The primary reason I don’t believe in ghosts–besides never having seen one–is that if tragedy/violence of some sort is the reason for them being, then we’d be literally stumbling over them at virtually every step. Think about it for a moment: If you take even a cursory glance at the history of any country, you won’t have […]
“Some Shrouds Obscure The End Of The World. “ Phil Joanou’s The Veil isn’t a particularly good movie, though it’s least interesting (and before I begin in earnest I have to mention the cinematography of Steeven Petitteville–according to IMDB and the movie’s credits that’s how his–I assume he’s a he–name is spelled–does great lighting. His work […]
William Brent Bell’s The Boy is one of the first movies released by STX Entertainment, a new studio launched in 2014. It reminds me vaguely of two movies. The first is 1973’s Arnold, which revolved around a woman marrying a corpse–not Rupert Murdoch, though I can understand the confusion. The second is Gremlins, especially when the sitter […]
Goodnight Mommy won the award for European Cinematographer in 2015 at the 28th annual European Film Awards and is also Austria’s entry for Best Foreign Film at the 2016 Academy Awards. The only problem with that whole Academy Award thing is Serverin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s film is a horror movie, and when do horror movies win Academy Awards? (The […]
“It’s an unfinished section. They told us not to go down there.” Says Cooper (Jason Patric) in the trailer for Eytan Rockaway’s The Abandoned. You can be reasonably sure–mainly because it’s in the trailer–that someone will eventually do exactly what they shouldn’t, and terrible events will result for everyone involved. Then again, without stupid people doing stupid […]
Horror has been pretty good to AMC. In 2010 they premiered The Walking Dead, one of he biggest shows on television, cable or otherwise (despite how atrociously they apparently treated Frank Darabont). Later came the spin-off, Fear The Walking Dead, which hasn’t been a laggard in the ratings department, either. That they’re sticking with the genre that […]
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is–when viewed in retrospect–hasn’t aged particularly well.
Finally, a Christmas movie I can get behind! Instead of being maudlin and glamorizing what has essentially become the time of year when we gauge how much someone loves us by the amount of stuff they buy us, we instead get what appears to be a life and death battle against the Krampus (who’s like an anti-Klaus in […]
I honestly wanted to like the Paranormal Activity movies. After all, there are slim pickings for horror movies at the best of times, yet the PA films are less fully-resized movies than an accumulation of jump scares that last for an hour or so. And maybe that’s not fair, but the filmmakers have had every […]
When Guillermo del Toro says that his latest movie, Crimson Peak, isn’t a horror movie, but a gothic romance, he means it. A gothic romance is a type of movie that, while horror-adjacent, visually, beckons back to movies like The Innocents, where elaborate costumes and sets help to set the mood and atmosphere. And like Jack Clayton’s 1961 movie, […]
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