The Gift That Keeps on Giving: Black Christmas and the Creative Continuum of Holiday Horror
The Wicker Man: The Sources for an Insular Folk Horror
Echoes of the Past: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and the Haunted Heroine Archetype
The Gift That Keeps on Giving: Black Christmas and the Creative Continuum of Holiday Horror
|Andrew Neill| My first experience of cinematic horrors shattering the porcelain white purity of the holidays had to be The Nightmare Before Christmas. Six-year-old Andrew was not prepared for Santa to be kidnapped by demonic trick ‘r treaters and tortured by the Oogie Boogie Man, a sentient bag...
The Wicker Man: The Sources for an Insular Folk Horror
|Sophie Durbin| The Wicker Man begins like a typical “everyone in this town is hiding something” crime story. Sergeant Neil Howie arrives by seaplane to the fictional Hebridean island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He discovers that the locals, who seem ordinary at first, ...
Echoes of the Past: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and the Haunted Heroine Archetype
|Courtney Kowalke| Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Or did I? Do you believe everything I write in these reviews? Do you take me at my word when I mention details from my life, or is there a sliver of doubt? Do you know who I am offline? When I’m not the person behind the keyboard telling you...
Totally Folked Up: Sex, Song, and Sacrifice in The Wicker Man
|Jay Ditzer| Along a ruggedly beautiful coastline, a middle-aged man dressed in an incongruous white robe struggles as he is forced up a hill by villagers who sing cheerfully, as if celebrating—because they are. The man’s eyes...
Low-Down Horror :: Keep Screaming, Blacula
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| The following assertion is perhaps already an old saw by now, but still I think it bears repeating from time to time: The notion of “elevated horror” is pretentious AF. It’s a crass moniker meant to distinguish horror cinema’s more prestigious vendibles from...
“This is no dream! This is really happening!”: Rosemary’s Baby’s Horrific Reflections of Female Subjectivity in 1968 and Present-Day America
|Jillian Nelson| When Rosemary’s Baby released in 1968, conflicts over women’s rights raged on as second-wave feminists battled governmental restrictions that seeped into interpersonal relations. Birth control pills had only just been made legal. New York had recently...
Rosemary’s Baby: The Anatomy of a Satanic Impregnation Scene
|Sophie Durbin| take so much pleasure in every rewatch of Rosemary’s Baby that it often feels more like I’m visiting old friends, not watching one of the scariest films of the twentieth century. I love the pink font used in the title sequence, the New York Christmas scenes, the way...
Spirits of Light, or: Theatrical Lighting in Movies Makes Me Happy
|Zach Staads| I've used this quote at the top with almost no context for where it comes from or what it means. I'm not even checking to see if the person who quoted this is correct, and that this is something Kurt Vonnegut said or wrote. I quote it to illustrate how...
Ingmar’s Munsters: Hour of the Wolf
|Jackson Stern| For all of its philosophical wonderings, questions of morality, madness, and arthouse sensibilities, there’s something very different about Ingmar Bergman’s follow-up to the monolithic Persona. Sure, it contains all of the aforementioned heft of his previous films...
HOUR OF THE WOLF is Your Cathartic Nightmare
|Jake Rudegair| In your nightmare the dinner guests are ghouls (all but one of course, sweet Alma). They’re frocked up in tailcoats and ballgowns. They chat over each other, so you only catch shards here and there. “Bureaucratic vengefulness.” “Humiliation.” “The pus never...
Richard Nixon and the Ghosts of the American Dream
|Finn Odum| I must admit to you that I know very little about the 1970s. I know that Richard Nixon “pledged to end the Vietnam War”, sending the poorest of America’s sons to die aimless deaths while massacring innocents. Black activists fought in memory of assassinated...
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Hippie Road Trip Masterpiece (Film as a Self-Care Text About How It’s Totally Fine to Go No Contact With Your Family)
|Phil Kolas| Pulled pork tacos were a poor choice. That was my first thought when I started this movie. After the opening flash photography montage depicting half-decomposed human bodies, leading into the zoom-out reveal of...
Massacre for Sale: Houses on the Market Right Now That Look Like the House from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
|Ben Jarman| Last week I learned about the fate of the original house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It appears the house was cut into several pieces in the ‘90s and transported to a town 60 miles away. The house is now a restaurant in Kingsland, TX. This revelation is...
Of Monsters, Machines, and Relationships: The Stepford Wives
|Dan McCabe| Obedient tool. That phrase from the intertitles of Metropolis describes what a group of men desire in another science fiction film made decades later, The Stepford Wives (1975). In Metropolis...
Making Romania on Film: The Case of The Keep
|Sophie Durbin| The Keep was a tough sell for me, a Michael Mann fan who fell in love with him through Heat and Thief—on my first watch, I was almost offended by the supernatural plot (I’m fine with the paranormal on film, but keep it out of my Michael Mann features). Of course...
Cinema as Resistance: Black Revolution in Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door
|Chris Polley| The early 70s were, in many ways, rife with watershed moments in Black history: Charles Gordone became the first Black playwright to win a Pulitzer prize, Rep. Shirley Chisolm helped form the Congressional Black Caucus, and Thomas Bradley became the first Black mayor...
An Experiment in Disrespecting the Troops: Dead of Night
|Doug Carmoody| The patriotic imperative to “support the troops” grew, like many other national neuroses, from America’s inability to reckon with the moral failures of the Vietnam War. To counter anti-war sentiment, the U.S. political establishment boosted effusive parades to “Support...
2008: The year Tom Cruise played a Nazi and Hollywood changed forever
|Andrew Neill| 17 years ago, on a frigid night in January 2008, I was in a car packed with friends, speeding up I-29 from Fargo to Grand Forks to see a new release. We would have gone to see it locally, but the theater chain (Marcus) and the distributor (Paramount) were fighting. The film...
Not From Around Here: How Roger Corman Captured The Intruder
|J.R. Jones| If you’re sensitive to microaggressions, brace yourself for the macroaggression of The Intruder. This low-budget 1962 drama, about a small Southern town struggling to integrate its public high school, plunges viewers into the sort of casual white supremacism...
Constructing an Auxiliary Language of Horror: Esperanto
|Sophie Durbin| I have a strict “don’t talk about people from your past in your writing, they didn’t sign up for that” policy, but I am going to break it to share that I had an ex tell me (I was an admittedly overzealous linguistics minor in college at the time) that the concept of preserving...
They’re Coming to Get You (if You’re Black in PA)!
|Kit Stookey| Night of the Living Dead plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. It is common wisdom that any given piece of media says more about the period in which it was produced than the period it was trying...
God Bless This Mess: Vietnam, The Monkey’s Paw, and Dead of Night
| Wil McMillen | Dead of Night aka. Deathdream plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “My brother came home yesterday From somewhere far away He doesn’t look like I remember As he stares off into space He must’ve seen...
The Dirty Dozen: Your Dad’s Favorite Movie Before FOX NEWS Got To Him
|Phil Kolas| An ensemble masterpiece, where one dozen of the worst and most violent incarcerated American soldiers are offered a suicide mission in exchange for their freedom. A rotten deal from a rotten wartime government, offered to rotten men, to get them to kill the only type...
What are We, Some Kind of Dirty Dozen?
|Finn Odum| Sometime Before 1944: The US military established a covert demolition squad that later took on the moniker “The Filthy Thirteen,” after they decided to save their bathing water for cooking. Normandy, France, 1944: The Filthy Thirteen were airdropped over the Douve River...