While the giallo genre has a fairly rigid set of tropes that most films falling within its parameters adhere to (masked killer with gloves, a murder mystery element, ultra violent killings committed with bladed weapons, etc.), that isn’t to say that some directors didn’t try to do something a bit different within the loose confines … More Movies: All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
I decided to do something of a Middle Eastern theme for today’s double feature, consisting of two films I had heard a great deal of positive press about and had been wanting to see for ages. The first is a surreal torture-fest from Turkey, the second a more traditional metaphorical ghost story with an Iranian-born … More Middle Eastern Double Feature: Baskin (2015) and Under the Shadow (2016)
No one would ever accuse notorious Italian gore master Lucio Fulci of being a particularly subtle filmmaker, but even in the wide Fulcian seas of splinter eye gougings, coughed-up intestines, and little braided girls getting their heads half blown off by shotguns, his 1982 giallo thriller The New York Ripper gives even his ardent fans … More Movies: The New York Ripper (1982)
I have to admit that I’m not usually a huge fan of the sci-fi genre or of horror/sci-fi crossovers. There are some exceptions, of course—the Alien franchise, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers—but on the whole, aliens are not really compelling baddies for me. So it was with some degree of meh-ness, one Halloween night, that I randomly … More Movies: Xtro (1983)
It’s time for another scintillating installment of Silent Movie Watchalong, kiddos! Today I’m going to be discussing the eleven-minute D.W. Griffith film The Sealed Room from 1909, which as you might imagine bears a slight resemblance to the Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado,” as well as the works of Honoré de Balzac. It also stars Mary … More Silent Movie Watchalong: The Sealed Room (1909)
The Australian psychological horror film The Babadook made an enormous splash with critics and horror fans when it came out back in 2014, and to this day it still ends up on many “best horror movies of the century so far” lists. Because of the hype surrounding it, there was also a pretty predictable backlash, … More Movies: The Babadook (2014)
Dario Argento is of course no stranger to horror fans, being the mastermind behind such seminal giallo films as Deep Red and Tenebrae, as well as more lurid supernatural fantasias like Suspiria and Inferno. 1971’s The Cat O’Nine Tails (aka Il Gatto a Nove Code), only Argento’s second film, shows many trademarks of the director’s … More Movies: The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971)
In the case of Anne River Siddons’s 1978 novel The House Next Door, I was actually first turned on to it through Stephen King’s nonfiction classic Danse Macabre, in which he chose it as one of his ten best “modern” horror novels (as of 1980) and devoted an entire chapter to discussing its themes. I’ve … More Book vs Movie: The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
In the mood for some Italian? Excellent; let’s mangia. Our movie we’re discussing is one I actually thought I hadn’t seen before, though when I got to one of the later scenes, I felt a definite tingle of recollection. See, when I was a kid, I saw a movie with this one scene that really … More Movies: The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971)
In my previous review of the 2015 neo-giallo Francesca, I emphasized that although the film did have a fairly standard murder-mystery plot common to films of the genre, its main attractions were the visuals, the sound design, and the painstaking care that had been taken to recreate the exact look and feel of an Italian … More Movies: The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)
The Scare Salon 