I have to admit that when I learned that Osgood Perkins (I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, Longlegs) was working with James Wan on a Stephen King adaptation, I wasn’t optimistic. After all, Wan is at best uneven as a director/producer while I’d argue that there are more mediocre to bad […]
When I first heard that James Wan was developing a series based on Robert McCammon’s excellent novel,Stinger, I had mixed feelings. The novel revolves around an alien (the language of the creature isn’t directly translatable to any human language so the closest we can get to what the creature is is ‘Stinger of the House […]
Did you see The Haunting of Hill House (2018) on Netflix? If you haven’t it’s still there and well worth seeing though the reason I mention it is because I have a suspicion that it owes a lot to Peter Medak’s The Changeling, which is likely among the best ghost stories ever put to film. […]
There are few things that bug me more than movies that open with ‘Based on a True Story’ because more often than not they’re based so loosely on anything resembling truth that it’s barely relevant – a market James Wan has cornered with The Conjuring and its sequels, which neglect to tell viewers that the […]
Last week I chose to see the reboot of Candyman (2021) over Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and while the former was not terribly scary, it wasn’t a decision that I regretted. Partially because the aspirations of Shang-Chi seemed a bit high (I tend to watch movies because I enjoy watching movies, […]
I know the idea of ‘aggressive mediocrity’ is somewhat contradictory in that mediocrity is almost by definition milquetoast and lacking in passion, but there’s no other way I can find to describe James Wan’s The Conjuring 2. The original movie was one of those horror movies that was so risk-adverse that (much to no one’s […]
I was particularly impressed by Ole Bornedal’s The Possession (2012), so much so that in my review I mentioned how much I preferred it to the horror of James Wan’s movies, The Conjuring in particular. There was a problem though, namely I haven’t seen it in quite awhile, so I was comparing Bornedal’s movie to […]
I’ve never been particularly fond of the bulk of the movies that make up James Wan’s Conjuring universe (The Conjuring (2013), The Conjuring 2 (2016), The Nun (2018), Annabelle (2014) and Dead Silence (2007, that latter as far as I’m aware isn’t actually connected though is directed by Wan) because he seems to care more […]
Jorge Olguín’s La Casa revolves around Casona de Quinta Normal in Chile, which was been associated with paranormal events for decades…even after it was converted to a community center. Which sounds like a really interesting thing to make a movie about, except that La Casa isn’t really about Casona de Quinta Normal, not really, more […]
I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that Mike Flanagan is among the best – if not the best – directors currently working in horror. And you likely noticed that “Mike Flanagan” isn’t either Guillermo Del Toro, James Wan or Andy Muschietti. And that’s because Del Toro – while never far from the […]
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