For the most part, hard luck familial dramas have the potential for being notoriously manipulative on an emotional scale. However, when done remarkably well — with the right precision of pathos and truth — such melodramas can resonate and overcome their soapy constraints. Director/co-writer Jake Scott (“Welcome to the Rileys”) oversees such a one with…
Joining A24’s pantheon of beautifully crafted, enigmatic thrillers is The Lighthouse, the sophomore effort by horror auteur Robert Eggers. Based on two seamen on an isolated lighthouse in the late 1800’s, this strange thriller tackles a simplistic setting from a mind-numbing perspective and is more than enough evidence to support the resounding resurgence of unsettling,…
Ready or Not was one of the highlights of London’s horror film festival FrightFest. Wonderful in its balance of scares and laughs, it brings together a fine cast with a viciously vibrant script and highly inventive direction. Much of the film’s genius comes from its central device of games, a device that structures both the…
The horror genre allows many opportunities to explore opposition. The opposition may involve faith in “The Exorcist,” gender in “Rosemary’s Baby,” class in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and sometimes all these and more, such as in “Drag Me To Hell.” With folk horror, the opposition is often between tradition and modernity, insiders and outsiders, new…
Hot on the wicker heels of Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” is Blood Paradise, another chiller about uninitiated Americans travelling to a Swedish rural retreat. This time the victim is horror author Robin Richards (Andréa Winter, also co-writing with co-star and director Patrick von Barkenberg), whose last novel, “Return to Blood Paradise,” was a critical and commercial…
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…
The third entry in the “Annabelle” series, a part of the extended “Conjuring” Universe, is Gary Dauberman’s directorial debut, Annabelle Comes Home. The scribe is close to the source, though, as he was responsible for scripts on 2014’s “Annabelle” and 2017’s “Annabelle: Creation,” as well as 2018’s “The Nun.” Luckily, Dauberman’s transition behind the camera…
