by: Letitia
Posted on 05.24.10 in All Horror Films > Slasher

The 1983 slasher movie House on Sorority Row has pretty much every element you’ve seen in a slasher movie since then: clever-but-unlikely death scenes, girls at various levels of nakedness, the slutty girl/virginal girl combo, and the unstoppable faceless killer who can be everywhere at once. Although it’s completely predictable (with a few nice twists), House on Sorority Row is also incredibly fun–it does what 80’s slasher movies do best–it sells its …

by: Letitia
Posted on 04.04.10 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic > Thriller/Suspense > Torture

Lars Von Trier really wants you to know that Anti-Christ is his film–even before we get the title of the movie, von Trier’s name is written across the screen in a hasty, messy scrawl. Von Trier is known for his punishing, gritty independent films, films in which women are usually subjected to all kinds of horrors: in Breaking the Waves, a spunky Emily Watson had to have sex with random men to …

by: Letitia
Posted on 03.21.10 in All Horror Films > Torture

The Girl Next Door, based on a novel by Jack Ketchum, seems like a great set-up for a psychological horror movie. The film is about a single, older woman in the 1950’s who gets custody of her two nieces after the death of their parents. One neice is a pre-teen with polio, and the other is the “girl next door” of the title, Meg, a thirteen-year-old who Ruth immediately takes a dislike …

by: Letitia
Posted on 02.07.10 in Action/Adventure > All Horror Films > Thriller/Suspense

The French-language film Ils (Them), directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, is one of the least original yet most tense and frightening movies I’ve seen in years. Although its bag of tricks is a well-worn one (think The Strangers, Funny Games, or any other movie that involves a couple being pointlessly terrorized by unseen or unknown enemies), and although the characters sometimes do the very dense things that characters in horror …

by: Letitia
Posted on 02.04.10 in All Horror Films > Psychological Thriller

I’m a big fan of cheap horror movies. There’s one thing that talky indie movies and horror films have in common: they don’t necessarily require special effects or fancy camerawork to be effective. The things that most frighten me are mundane: insanity, the dark, being trapped somewhere small, etc. Big-budget horror movies often err on the side of telling too much, showing too much, and throwing too much money into making everything …

by: Letitia
Posted on 01.22.10 in All Horror Films > Exploitation > Torture

It takes a lot for a horror movie to disgust me. I like gore. I like blood. I like violence. I think that gore and blood and violence satisfy a human need to see what’s really happening inside our bodies, to see what’s taboo.  But to this day, Deadgirl is one of the few horror movies that has truly disgusted me. Maybe this disgust could have worked for the film, could have …

by: Letitia
Posted on 01.12.10 in All Horror Films > Psychological Thriller

Before he went Hollywood with The Dead Zone, David Cronenberg made some extremely cold and cerebral low-budget horror films in his home country of Canada. The Brood isn’t his best earlier film, but it’s the movie where he steps up with the theme that he took to extremes throughout the 80’s and early 90’s: the horror of what’s inside our bodies and what our bodies are capable of when pushed to their …

by: Letitia
Posted on 12.20.09 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic > Exploitation

Wes Craven’s first movie, Last House on the Left, begins with an idyllic shot of ducks on a lake, a cozily autumnal country road, and then a shot of a solidly middle-class house. The camera then focuses on a girl, Mari, our main character, as she showers. The camera work here is gauzy and romantic, much like the opening of Brian DePalma’s Carrie, where the camera lingers lovingly on girls’ bodies. In …

by: Letitia
Posted on 12.16.09 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic

For horror movies, sometimes cheap is good. And Carnival of Souls looks cheap in the best sense of the word—the film has almost no attempts at special effects, and the stark, pared-down settings and scenes lend to the overall effect of creepiness. Like Romero’s Night of Living Dead, black and white film, minimal effects, and minimal settings really work for this movie. And, like Night of the Living Dead, much more …

by: Letitia
Posted on 12.13.09 in All Horror Films > Vampire

Like that other recent vampire movie that will remain unnamed, Let the Right One In is, on the surface, is about teen vampires and budding love between outsiders. Unlike that other recent movie, Let the Right One In knows what to do with its monster. While Stephanie Myers’ vampires spend lots of time moping in Morrissey-style bouffants and bathed in sparkle, Tomas Alfredson’s vampire, the androgynous and decidedly unsparkling Eli, has the …