One of my favorite overlooked horror subgenres is the psycho-biddy movie, or “Grand Dame Guignol”. These movies feature older actresses hamming it up in roles that both make a spectacle of aging and sometimes, at their best, find some subversive empowerment in it, too. Examples include Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? all the way up through 2019’s Greta, which features Isabelle Huppert preying on Chloe Grace Moretz.

The Lodger (Messe Basse), a new French film from first-time director Baptiste Drapeau, has some delicious elements of Grand Dame Guignol. But it’s more than that; it’s something weirder, something a little sweeter…

There’s a tense sequence in David Fincher’s Zodiac where two young lovers having a picnic are startled by the appearance of a black-clad figure holding a pistol. I think of that scene often when I listen to true crime podcasts or watch one of those Investigation Discovery shows about senseless murders, wondering to myself: what must that feeling be like, to look at an utter stranger and think that this will be the end? What goes on in those moments before unimaginable tragedy, between first seeing someone unfamiliar and realizing that they mean to take your life?

I thought about…

I confess that I am often ambivalent about the exorcism subgenre. At its best — The Exorcist, of course— exorcism movies can be tense exercises in psycho-religio-sexual insanity, using the genre’s baked-in regular jolts and thematic underpinnings to break down characters. At their worst, though, they rely too much on the formulaic nature of the beast, and they’re… well, The Vatican Tapes, a movie so uninspired and limp that I prayed for it to be the last exorcism movie I’d ever have to sit through.

Thankfully, my prayer went un-answered and it wasn’t, because director Christopher Alender’s new horror feature…

I always liked the part in Friday the 13th: Part 3D where the new crop of imminent victims drive past Camp Crystal Lake and see the place swarming with emergency vehicles cleaning up the previous night’s massacre, a.k.a. the events of the previous movie. How awful must it be to find the aftermath of a slasher-movie scenario?

Blood Conscious, the new debut horror film from writer-director Timothy Covell, tackles that very question. In this case, the newcomers to the scene are brother/sister duo Kevin (Oghenero Gbaje) and Brittney (DeShawn White), headed along with Brittney’s fiancé Tony (Lenny Thomas) up to…

I’ve enjoyed a number of director Neil Marshall’s films in the past. The Descent is, of course, a modern masterpiece of unbearable tension. Centurion looks phenomenal. I even saw Doomsday with a bunch of friends for my 18th birthday; I remember loving its messy, wanton genre-mashing, appreciating its gonzo energy and fun action-horror setpieces in a way my friends very much did not click with.

All that is to say I was interested in his newest film The Reckoning, which has been released on Shudder. I was hoping for a glimmer of the weirdness of Doomsday, but would have certainly…

Last week, Netflix quietly released an early contender for my favorite film of 2021. Dance of the Forty One (el Baile de los 41) is a lush, sensual experience, one that uses its luxurious production values to tell a story of painful Queer history exactly the way it should be told: with a focus on the intimacy, the art, and the resilience of a community that refused to let itself be snuffed out by oppression.

Director David Pablos’s film takes place at the dawn of the 20th century and focuses on the double life of Mexican congressman Ignacio de la…

Let’s get something straight right away: Things Heard and Seen, Netflix’s new horror movie starring freshly-minted Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, is not good. It’s never less than watchable, but clocking in at nearly two hours, the film is overlong and stretches its already-thin story past the breaking point.

However, once the film breaks, Things Heard and Seen is fascinating. Over the course of the final half hour, the film becomes gradually unmoored from narrative concerns, ending as a collage of evocative imagery that takes the pieces of the wreckage of the film’s story and fashions them into something wholly odd.

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Sam (Donal Logue) is a man whose life is full of regrets. He carries them around like a literal weight on his shoulders, trudging through the world followed always by the sins of his past. When Sometime Other Than Now begins, Sam is lying unconscious on the beach, the waves gently lapping at his body; his motorcycle lays half-submerged nearby, and we wonder at first if he might be dead and waking up on the shores of some kind of seaside purgatory.

It soon becomes clear, though, that he’s very much still alive and the real purgatory was the life…