The V/H/S films, as ever true in horror anthologies, are met with timid reception; they are at best uneven compilations of short feature-works by up-and-coming
Tag: Horror
The Babadook
Because it hides amorphous behind so many masks, no bogeyman is outgrown by its tormented. The Babadook, Jennifer Kent’s brilliant debut as director, appears latched
Maria Leonora Teresa
If the mechanics of terror are as superficial as placing drum-hits and cheat-scares, then the genre might as well be dismissed moot, at the easiest,
Siquijor: Mystic Island
In horror, sincerity stands as the most welcoming and, simultaneously, repelling factor for a genre filmmaker. Terror is forthright; this fundamental directness of the genre both
Wolf Creek
The smaller moments in Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek inspire liberation from the conventions of grotesque cinema: a slight, giggly yet sincere wedding of the lips; the
Les Revenants
In Les revenants (They Came Back, 2004) the threat posed by a vast river of bodies inexplicably risen from their recent deaths, is far more internal
Final Exam
Echoing John Carpenter’s seminal slasher, Jimmy Huston’s almost-forgotten Halloween wannabe Final Exam (then an unconscious subversion of the slasher genre), is an audaciously soiled exercise yet comes to
The Sacrament
Ti West is among the very few contemporary genre filmmakers to receive much-deserved admiration: ‘tis from both the sizable fraction of the following he has