The Devil in the Details

Welcome back! Last time around, we were introduced to our cast of characters, its major themes, and the general structure of the game. Today we'll be digging as deeply into the story as we can without getting into spoilers, basically everything up until the third act, so that we can do a little more analyzing and criticizing in pt. 3. Okay, so we know that Yoshino had survivor's guilt, like Rei, and fell into a sleep that eventually consumed her. But why? And how? I mean, what’s the deal with the Manor of Sleep anyway?   Old musty notes fill us in. Long ago, the Manor of Sleep was a real place that existed deep in the mountains and housed a religious shrine of no small import. The clan that operated out of the shrine was composed entirely of women, only tolerating men when they needed to expand the ranks a bit (if you catch my drift.) Not sure what they did with the countless baby boys who would have resulted from this, but whatever...   This feminine clan also perf...

If you've yet to read my analyses for either the original Fatal Frame or its sequel, Crimson Butterfly, then I'd advise you to check those out before coming back. I didn't want to repeat myself too much for those following along, so certain things that I may harp on in one review, I'll generally only briefly allude to later on the line unless it really  bears further repeating, though I admit it does come at the expense of those who wish to jump right in with their favorite entry. Sorry! So it has come to this. We have finally made it to the third entry in this series, with only one more to go after this (until I move on to something else, at least; I’m aware there are more games after the fourth, but I'll honestly need a break after talking about Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.) I feel like I have rambled myself silly about all this by now, and it makes knowing what the hell to put here in the intro and beyond extremely difficult. I mean, it’s another Fatal Frame. W...

Apologies if this joke has already been made, but we need to talk about We Need to Talk about Kevin,  a psychodrama about every parent's worst nightmare: a psychopathic, violent offspring. Poor Eva Khatchadourian once had everything: a happy marriage, a comfortable living situation, and a baby boy on the way. Nowadays, she's a ghost, haunting wherever she eeks out an existence, totally at the whim of a mob of people who mostly despise her because of the things her son has done to them. We start at the bottom with this story, after things have already happened and the dust has settled, and we see our poor heroine at her lowest point, and from there work backward to find out where it all went wrong. This film tackles very tough subject matter carefully and considerately without shying away from the horrors it confronts head-on. Who needs The Omen, The Bad Seed, or The Good Son?  Kevin is one of cinema's greatest monsters, the kind of thing to make young people fear ever havi...

I can hardly believe this will be our first discussion of horror maestro Wes Craven. The man possesses one of the most recognizable names in horror and has contributed many of cinema's most iconic monsters over his prolific career. In this little-discussed entry in his canon, we find him taking on genuine folk horror: a story of voodoo zombies and the taking of souls, based not only in folklore but in real beliefs and superstitions. Its literary source is actually a "non-fiction" book from which the film derives most of its material and journalistic sense of detail. So, is this film simply underrated and underseen, or has it been forgotten for a reason? The opening hook is familiar, but intriguing nonetheless: a pharmaceutical company hears talk of a man in Haiti who claims to have been resurrected and enslaved by an evil practitioner of black magic, and they send their best man in to investigate. You see, they don't actually believe he was resurrected, but just think...

It's been nearly a decade since Ti West's last full-fledged horror outing, 2013's The Sacrament. How unfortunate, then, that it wasn't particularly good. His approach to horror is generally very direct and uncomplicated. It's the style and intelligence with which he wields these sturdy horror tropes that makes all the difference. Let's call him a thinking man's Eli Roth in the sense that he's willing to subvert audience expectations and shock at every turn with that familiar sort of post-modern horror savvy, but yet is crucially less concerned with dumb humor and much less uncomfortable with killing people who don't "deserve it" in some way, be it thanks to their stupidity, vanity, curiosity, being too rich, etc. No sir, Ti West writes believable characters that illicit sympathy before throwing them to the wolves and forcing us to watch them be ripped apart.  The Innkeepers, his last great film, also had more going on thematically than we...