horror
Set in 1630, Robert Eggers’ The Witch follows a family banished from a Puritan community and forced to live, isolated and penniless, in a remote woodlands shack. Soon, malevolent forces begin to molest the kids and infect the goat, and the family is engulfed in a maelstrom of religious hysteria and occultist magic. With its deeply unsettling atmosphere and frenzied performances, The Witch has (not undeservedly) become one of the most acclaimed horror films of the new millennium, with many critics praising its attention to detail and the slow-burning tension of its narrative (as well as its mascot:
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is underrated horror films from the 1980’s.
Carrie is a movie inspired by one of Stephen King’s first novels, a dark story mixed with dramatic notes, where all the uncertainties and fears of adolescence, such as the problem of being different in a society that does not forgive, are transformed into anger and the desire for revenge. The movie was directed by Brian De Palma in 1976, but I believe it is a timeless story; indeed there have been many remakes, the last one in 2013 by Kimberly Peirce, setting it in a modern context. De Palma’s film, which can be considered a cult classic, shows the daily life of teenagers at an American high school and explores the theme of bullying deeply, adding some gory scenes towards the end.
In Matthew Solomon’s Chatter, Agent Martin Takagi (Tohoru Masamune) comes across the intimate video chats of married couple while monitoring Internet traffic for the Department of Homeland Security. The married couple, played by Brady Smith and Sarena Khan, begin to discover that their new home is haunted. In the same vein of horror films such as Paranormal Activity and the more recent Unfriended, the mechanics within this film felt familiar.
Mark of the Witch (also known as Another), written and directed by Jason Bognacki, is described as a horror fantasy film. It tells the story of Jordyn, played by Paulie Rojas, who is confronted with her Aunt Ruth’s (Nancy Wolfe) attempted suicide just minutes after blowing out her birthday candles, and soon discovers a dark secret about herself. Jordyn just wanted to know who she is and where she comes from, which her Aunt Ruth acknowledges is a perfectly normal thing for anyone to wonder about.
One annoying trend nowadays is for people to mix their genuine reactions to a film with the hype and varied opinions of others, judging it not on its content, but what you thought it was going to be. Quentin Tarantino flipped heads last year with The Hateful Eight, a considerably slower but angrier entry into his filmography, which caused anger amongst many filmgoers who were expecting another Spaghetti Western tribute that mixed modern music and quick-paced action. This highlights the problem with auteur theory and the reliance of marketing in the current movie climate, where many movie marketeers either must spoil an entire film within the trailer to gain the audience’s confidence to go see it or mismarket a film because they’re unsure on how to sell a unique/niche product to a broad audience.
PJ Woodside and her partner, Steve Hudgins at Big Biting Pig Productions in Madisonville, KY are creating quite a stir in the independent horror scene. They’ve put out a film a year for the last decade. Their most recent film, Frances Stein, was recently released on Amazon Prime and has been getting a steady stream of five star reviews.
In the brilliant and insightful documentary A History of Horror, British writer and actor Mark Gatiss explores the horror genre throughout many countries. While discussing British horror cinema of the 1960’s, Gatiss uses the term ‘folk horror’ to describe a short but very curious subgenre. The films that make up this genre are unmistakably British and owe a large debt to the trail blazers of horror cinema in Britain:
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is female-directed horror films.
“The horror genre gets (us) in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives (us) this chance to … reflect on who we are and look at the … uglier side that we don’t always look at, and have fun with that very thing.” —Drew Goddard (IMDb) I may be a little late to the party (by about four or five years) but for those of you who have not yet seen Drew Goddard (writer and director) and Joss Whedon’s (writer and producer) The Cabin In The Woods be forewarned, this article contains spoilers.
Rarely is a filmmaker as entrenched in infamy as John Waters. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1946, the king of counterculture became known in the 1970s for his creative collaborations with the equally infamous Divine and his gang of Dreamlanders. He began work as a director with a series of experimental short films including Hag In A Black Leather Jacket (1964) and the Andy Warhol-inspired Roman Candles (1966).
Two years after his ex-wife disappeared, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) get an invitation to a dinner party his ex-wife is throwing out of the blue. The couple is hesitant, the invitation is too elaborately fancy, and it all feels slightly off, especially after such a long time of complete silence. On their way to the party, they hit a coyote, which Will kills out of mercy.
The inner urge for survival is the most primitive of all impulses. For the longest time, sex was believed to be the driving force that pushes people, unconsciously and fully-cognizant, towards certain results in life. But after WWII especially, psychologists and holocaust survivors began to revisit the idea, and psychoanalysts took the obvious cue from Darwin:
Like all social groups, people with disability have been portrayed in diverse ways in Hollywood, from stereotypical representations in horror to genuine inspirations in melodramas. Disability is represented as a metaphor through imagery or characters’ features, or as a direct subject within the narrative. The entire concept of genre is recycled from elements within society, and the relevant features of each specifically labels the disabled into a certain character type.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is its unwillingness to pander to its audience. Though people may have been expecting a semi-typical supernatural horror film (complete with jumpscares and excessive gore), what they receive instead is something much more disturbing in its implications. Set in Puritan era New England, The Witch is an atmospherically driven, religion-coated film that is, at times, both beautiful and terrifying.