While I’ve not necessarily been a fan of the new flood of found footage-style horror movies, I do appreciate the return to a different approach to scaring audiences in the dark: films about the creepy, the unnerving, the inexplicable, and the unseen. It beats watching another director try to come up with yet another unique […]
The Host (2006), Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean monster movie hit, is neither a parody, subversion, or revision of the often campy horror movie genre. It stirs a stew of genre conventions, from political commentary to dysfunctional family satire to earnest emotional pathos, into an often thrilling monster movie as indebted to the B-movies of seventies American […]
The Babadook, one of the best and most original horror films in years, raises goosebumps with old-fashioned scares, relatable characters, and a provocative psychological foundation. Amelia (Essie Kent) is a single mother who is still in mourning for her dead husband—she barely seems to be able to rouse herself to face the world—and is unable […]
John Landis teaches us two things in An American Werewolf in London (1981): turning into a werewolf is a very painful process, and the dead are boring! American tourist David Naughton survives a moonlight animal attack in Northern England only to turn into a hairy, bloodthirsty beast back in London when the moon is full. […]
It Follows is both the title and the premise of this simple but intelligent low-budget horror. The premise is like a twist on Ringu / The Ring, except that this curse is passed on through sex, which writer / director David Robert Mitchell plays with a tender sense of romance that twists into a terrible […]
In Scary Movie 3 (2003), David Zucker (co-creator of the Airplane!, the godfather of all movie spoofs) took over the horror movie lampoon franchise previously under the control of the Wayan Brothers and rejuvenated it. Where the Wayans had a mean-spirited edge to their rude and raunchy humor, Zucker plays it in a cartoonish, anything […]
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – The original version of the oft-filmed science fiction horror is still the most insidious alien invasion film ever made. This is an invasion from within. Small town family doctor Kevin McCarthy returns to his small California coastal community from an out-of-town trip to find everything just a bit […]
Re-Animator (1985), Stuart Gordon’s cult horror classic from the gory eighties, is a mix of metaphysics, medicine, zombies, and Frankenstein loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West: Re-Animator.” Bruce Abbot is ostensibly the hero, a nice-guy medical graduate student in love with the dean’s daughter (the frequently naked Barbara Crampton), but Jeffrey Combs steals the […]
In Nacho Vigalondo’s Spanish time-travel drama Timecrimes (Spain, 2007), Hector (Karra Elejalde), a middle-class man in a new country home, strays from his wife to search the nearby woods for a naked girl, and ends up chased by a scissors-wielding madman right into the amniotic pool of a time machine. He steps out earlier that […]
We Are What We Are (2013), Jim Mickle’s remake of the Spanish film of the same name, is a horror film by definition—an isolated family in rural America cloisters its teenage daughters in a religion/ritual that reaches back to their starving forefathers who turned to cannibalism to survive a harsh frontier—but a family drama at […]
