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A nurse leads a catatonic through an expanse of moonlit cane. They pass displays of sacrificed animals before encountering the towering, shirtless, dead-eyed Black man who grants them entry to a private outdoor religious ceremony…
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...
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...
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2021
Even after the financial success of Tim Burton’s 1985 feature debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Warner Bros. rejected his vision for Batman and he was left in search of...
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, we seem to observe the running man...
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 roles.
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 13, 2022
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...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | June 14, 2022
Not just a key figure in the emergence of the J-horror movement, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is also a contender for the most important filmmaker in all of Japanese horror history.
BY LAURA KERN | July 15, 2022
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
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...
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
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 body radically changes and deteriorates...
BY VIOLET LUCCA | October 31, 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...
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
Jack Clayton’s masterpiece of narrative ambiguity The Innocents begins with a time-honored tableau: Deborah Kerr, hands clasped devoutly, imploring a higher power to make her useful...
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2022
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...
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 among the wealth of 1988 horror gems...
BY LAURA KERN | October 31, 2022
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
Like the best fairy tales, which often portray darkness through the lens of childhood innocence, Laurín tells a dreamily surreal story...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | October 31, 2021
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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.
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
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. That absence is no fault of his own...
BY STEVEN MEARS | July 15, 2022
When Bette Davis as Jane served Joan Crawford’s Blanche her pet bird for “din-din,” a new strain...
BY STEVEN MEARS | April 19, 2022
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...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | October 31, 2022
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.
