Although relatively scarce, horror movies directed by women are out there. You may have to turn over a few rocks to know who they are and their material might be a little more difficult to get your hands on, but these directors deserve just as much attention and scrutiny as their male counterparts, who have …
15. The Immigrant – If one were to rank the films of 2014 based solely on innovation, The Immigrant would probably end up near the bottom. Writer-director James Gray’s languid melodrama tells the tumultuous story of a resilient Polish woman looking to find a slice of the American Dream, without much in the way of …
40. Night Moves Since 2006, Kelly Reichardt has found a way to reach inside of the hearts of her audiences, plucking out strings one by one with desolate re-imaginations of the American Pacific Northwest, seen through the eyes of people not so different than ourselves. With Meek’s Cutoff, she departed from her typical genre and moved …
We here at Sound On Sight believe horror transcends explicit gore, jump scares or supernatural content, which is why you’ll soon notice our list ranges from independent art films to psychological thrillers to parodies, satire and more. Surprisingly, vampires lead the pack this year, along with found footage flicks, but there are a few comedies, one …
The Babadook contains DNA from such disparate influences as Roman Polanski, Joe Dante, Georges Méliès, German expressionism, and Roald Dahl, but Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s very impressive feature debut is an intensely emotional horror film that feels completely unique in the current film landscape. It’s an allegory on grief, love, loss, and maternal trauma, and is as consistently unnerving as many a Polanski movie (and is the scariest thing with Roald Dahl blood since Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
Like all of the great horror films, Jennifer Kent’s ‘The Babadook’ possess a primal, timeless quality, equally appropriate for the eras of the rotary-dial telephone or the iPhone.
In the 2010 film Rabbit Hole, a character compares grief to a stone that you carry around in your pocket. There are times when it is easy to forget about this extra weight, but then one day you reach into your jacket and suddenly remember that it’s there. The grief of losing a loved one can never fully vanish. It will always be there in some form, whether it be as a stone in your pocket or as a spindly fingered, top hat-wearing boogeyman. If that latter comparison makes little sense, then you should see Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. In addition to being a thoroughly satisfying horror film, it is an extraordinary character-driven story about a woman trying to recover from the loss of her husband.
Fantastic Fest 2014 is still a little over six weeks away, but the Austin-based festival just released its first wave of films. Some notable selections among this group include The Babadook, a horror film that received critical acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and The ABC’s of Death 2, a sequel to the divisive …