Received two films this Christmas. One was a Criterion Collection Blu-ray: The Darjeeling Limited. The other was a DVD that has not yet received the Criterion Blu-ray treatment: Ice Spiders.…
The popularity of contemporary horror is such that even “Masters of Horror” like Italian director Dario Argento are hired to do episodes in low-budget TV series of that name. Horror,…
Just saw Alien for the first time all the way through. Maybe a coincidence, but probably not, Ridley Scott has a new film out that appears from trailers and preliminary…
When reading and thinking about melodrama in film, there’s no better place to go than to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. This is the archetype of the “mode” at…
A textbook case of the monstrous feminine like no other, this series of horror/sci-fi cliches run amok with every one-liner in the book (always more effective when uttered with a…
If Begotten does anything well, it’s showing the interconnectedness of abjection with suffering. Very little in this unusual piece doesn’t evoke ideas connoting the death drive: repulsion, disgust, horror, confusion,…
Cindy Sherman’s only film (so far) came after years of notorious photography, most notably the Untitled Film Stills series. She is both the photographer and the photographed, the subject and…
Through impressive use of color, texture, lighting, and sound, The Exorcist reveals a surprisingly rich psychological ambiguity of parallel characters, corresponding with the mystical nature of and fine line separating…
You can’t really get the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men unless you’ve first watched (and gotten) Blood Simple. Now I have to go re-watch the former. It’s far…
My first foray into German Expressionist cinema was, fittingly, F.W. Murnau’s infamous Gothic work Nosferatu. The mother of all horror films (chronologically speaking), Nosferatu marvelously executed some great intercutting, showing…
