I am a fan of writer/director Leigh Whannell. It gets somewhat lost now under the weight of the attenuated franchise, but Whannell’s first feature (he co-wrote and co-starred), Saw, was a brutally clever low-budget surprise hit that announced new talents had arrived on the genre film scene. 2010’s Insidious breathed fresh life into the supernatural…

The Ten Best Horror Films of 2024 2024 has been many things, pro and con, but one of those things was a strong year for horror cinema. There were so many good options that my top ten list may not even include any of the other films on some other critic’s list of favorites. In…

There are plenty of winter-set horror films, and that’s for good reason: if you’re looking to put a chill in the audience, a dark, cold atmosphere has already done half the work for you. Films such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter or John Carpenter’s The Thing make it clear that even if there was no demon…

Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving began as one of the parody trailers in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 film, Grindhouse. Epitomizing the “grindhouse” vibe, the trailer looked and sounded low-budget and tasteless, all sex and garish kills, with a closing shot so shocking that it was literally only visible for seconds. In other words, it was…

Regarding Hugh Grant’s first horror film in thirty-six years (following Ken Russell’s groovily psychedelic The Lair of the White Worm), perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan put it best – “Whereas heretofore Hugh Grant has been a hail-fellow-well-met-ical, his ventures into horror fare just barely parenthetical, one wonders on reflection if he sees this as regrettable, so…

Late October, when the weather portends the oncoming chill of winter, the night rises earlier and the day grows shorter, when the veil between this world and the next grows thin and the spirits of the dead are welcome to revisit and the most terrifying aspects of our reality are celebrated by figures in dread…

Lesser-Known Halloween Horror Film Suggestions Every year around this time media of all sorts try to get into the Halloween spirit and either posts lists of films to watch or programs a slate of scary fare. This is all well and good – the more Halloween stuff the better – but in general these lists…

There’s been somewhat of a vogue for dialogue-free genre films in the past decade, including titles such as John Woo’s Silent Night, No One Will Save You, Boy Kills World and, of course, A Quiet Place. These movies eschew language to focus on pure visual cinema, hearkening back to silent film and the primacy of…

The Substance There’s a certain kind of film fan that reacts positively when they hear that an upcoming movie is “outrageous” or “over-the-top.” The idea that something “goes too far” does not dissuade; there is no ‘too far.” The boundaries exist to be pushed, please show us something new. I am one of those film…

ODDITY – Writer/director Damian McCarthy’s film is a more straightforward entertainment than his previous movie, Caveat, but they both share his own distinctive, off-kilter style. One night, while alone in the country house she and her husband Ted are renovating, Dani is murdered. One of Ted’s psychiatric patients is blamed for it and is later…

Writer/director Christopher Smith’s 2009 film Triangle hurts my head with the complexity of its plot, but I love it anyway. I’ve seen it three or four times in the past fifteen years, and it never fails to impress me with its combination of intellectual gamesmanship and emotional impact. Thus the fact that it seems relatively…

Almost sixty years before the publication of Dracula, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin to Leo Tolstoy) wrote a novella entitled The Family of the Vourdalak. The story concerned a specific vampire variant from Eastern European folklore which preferred to dine upon its family or its beloved in general. The most famous adaptation of this tale…

Osgood Perkins’ fourth directorial effort, Longlegs, debuted to critical acclaim and box office success, due in part to an incredibly creative and savvy marketing campaign that created a “want to see” factor that pulled people off their couches and into theaters. That’s notable in and of itself, but that would simply be a quickly forgotten…