The Devil in the Details

Originally published 5/5/22. Roman Polanski's brilliant 1976 film  The Tenant represents a rare form of horror film, similar to 1981's Possession, another great film that stars Isabelle Adjani, one which dares to mix horror and comedy in a way that screams 'European sophistication.' Viewers both at the time and presently generally see moments of clumsy, awkward comedy in this film as a failing of the horror, but I see it as very intentional extension of the work of many great authors like Franz Kafka or Shirley Jackson. It's surreal and strange; nightmarish in the truest sense of the word, invoking the obscure logic of nocturnal imaginings. Scenes of our lead descending into madness - alone in his apartment, a deathly silence hanging in the air - are unsettling, and the film story and characters are all perfectly ambiguous.  Where to even start with this one? Well, it is unique amongst Polanski's so-called 'apartment trilogy' of psychological horror cl...

Alright, you guys know the drill: I’ve found another very specific thread of storytelling that I’ve become obsessed with: this time paranoid political thrillers, especially those from the seventies. I’ve been working hard to catalog as many as I can. This, of course, means I’m no stranger to the work of one Alan J. Pakula, director of the excellent paranoid character study Klute and the incredibly spooky The Parallax View, still most likely the best film inspired by the JFK assassination there’s ever been. Those two films happen to belong to something fans of Pakula have taken to calling his “paranoia trilogy,” the last film of which is what we’ll be taking a look at today. After dealing with surveillance and political assassinations in his previous two works of fiction,  All The President’s Men sees Pakula showing off a different side of the conspiracy narrative, primarily because this one happens to be completely true. Yes, this film is based on the book of the same name writt...

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...

Well, after watching The Parallax View for the first time recently, I immediately became hungry for any and all paranoid thrillers, especially those from the seventies. Naturally, my first step was to check out the other two titles in Alan J. Pakula’s so-called ‘paranoia trilogy.’ Enter today's film: Klute. It had never drawn my attention before, but after discovering the pedigree behind it and the fact that it was a murder-mystery-thriller, I decided to finally pull the trigger and order myself a copy.  To my surprise, despite this being considered part of a piece with The Parallax View, Klute really could not be any more different than it as a film. It’s a character study for one thing; far more concerned with the psychology and humanity of prostitutes, addicts, and those who control them - dealers, pimps, or bullying police - than it is spinning a complex web of murky conspiracy. It even prominently features a romantic subplot, just when you’d think the murder mystery should re...

My, how time flies. I pre-ordered this film, and watched it a week or so after its late December release, and I’m just  now getting around to covering it. It’s been so long since I covered the first two titles in the venerable Terrifier franchise that I can just about guarantee that no one who might stumble across this page will either remember them or be able to dig through my posts and find them. Furthermore, the fervor that surrounded this film upon its release during the ’22 Halloween season has now officially died down, and so I feel the time is right to take it to task: is Terrifier 2 the return to vintage horror glory that it's being touted as, or is this yet another case of “You had to be there?” Generally, I start with a synopsis, but in the case of Terrifier 2,  there honestly isn’t much to summarize. Our story picks up the very instant the previous film ended, with Art the Clown freshly resurrected by a mysterious supernatural entity and the poor coroner on the sce...

Many of you may not know this about me, but I’m a very flighty person, taste-wise. I often become obsessed with an idea or subgenre or even a specific creator and voraciously devour anything related to it, no matter the medium. The unfortunate flip side of this is that when I get burnt out on something, I really get burnt out, but that's beside the point. Well, lately I’ve been pining for a distinct type of film that has become one of my favorites over the years: namely, the bleak seventies film. There's a reason this decade saw the release of many of my all-time favorite horror films. For one thing, it was a time before Hollywood became more about making money than art and the rules and regulations of modern films had not yet been codified. Most importantly, however, the world was in something of a paranoid, nihilistic funk at the time which resulted in such masterpieces as Chinatown, Coma, The Conversation, the incredible remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The P...