Certified Forgotten
Only the forgotten are truly dead.
For as long as movies have existed, a vast majority have been dominated by the vision of a very particular brand of human. The existence of the male gaze is not the problem, rather the lack of diverse gazes available to the masses. Despite a recent and overwhelming push for moviemakers to offer films that appeal to those outside the dominant […]
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 focus on the uniquely female experience of puberty and 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 but quickly develop […]
A young woman – battered, disorientated, and disconsolate – is tied to a chair, her hands bound behind her back with rough lengths of frayed hemp. A small, dated camcorder sits on a tripod a few meters in front of her, the red recording light blinking in dour, violent recitation. The woman sighs, gathers whatever composure she can, and says, […]
The Nightingale is a graphic, brutal film full of 19th century colonial rage. The follow up to director Jennifer Kent’s debut horror tale The Babadook, The Nightingale delves into a very different kind of horror, that of the British colonization of Tasmania. The Nightingale is a horror film not about a supernatural evil, like Kent’s The Babadook, but the horror […]
In the world of horror films, children are often the characters who interact with monsters or villains before anyone else, but find that no one believes them until it’s much too late. They are far more likely to believe in “the unbelievable” than adults. Children don’t typically turn to logic or rationale, but simply recognize that they are in a […]
Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic is impractically tender and angelic (as far as genre representation goes), and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a film that centers around death and yet is a celebration of life. Characters nurture hope in the darkness, find meaning within the macabre, and reveal empowerment in individual representations of our honest, authentic selves. For those […]
Decades later, James Whale’s ‘The Old Dark House’ still offers a fascinating blend of queerness and camp in pre-code Hollywood horror.
Somewhere along the way, horror became synonymous with mental illness. Films about characters struggling with depression or clinical paranoia have dominated arthouse cinema. Any contemporary list of the best horror films of the decade reads like an appendix to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These films and the unreliable status of their characters have even coined their […]
Sion Sono is one of the more prolific Japanese directors, with over 50 films and television shows to his name since he started in the mid-1980s. Both a poet and a filmmaker, Sono found some success after the release of Suicide Club in 2001, his film that tackles the high suicide rate in Japan. The film’s most iconic scene 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 focus on the uniquely female experience of puberty and 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 but […]
Before Pamela Voorhees and a version of Jason that might have been an apparition graced our silver screens, writers and studios exchanged words, contracts, and agreements to create the massive hockey mask franchise we know and love. It was here that Victor Miller either penned Friday the 13th and sold it to a studio or worked on the project as […]
Last week, Matt Donato made his case for Certified Forgotten as the newest horror publication on the block. This week, it’s my turn to reflect a little on our brand-new website. On the one hand, Donato and I always knew that we wanted to launch a written counterpart to our podcast. One that would leverage the (relative) success of the […]
Here we are. Certified Forgotten: The Website! I bet you’re wondering what to expect from this new venture into the Certified Forgotten shared universe. “What is Certified Forgotten?” That’s the same question I posed to both myself and co-founder Matt Monagle. My idea was to answer with personalized definitions of what Certified Forgotten means to us, which I thought could […]