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...

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...

A rewatch I’ve been looking forward to for a while at this point, I was inspired to write this film up after my viewing of Black Christmas last December, another horror film it sort of shares a premise with. All I remembered about The Blackcoat's Daughter was that it had an interesting twist, lots of disturbing violence, and a surprising amount of humanity and maturity for a film that is - in essence - a classic possession film, complete with a short exorcism scene and everything! With this in mind, I had my expectations high and was eager to dive in, which is probably the worst possible place for a piece of entertainment to have you; you’re practically guaranteeing yourself disappointment, and even if it doesn’t let you down, the actual merits of whatever it is you’re dealing with can become easily distorted by mental gymnastics and identity politics in the wake of. Sure, I’d seen this particular film once before, but that doesn’t mean much. Sometimes the mood of the room or even...

You know, Eyes Wide Shut is a classic example of the kind of film that you grow into. I watched it many years ago at a very different time in my life, and while I enjoyed it, it was something of an enigma. I imagine my first experience was the same as a lot of people’s; I was sold a conspiracy horror film and ended up with something more akin to a psychosexual noir film, one with very little actual sex depicted despite its reputation, then and now. An early edited version of the film claims to insert extra CG people into shots to “cover genitalia” but this is a lie: there is no genitalia shown in any version of the film. You can see pubic hair a few times, but nothing beyond that. So the near-pornographic qualities the film is often associated with are bogus, and really, so is the whole conspiracy plot (if that’s all you’re here for, at any rate) So, what exactly does that leave us with? Well, what we do get is a Kafka-esque noir that examines a number of very adult themes in strange...