Watched on Netflix w/ my son, intrigued to see what he would make of it. The extremely shocking death in the first few minutes got his attention, but he was unfazed. As Ryan Simpkins's hapless Tess moped around town and gradually moved closer to disaster, he made the usual hilarious complaints and commentary: "Noooo! Why are you sitting outside in the dark waiting to get haunted? That's not a good idea! Oh, and now you're just going to walk up…

Watched on YouTube, and you can see it here.

A happy collaboration of artists and activists, and an illustration of the thin line between art and activism, this webseries started in a creative partnership between Jen Richards (writer/actress/activist/bi/trans) and Laura Zak (writer/actress/producer/queer), and accumulating partners and resources (including an Indiegogo campaign), came to fruition in an hour of online TV that competed in the 2016 Emmys with short-form spinoffs of Broad City and Fear the Walking Dead in the relatively…

Women in Horror M.

Then Natalie [Erika James], you talked about female voices being crucial to broadening horror. That horror creators do that by shaping the parameters of what is, or who is, to be the feared other in horror. That this is an inherently political dimension of creative agency. In Relic, she’s less interested in the fear of the crone or the fear of the hag and kind of refuses to demonise elderly women by instead thinking about the…

Women in Horror M.

So the story goes, at some point in the early 90s, Linnea Quigley wanted to be in the LAPD, a goal she worked toward for a year. She went so far as to take the written test, but as she says, "I guess it wasn't meant to be. Show biz does get into your blood." [cf]

Quigley's role in Pumpkinhead II is the quintessential example of something that has been a staple in her career: she…

It's probably a mediocre movie in the final analysis, but it contains one scene that is priceless to me, and part of its immeasurable worth, for me, is that it provides a kind of iconography for the notion of a masculinity that's healthy and potentially healing.

Aaron Eckhart plays a man who is really good at what he does but has retained all the spontaneity and even goofiness of a boy. He doesn’t fade into the scenery and he projects…

Subgenres of the thriller genre:

1. the thriller as art film, where the artist cannot stoop to actually thrilling his audience

2. the thriller as philosophical rubbernecking, where we are invited to meditate upon the nature of evil — as severed heads roll our way

3. the thriller as pastiche of esoteric pop-culture references

4. the redundant thriller, either a remake of a good thriller or adaptation of a good novel, or both

My highest praise of Collateral is that…