Robtober

Having cut his teeth producing Stuart Gordon’s celebrated H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, Brian Yuzna aims for the same audience with Society, his directorial debut. Its turbo-charged sex drive and comic body horror will be familiar to fans of Re-Animator and From Beyond, but unlike his work with Gordon, with Society Yuzna appears to have giddily assembled a special effects crew before he even hired screenwriters.

The plot, such as it is, follows a high school basketball… See more →

On the surface, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò seems like it requires some unpacking, at least for those of us without graduate degrees. Relocating the Marquis de Sade’s depraved novel The 120 Days of Sodom to Mussolini’s northern Italy in 1943, it name-drops Nietzsche, Proust, Ezra Pound, and others as it systematically humiliates and tortures a group of eighteen captive adolescents. But Salò’s goal is not opaque intellectualism for its own sake. Its poetic and… See more →

After reading up on Black Sabbath a bit, I wish I had sought out the original Italian version, rather than settling for the sanitized English version released by American International Pictures (which is the one currently available on Netflix in the States). Of the film’s three short stories, one (“The Telephone”) is edited severely enough to completely change its meaning, but thankfully, a discerning eye can still spot traces of its more lurid giallo origins… See more →

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 →