Robtober

There’s not a single original moment in this vengeful ghost story, but the care it puts into presenting its collection of haunted house tropes makes it surprisingly enjoyable. Soaked in atmosphere, The Woman in Black’s familiarity doesn’t prevent it from being frequently chilling.

In The Mist, a few dozen townspeople are trapped in a Maine grocery store enveloped in a thick fog which is inhabited by mysterious, deadly creatures, and order dissolves at roughly the same rate as the hope of rescue. Conceptually, the film’s central interest in humanity as its own biggest enemy is intriguing (á la The Twilight Zone’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), but its expression of that theme is somewhat ham-fisted. Marcia… See more →

Every October, I try to watch as many horror/suspense films that I haven’t seen before as possible. Dates and times (subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me.

The Devil’s Backbone

Guillermo del Toro (Spain, Mexico, 2001)

After Carlos – a 12-year-old whose father has died in the Spanish Civil War – arrives at an ominous boys’ orphanage, he discovers the school is haunted and has many dark secrets which… See more →

Every October, I try to watch as many horror/suspense films that I haven’t seen before as possible. This is the first year the films were somewhat carefully selected and scheduled in advance. They span seven decades and eight countries. Dates and times (subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me.

Don’t Look Now

Nicolas Roeg (UK, Italy, 1973)

A married couple grieving the recent death of their young daughter are… See more →

Every October, I try to watch as many horror films that I haven’t seen before as possible.

Corman’s World

Alex Stapleton (USA, 2011)

A documentary on DIY producer/director Roger Corman and his alternative approach to making movies in Hollywood.

Not of This Earth

Roger Corman (USA, 1957)

An alien agent from the distant planet Davana is sent to Earth via a high-tech matter transporter. There, he terrorizes Southern California in an attempt to acquire blood… See more →

When it appeared in 2007, Paranormal Activity was arguably the best entry in the “found footage” horror sub-genre since that category was kickstarted by the immense success of The Blair Witch Project in 1999. A sort of Blair Witch for the YouTube era, Paranormal Activity capitalized on social media’s self-surveillance culture and applied it to things that go bump in the night, telling the story of a young couple who decided to investigate their home’s… See more →

Horror director Ti West is known for employing a persistent, slow-burning tension in his films, which I admire in principle, but in practice it hasn’t always worked out. His last feature, House of the Devil, was defined by tension built around what we knew and the protagonist didn’t: her babysitting clients were extremely unsavory characters. How it would end was unclear, but there was no question that she would be subjected to a harrowing ordeal… See more →

There is little I enjoy quite as much as spending an entire afternoon in a movie theater, so I often lament the fact that I missed out on the heyday of the double feature. Of course, in this day and age, I’m able to curate my own double (or triple, or quadruple) features in the privacy of my own home, which I do often. I might watch a string of sequels, a pair of films… See more →