Every year, starting on November 1st, I count down the days until October with the prospect of watching non-stop horror movies (inevitably alone, or with my dog). As I patiently await for the next October to arrive, I imagine the films dancing like poisonous sugar plums in the catacombs of my head. I love October, and …
Australia may not have an overabundance of horror films but they’ve managed to produce some quality genre pictures. The recent success of the acclaimed documentary Not Quite Hollywood has shed light on a much overlooked aspect of Aussie genre filmmaking, from lowbrow slashers to twisted thrillers and gross-out horror comedies. Back in the 70’s a …
‘Ava’s Possessions’ is smart, funny, and occasionally creepy indie fare.
There’s a lot at stake in the final scene of The Witch, the terrifying feature film debut from writer/director Robert Eggers, and it’s not as unambiguous as it may seem. As Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) descends into the woods, ostensibly joining the coven which has been terrorizing her family, Eggers appears to validate the concerns voiced throughout the film: Witches are real, and they can entice former Christians to join them. But Thomasin very well may just have an active imagination, one fueled by her anger towards the patriarchal Christianity her father attempts to impose on her, and no one other than Black Phillip is around to confirm the reality of Thomasin’s experience. Either way, the ending depicts Thomasin’s clear rejection of one system in favor of another, and it therefore captures the true conflict at the movie’s core.
Robert Egger’s feature film debut The Witch, is a terrifying exploration of a puritanical family’s descent into hysteria. Eggers is stingy with the film’s supernatural elements, preferring to force the audience to decide what is real versus what is a manifestation of the character’s anxieties. The result is a film finely tuned for horror aficionados with a preference for old-fashioned psychological terror.
Zombie’s ’31’ is a thoroughly dispensable gore-fest.
At long last, we come to the writing portion. Still with me? Not bored by my great wall o’ words? Good! As I said before, Midnight Menagrie is a horror comic for a teenage audience. I mean, hint-hint at the PG-13 rating. The comic starts off by introducing Shawn, the main protagonist. He’s the son …
A guide to the very best of one of TV’s most definitive genre series.
Swamp Thing is one of the very best series from DC Comics in the past five years, from Scott Snyder’s revival of the character in 2011 to Charles Soule’s grandiose world-building years later.
Quentin Tarantino’s newest feature, The Hateful Eight (“The 8th Film From Quentin Tarantino,” as the opening credits remind viewers), is his most violent film ever. Every act of violence is similar to something from his previous films, but never has Tarantino devoted so much of a single film to non-stop carnage. It wasn’t always like …
Tales of the Unusual is a webcomic series of strange and mysterious stories by Sungdae Oh in which terrible things happen to terrible people 95% of the time, and innocent people are caught in the crossfire the other 5% of the time. Either way, each thrilling tale has a moral at its twisted end.
Southern Cross #1-5 (2015) Written by Becky Cloonan Art by Andy Belanger Colors by Lee Loughridge Letters by Serge LaPointe Published by Image Comics In a dark future, ex-con Alex Braith travels to a refinery rig on Titan to retrieve the remains of her sister, Amber, after she died of mysterious circumstances. The ship Alex …
Mexico Barbaro Directed by Isaac Ezban, Laurette Flores Bornn, Jorge Michel Grau, Ulises Guzman, Edgar Nito, Lex Ortega, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Aaron Soto Mexico, 2014 There’s a line in Mexico Barbaro that goes something like, “Drain the blood from your sister’s vagina or I’ll suck your soul out of your anus.” And that’s not the …
Occasionally older, strong-willed women creep into the sex-saturated narrative of horror that traditionally wallows in the terrorizing and disposing of young ladies. There is something to the fact that whether their presence maintains, twists or rebukes the genre’s stereotypically repressive lessons about female sexuality that so often end in the punishment of women acting out …
The dream came true on October 28th, 2013 at Los Angeles’s Egyptian Theater, where the 2013 Beyond Fest was being held. Trick ‘r Treat (2007) was appropriately closing out the evening, but the viewing began with a Q&A session including director Michael Dougherty, producer Bryan Singer, actors Dylan Baker, Brian Cox, Quinn Lord, Jean-Luc …
In a padded cell adorned with crudely drawn crosses resides John Trent. Trent has gone so far as to not only decorate his new insane asylum home with crosses, but himself as well — they run up and down his mental patient uniform and dance across his very face. Outside the asylum, the world is going to hell, and John Trent knows it. When the kindly Dr. Wrenn comes to talk with Trent, Trent tells him the cold hard truth: “Every species can smell its own extinction.”
The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their tenth piece, they discuss Guy Maddin’s fusion of silent-era horror and dance, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). DREW’S TAKE Every autumn, I treat Halloween the way some Midwestern moms obsess over Thanksgiving or …
We now know that while Rick’s methods have been cruel in some respects, his way works, and works hard. I say that because, while the Alexandrians are out planning to overthrow him, the Wolves invade and slaughter about twenty five percent of the village.
John Frankenheimer’s ultimately terrifying Twilight Zone-like, futuristic thriller Seconds, received mixed reviews, and was critically panned at the Cannes Film Festival. But what do they know?
Horror in video games is not the same as horror in books or movies. There’s a certain artistic realism to horror in games that makes players more immersed in the nightmare the developer creates. In movies or books, the audience is just that, a spectator looking from the outside in. Video games add a whole …
To describe Bone Tomahawk as a “horror-Western” is good shorthand, but could be a little misleading. The film indeed has horror elements but novelist turned screenwriter/director S. Craig Zahler seems more interested in spending time with his four main protagonists as they travel across country, letting their different personalities and world views, and the harshness of the terrain, challenge them on their journey
Movies about gaggles of sinister children scurrying about getting up to all kinds of bloody mischief (or alternately, standing stock still, staring into the middle distance and looking creepy) are nothing particularly new to horror films. Movies like The Innocents, Children of the Corn, Children of the Damned and countless others have all found success in gleefully twisting the popular image of children as innocent and harmless and capitalizing on that subtle unease felt by so many people in the presence of the young. It’s an ever-growing horror sub-genre, and once which Bruce McDonald’s Hellions aims to stake a claim in.
At least the title of Terror and Black Lace isn’t entirely misleading. There is, after all, some terror. And there is some black lace. But, in the same way that Luis Alcoriza’s 1985 film is mostly domestic drama and then only partially and haphazardly horror, this film is far more concerned with lingerie than horror.