The Devil in the Details

Is it just me, or is the western/horror subgenre vastly underexplored? I mean sure, one comes out every once in a blue moon - films like The Burrowers ,  The Pale Door (neither of which I’ve seen yet, so perhaps the fault lies simply with the audience here) or the cult hit Ravenous (a film that I was very divided on)  - but few are generally considered especially great films. Generally, such genre blends are done in simply because the person in charge has no idea how to write either a horror film or a western and so is totally unqualified to combine the two, and/or because 'combining' them ends up translating to something closer to rapidly switching between one genre or the other throughout the runtime, creating a tone that feels at odds with itself. With that being said, Bone Tomahawk might just be the first successful blend of its kind: a film that understands the core of the western genre, and how an invasion of horror tropes might set comfortably within it so that no de...

Ah, the seventies. Could it be the best era of filmmaking there’s ever been? Between the lack of codified 'rules' that strictly define how Hollywood films are supposed to work - rules that wouldn’t come along until the success of films like Jaws and Star Wars  toward the end of the decade - and the bleak mindset that seemed to dominate the decade overall, it just seems that the seventies has a higher batting average than any other decade in the history of cinema. Films like Chinatown, Coma, The Conversation, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Soylent Green, The Tenant, and, without wishing to spoil my entire opinion right away, The Parallax View: perhaps the definitive paranoid political thriller of all time. We could go back and forth over why exactly the seventies were as bleak as they were. Was it the harsh reality check of Vietnam? Or did it have more to do with the infamous free concert at Altamont Speedway and the failure of the hippie movement in general? Watergate? ...

Director Ti West is an interesting specimen in the world of modern horror. Sure, he makes films that are popular with critics, but they’re not exactly what the cool kids derisively refer to as “elevated horror.” His films don’t spin their scares from everyday trauma or socio-political allegory, nor do they go out of their way to challenge and provoke their audience the way something like It Comes at Night does with its uncompromising bleakness. By that same token, West’s horror films are far from the disposable kind that horny teenagers go to see at their local theater that only plays three films at any given time: a CG children’s movie, an adventure film starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and one horror film, probably produced by Blumhouse. Rather, his films make use of proven filmmaking techniques to tell stories that fall squarely within the horror tradition - stories involving vampire bats, murderous hillbillies in the woods, satanic cults, and haunted hotels - while do...