7 years ago
horror 10
“Bone Tomahawk” Isn’t Fooling Around
I’m not sure if the disparate genre elements in Bone Tomahawk all hang together quite as well as they should, but one thing for certain is that first-time writer-director S. Craig Zahler isn’t fooling around. A sci-fi horror cannibal exploitation picture by wa...
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“Crimson Peak” Is A New High For Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro will not be mistaken. He’d very much like for his new film, the magnificently wrought Crimson Peak, to not be spoken of as a horror film. On Twitter, he clarified that the film is a “Gothic Romance,” and then compared its tense creepiness to...
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In “The Brood,” Even Cronenberg’s Basics are Intricate
It’s a testament to the heady complexity of the later works of Canada’s proudest son David Cronenberg that a film as fully realized as 1979’s The Brood would be considered one of the basics of his deep filmography. He’s moved through so many phases as a stylis...
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“The Final Girls” Is Deliciously Wicked and Surprising
It’s not every day that you walk into a horror movie expecting it to make you choke up. Usually, we pay the price of admission to scare ourselves silly and enjoy some good old-fashioned exploitative voyeurism; we watch imperiled characters get bumped off with ...
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“Deathgasm” Is Gleefully Over-the-Top
It’s best to think of Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm as the spiritual kin of Brendon Small’s great Adult Swim series Metalocalypse. They’re both gleefully over-the-top odes to all things metal—from the music to its ethos and iconography. Metalocalypse ran from 2...
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“Goodnight Mommy” Fails To Come Together As A Horror Film
Even though its story isn’t what the virally-spooky trailers are selling it as, this still seems like the kind of movie I should love. An austerely produced, beautifully shot dark fable about children’s resentment of their parents, it’s sound on paper. But in ...
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“The Visit” Is M. Night Shyamalan’s Best Film Since “Signs”
In the late summer of 1999, two low-budget movies intended to scare audiences helped change one aspect of the mainstream-cinema landscape: the bare-bones found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project and the spooky psychological thriller The Sixth Sense, w...
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Wes Craven: In Memoriam
It's clear from the outpouring of love after his death on August 30 that Wes Craven was not just a revered horror filmmaker, but also a pioneer in a kind of socially minded self-aware genre filmmaking that continues to flourish today. Before he made films, he ...
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“The Gallows”
Congratulations, The Gallows: You’re this year’s As Above, So Below, which means that you’re this year’s Chernobyl Diaries, and on and on throughout found footage’s rich history as a hotbed for horror hack-work. (For every Trollhunter, there’s an Apollo 18. Fo...
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“Stung”
In the vast and varied catalog of horror film villains, giant bugs have historically been paid little respect. Big damn insects tend to be B-movie fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000 or drive-ins. If Benni Diez’s Stung proves anything, it’s that relegation...
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