Certified Forgotten
Only the forgotten are truly dead.
The popularity of The Babadook, The VVitch, and Midsommar in the past five years tells us that folk horror films still interest both creators and consumers. I say still because this horror subgenre dates back to the industry’s dawn with The Phantom Carriage and Nosferatu. It has cropped up in every decade since then, and horror fans recognize the previous examples […]
In a genre typically considered “for the guys,” it’s time to give a nod to the ladies. Uterus Horror is a subgenre of horror films that focuses on the uniquely female experience of puberty and the act of coming into their sexuality, using horror elements to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for that experience. These films are often ignored in theaters, […]
Summer camp slashers are a staple of the horror genre. From Friday the 13th to Sleepaway Camp to The Burning, choosing this adult-free setting for your bloodbath is so ubiquitous that it’s become almost too predictable. What if you introduced elements—emotional stakes, character growth, heart—that are often sorely missing from the hack-and-slash classics of the 1980s? Well, you’d end up […]
Once upon a time there was a house at 112 Ocean Avenue, in Amityville, New York. The house looked evil—those front windows looked almost like eyes—and sure enough, evil things happened there. Horrific things, murderous things, threatened that most beloved of Western institutions: the nuclear family. People wrote books about that house, and about the demonic patriarchs of the families […]
Whenever international horror has a backyard party, Vietnam misses out. There’s no restriction or bad blood. With sparse-to-no official home media release and tough-to-tougher hoops regarding exhibition beyond local borders, measures from my birth country to protect intellectual properties are also a guarantee for genre titles to not discover global mainstream recognition. We make it harder on ourselves. Such is […]
In a genre typically considered “for the guys,” it’s time to give a nod to the ladies. Uterus Horror is a subgenre of horror films that focuses on the uniquely female experience of puberty and the act of coming into their sexuality, using horror elements to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for that experience. These films are often ignored in theaters, […]
There was a time in my life when I ate, slept, and breathed K-pop. A friend I met in high school introduced me to these infectious songs and the irresistible idols behind them. While our mutual infatuation eventually faded as so many adolescent interests do, I can’t help but think back on those years as a new age of K-pop […]
The popularity of The Babadook, The VVitch, and Midsommar in the past five years tells us that folk horror films still interest both creators and consumers. I say still because this horror subgenre dates back to the industry’s dawn with The Phantom Carriage and Nosferatu. It has cropped up in every decade since then, and horror fans recognize the previous examples […]
In a genre typically considered “for the guys,” it’s time to give a nod to the ladies. Uterus Horror is a subgenre of horror films that focuses on the uniquely female experience of puberty and the act of coming into their sexuality, using horror elements to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for that experience. These films are often ignored in theaters, […]
Summer camp slashers are a staple of the horror genre. From Friday the 13th to Sleepaway Camp to The Burning, choosing this adult-free setting for your bloodbath is so ubiquitous that it’s become almost too predictable. What if you introduced elements—emotional stakes, character growth, heart—that are often sorely missing from the hack-and-slash classics of the 1980s? Well, you’d end up […]
Once upon a time there was a house at 112 Ocean Avenue, in Amityville, New York. The house looked evil—those front windows looked almost like eyes—and sure enough, evil things happened there. Horrific things, murderous things, threatened that most beloved of Western institutions: the nuclear family. People wrote books about that house, and about the demonic patriarchs of the families […]
Whenever international horror has a backyard party, Vietnam misses out. There’s no restriction or bad blood. With sparse-to-no official home media release and tough-to-tougher hoops regarding exhibition beyond local borders, measures from my birth country to protect intellectual properties are also a guarantee for genre titles to not discover global mainstream recognition. We make it harder on ourselves. Such is […]
In a genre typically considered “for the guys,” it’s time to give a nod to the ladies. Uterus Horror is a subgenre of horror films that focuses on the uniquely female experience of puberty and the act of coming into their sexuality, using horror elements to emphasize and/or act as a metaphor for that experience. These films are often ignored in theaters, […]
There was a time in my life when I ate, slept, and breathed K-pop. A friend I met in high school introduced me to these infectious songs and the irresistible idols behind them. While our mutual infatuation eventually faded as so many adolescent interests do, I can’t help but think back on those years as a new age of K-pop […]
As we sluggishly crawl – crestfallen, exhausted, and bloodied – towards 2021, it is time to think back on the hell of a year we’ve lived through. I’m sure I am not the only person that has spent a lot of their time holed up inside watching an endless wave of movies, and it has fortunately been a great year […]
In 1994 there was nothing more scary than the specter of video game violence. Technology-based horrors are nothing new, but the mid-90s offered up a timely and extremely specific subgenre: the VR-horror film. John Flynn‘s Brainscan (1994) encompasses a very specific—and essentially harmless—fear of video games that haunted the minds of parents and the American media. An evolution of computer genre […]
What kind of a movie does $20,000 buy you? If you’re writer-director Tomas Street, it buys you a sharp little thriller about memory loss and heists gone wrong. In his 2018 debut feature Fugue, Street and a team of motivated actors were able to stretch every dollar and craft a surprisingly sharp thriller in the vein of early Christopher Nolan […]
Believe it or not, the delightfully manic portrayal of all-out domestic war in Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 2LDK is the product of a bar bet. Tsutsumi and fellow Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura challenged one another to see who could produce the better film while adhering to a series of debilitating conditions. Dubbed the “Duel Project,” their wager tasked veteran directors to write and […]
The screen is a fascinating concept for horror filmmakers. The very idea of watching a scary movie projected onto a 20-foot white wall or through pixels and light of a television (or laptop monitor) aids in separating the audience from the frights being shown. We can jump at the monster appearing from behind a corner or curl up into a […]
Last week, we presented our listeners with a unique proposition: what if we turned the microphone back on ourselves and shared our own horror origin (horrorigin?) stories for a change? The result was the Matt Donato Origin Story, where Donato opened up about the experiences and friendships that helped shape his relationship to the genre. This week it’s Matthew Monagle’s […]
The urban legends surrounding LSD during the 1960s were as frightening as any horror film. Tripping babysitters place infants in ovens; gun-toting police officers go insane after accidentally getting dosed; careless acid freaks permanently blind themselves by staring directly into the sun. They all feature the same alarmist hyperbole or outright fabrications seen in so many pieces of “straight talk” […]
What generates fear for a final girl? The terror in stalk-and-slash films tends to stem from the treacherous whims of its boogeyman, the villain who won’t stop until a trail of teen bodies lies in his wake. The Big Bad who hides the horror of his true self behind a mask. That’s not the case in director Fred Walton’s When […]
As so often happens in Hollywood, producers learned the wrong lessons from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez‘s The Blair Witch Project. They learned it was fast to shoot. They learned it required minimal crew. Most of all, they learned it was cheap. For more than a decade, horror fans were subject to a barrage of disposable found footage films. And […]