181 Best Releases From the Genre Horror (Page 5)

It’s well past time for a mainstream horror movie that addresses the very real dangers the LGBTQIA+ community faces. Self-proclaimed “allies” in particular need to see what it’s like to have your bodily autonomy, your right to love, and even your right just to live peacefully put at constant risk, by people who think they’re acting on the side of righteousness and virtue. Continue Reading →

A look back at the use of chimpanzees as clowns & sidekicks for humans, & how it relates to a strange & haunting subplot of Jordan Peele's hit sci-fi horror. Note: this article contains spoilers for Nope. Please read Jon Negroni’s spoiler-free review here. If you haven’t seen Nope yet, you might be a little puzzled by references to a character named Gordy, especially once you learn that Gordy is a chimpanzee. It’s understandable: there’s not so much of a glimpse of a chimpanzee in any of the promotional material for Nope, and nothing that happens in its trailers seems to suggest that a chimpanzee will play any part in it. Continue Reading →

“It’s not politics. It’s poetry!” one of the many voices screams approximately half an hour into Lux Aeterna (stylized, of course, as Lux Æterna). With that line, Gaspar Noé’s 51-minute movie—now available on digital three years after its 2019 Cannes Film Festival premiere—reaches the self-awareness at which it often paws. That opener is partly a joke in and of itself: Noé’s auteur work has relatively veered toward the quote-unquote apolitical. The politics, inherent as they are to the art of cinema, have fleshed themselves out by accident. Here, the spontaneous “poetry” of Lux Aeterna—an extrapolation of sorts of his previous film, Climax—lives on a prosaic approach. Continue Reading →

Gather around, children, and let Auntie Gena tell you a story about days gone by. Long ago, up till around 1984, kids used to run free in the streets from dawn till dusk, with virtually no adult supervision. Was it a better time? Not really, just different, and it all came to an end with the collective belief that bad things happen to children who aren’t carefully watched at all times. Now it’s swung so far in the other direction that allowing your children to walk themselves to school may result in a visit from child protective services. Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone takes place in the time before, when parents didn’t worry about monsters until they were almost under their noses. Continue Reading →

As Marvel holds its iron grip on theaters, and Netflix seems determined to focus its dwindling profits on churning out generic action movies starring various iterations of Ryan Reynolds, cineastes lament the loss of “art” films, those outliers that, whether good or bad, generate far more lively after-movie conversation than Spider-Man ever could. And yet, right now we seem to be in the middle of a weird movie renaissance. We have the joyful weirdness of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the all too topical weirdness of Alex Garland’s Men, and the over the top spectacle weirdness of Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis. What better time could there be for David Cronenberg to come roaring back to form with some body horror weirdness in Crimes of the Future? Continue Reading →

In the first scene of Eskil Vogt’s sophomore feature The Innocents, a young girl pinches her autistic older sister while riding in the car. Her sister doesn’t react, so she pinches harder. The morality of Vogt’s latest ebbs and flows with this girl, her sister, and their two new friends, all of which have an odd connection, not to mention supernatural abilities. Kids have a gray version of right versus wrong, as violence sputters around the Norwegian thriller, minimal in technique but tense in execution.  Continue Reading →

Did you leave the gas on? Or does this movie stink? I’ll be here all week, folks. Continue Reading →

Though it resulted in some of the finest genre films of the 21st century, including The Babadook, Hereditary and Midsommar, it wouldn’t be all that bad if we got a break from horror movies that are about grief for a little while. Real life is about as bleak as it’s ever been, and while horror has always in some way reflected current events, maybe we can take a breather and return to a brief, glorious run of masked killers or radioactive giant rats. If not for that, then because it’s a genre that’s no longer bringing much to the table except more suffering and anguish. Taneli Mustonen’s The Twin, while well-acted and capably directed, seems almost committed to trying nothing new with the genre. Even a third act twist that essentially negates everything that happens up to that point is derivative in its own separate way. Continue Reading →

These days, when confronted with a film made in the past featuring material that comes across as somewhat outre by contemporary standards, it's practically to remark that there's no way such a thing could be made in these comparatively staid times. In the case of Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), one comes away from it not only thinking that it couldn’t be made today, but wondering how in the hell it was able to get made back when it did. Bloody, erotic and suffused with a level of kink rarely seen in a putatively mainstream project, this go-for-baroque spectacle was an outlier when it first came out 40 years ago and that feeling remains undiminished to this day, along with its ability to simultaneously raise eyebrows and libidos at every turn. Continue Reading →

Sandra Oh has always had range, and her demonstration of it for viewers has always been spectacular. However, the feat she’s pulled this month will be tough to trounce. Oh has folks turning red one Friday and blanch white the next. And she pulls off the jaw-dropping swing in an on-screen mold as traditionally restrictive as “mother to a teenage daughter.” That said, whereas Mrs. Lee in Turning Red strives to adapt whenever possible, Amanda (Oh) in Umma refuses to. Continue Reading →

As the discourse rages over how tame the mainstream movie scene can be—with its sexless heroes and bloodless violence—it can be tempting to elevate any film that hearkens back to "the good old days" of sex and slashers just for the sake of its own supposed transgressiveness. But luckily, Ti West's X largely earns that title, a playful and idiosyncratic ode to both ends of the '70s sleaze cinema spectrum (hardcore porn and Wes Craven-esque slashers) alike. Not only that, it's blissfully literate towards its influences, with a nod to larger points about the aesthetics and politics of desire, the fetishization of youth, and so much more. Continue Reading →

Although this Shudder Original from Hmong filmmaking duo the Vang Brothers—Burlee and Abel—is part supernatural thriller and part domestic drama, it actually aims to be a character-driven paranormal picture above all else. The character in question is Child Protective Services worker Claire Yang (Michelle Krusiec), who is noted by her boss as an efficient case-closer until this latest one neck-deep in bizarreness. In the Langs’ household, everything is tense as the young Sopviuhie (Madelyn Grace) is hurt and scarred; all the logical deductions will point to her parents Audrey (Ellen Wroe) and Giles (J.R. Cacia) as the culprits. Continue Reading →

Is Satanic panic even a thing anymore? When’s the last time we’ve heard anything about backmasking, or songs somehow influencing impressionable teenagers to kill themselves? It’s entirely possible that this is all still a thing, and I’m simply too old and out of touch to know anything about it. B.J. McDonnell’s Studio 666, the feature film debut of Foo Fighters, is a lovingly hokey homage to a time when “the Devil’s music” was such a grave concern for parents (and Tipper Gore) that Congressional hearings were held about it, and lawsuits were filed against heavy metal bands in an attempt to hold them responsible for what was more likely caused by untreated mental illness and drug abuse. Continue Reading →

Known for blending horror and comedy to varying success, writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. looks to find wit and wisdom through a coven of witches in King Knight, his latest collaboration with actor Matthew Gray Gubler. As the head of the coven, Thorn (Gubler), along with his high priestess partner Willow (Angela Sarafyan), give three couples advice, organize Beltane and other holidays, and collectively recognize the power of French star Juliette Binoche. Following the coven after Thorn’s secretive lacrosse-laden past is revealed, Bates’s film meanders along a path of hallucinations, low stakes interactions, and a high school reunion that neither satisfies nor energizes a project that outstays its initial, quirky welcome. Continue Reading →

Try as they may (as of today we’re up to the ninth film in the series), no other film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has come close to the original. Oh, a few of them have been entertaining in their own bananas way, like part 2, but no sequel, remake, or origin story can recreate the bleak grittiness of the first film, no matter how many new members of the cannibalistic Sawyer family they add to it. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

Say what you will about the Scream movies – while they’re almost as absurd as the movies they’re satirizing, they’re also each trying to say something. While the first movie was about slasher movies in general, Scream 2 explored the nature (and necessity) of sequels, while Scream 3 attempted (to less than successful results) a pre-#MeToo spotlight on sexual harassment, and, as an answer to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, Scream 4 focused on social media culture. Wes Craven set out to not just entertain and scare audiences, but to get them to think about what they were watching, exactly, and why. Continue Reading →