Ever since the first genre films established rules, filmmakers have used them as a safety net. For better or worse, this ensured audience familiarity, while also simplifying the production process. Of the genres, horror films are probably the most reliant on these standardized tropes (1996’s “Scream” lampoons this), so much so that there is stagnation…
On what appears to be just an average evening, a grinning pizza delivery man (David Harper, “The Clean Bones Gone”) walks through an alleyway carrying a pizza box, heading towards his next address. He’s dressed in a red polo shirt and a red visor, and we quickly discover he’s carrying a plastic bag — a…
Robin Wood’s “The Wicker Man” casts a giant, well, wicker man-shaped shadow over horror cinema, especially folk horror. From “Deliverance” to “Get Out,” from “The Blair Witch Project” to “Kill List,” the conceit of confident people from “mainstream” society going to a distant location and regretting it has yielded great results for horror filmmakers. Director…
What we find scary will vary enormously. For some it’s the supernatural, for others the psychological. We may be revolted by physical suffering or horrified by social oppression. The Owners is a film that capitalizes on multiple registers of fear to create an unsettling space, both within the framework of the film and more widely,…
School teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots, “I Kill Giants”) and gardener, Tom (Jesse Eisenberg, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”) are a young, contented couple looking to settle down and buy their first home. While out driving one afternoon they happen upon a showroom with a strange display of model houses, overseen by an eccentric man…
The critics haven’t been kind to the movie Isabelle thus far, but I wouldn’t go as far as to hurl the vitriol they are spewing. It isn’t a bad movie, it is a mediocre movie, mainly because it is batting in a field that has horror films like “The Babadook” and “Hereditary” in it —…
On the surface Ari Aster’s Midsommar, is very similar to “Hereditary,” in that it too deals with a grieving protagonist who unwittingly finds herself slipping into the clutches of a murderous cult, but it deviates quite sharply from Aster’s debut feature in two interesting ways: One, it’s clearly a very dark comedy at times, not…
