY LAURA KERN | April 19, 2022
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.
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2021
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 Hitchcockian Sisters (1972), Brian De Palma released Carrie and nearly perfected his horror technique.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 14, 2022
With its theatrical origins—Piotr Rowicki’s play Adherence—Demon might be stagey in its limited setting, but there’s so much festering within that you’re hardly aware that most of the action takes place during the course of one wedding.
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
A peculiar pre-Code concoction of horror, sci-fi, murder mystery, and slapstick romantic comedy, Doctor X was filmed simultaneously in two-color Technicolor and black and white...
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, unexpectedly released his best post-trilogy horror film.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 14, 2022
While 1981’s My Bloody Valentine may rightfully be the go-to Valentine’s Day slasher for anti-romantics who prefer their gooeyness blood-soaked and sugar-free, Cannon Films attempted to give it some competition later that year.
BY LAURA KERN | February 14, 2022
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape-revenge scenario in horror-movie history, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on a young woman, Ida (Shay Garner), during a family party in 1946...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
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 screen terror as Psycho, The Shining, Carrie, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
Like the best fairy tales, which often portray darkness through the lens of childhood innocence, Laurín tells a dreamily surreal story of hardened youth.
BY LAURA KERN | March 17, 2022
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, both well-executed and rapidly paced. Horror’s attempts to create a fear of answering the telephone...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
After a curiously cutesy opening-credits sequence featuring Murders in the Zoo’s cast members mirrored with similarly posed animals, a quick tonal shift occurs, transitioning to perhaps the most gruesome film scene of its day.
BY LAURA KERN | April 19, 2022
The close of the ’80s brought a consummate entry in that decade’s trash-horror cinema. Nightmare Beach takes a sex-comedy setting—spring break at Miami Beach—and tosses in a killer, who so inconveniently disrupts...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2021
Uniting his powers of visual storytelling and his understanding of human foibles, Hitchcock served up a top-notch melodrama and spy thriller with Notorious.
BY ANN OLSSON | June 13, 2022
One of the few great, truly original ghost stories of the 21st century, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others somehow manages to combine elements and touchstones of classic supernatural horror without ever descending into pastiche.
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, Anna (Charlotte Burke), is having a dream that also functions as a flashback.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
Though it’s not as widely known as some of the other B-horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946, The Seventh Victim is the cycle’s poetic pinnacle.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
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 twists, spooky synth soundtracks, characters who do the stupidest possible thing at the worst possible moment...
BY HANS SMITH | April 19, 2022
There’s no crueler fate for an inventive, well-crafted film than being remembered solely for its twist ending, especially with said twist divulged through a line reading that oxidized into self-parody as soon as it entered the atmosphere.
BY STEVEN MEARS | March 1, 2022
Coulrophobia—the fear of clowns—is no joke. Pennywise, that damn clown hiding under the bed in Poltergeist, and just good old trips to the local circus paired with a child’s dark imagination have been nightmare fuel for many.
BY LAURA KERN | April 19, 2022
This pre-Code offering packs a lot of story into its typically brisk running time, with several plot threads weaving together a (not always successful) tapestry of spooky and criminal doings.
BY ANN OLSSON | October 31, 2021
The horrible miracle of John Carpenter’s The Thing is that it manages to absolutely terrify the viewer while also being patently, grotesquely absurd. A commonly held belief about horror cinema is “the less shown the better”...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
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, atmospheric chiller that remains transgressive to this day.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
When Bette Davis as Jane served Joan Crawford’s Blanche her pet bird for “din-din,” a new strain of horror was born. Either “Grande Dame Guignol” or “psycho-biddy cinema,” depending on your degree of reverence...
BY STEVEN MEARS | April 19, 2022
