
The Enigma of Mr. Mamiya: The Unspoken Subject of Inner Darkness in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure
|Dan Howard| I was first introduced to Kiyoshi Kurosawa back in January, when attending a screening of Pulse (2001). During the film, I observed something you typically don't see in a lot of modern horror media...

You Can’t Get Rid of the Telephone
|Chelli Riddiough| The first sound you hear in the 1996 horror film Scream is a ringing telephone. Not the Apple ringtone everyone has, not a tinny song emanating from a speaker. No: it’s a bold, loud ring...

It’s All Just One Big Movie: I Always Had a Thing For You, Scream
|Jake Rudegeair| What’s your favorite scary movie? I don’t have a favorite, really. More like a group of honorable mentions that rearranged my brain. Psycho made showers much less relaxing, for instance...

You Know We Had to Do it To Him: Scream 2’s Big Swing was Justified
|Finn Odum| I think about Wes Craven and his filmography a lot more than a stable person probably should. Craven was one of the first directors I followed when I began to study film. It’s partially because he’s...

The Loss of Posture in Picnic at Hanging Rock
|Yuval Klein| Three students and a chaperone at an all-girls college disappear during a field trip at Hanging Rock, an Australian former volcano that is 6.25 million years old. The repercussions and philosophical symbols entice viewers for the latter part of the film. Much of the film is...

The Presence of Romantic Absence in Picnic at Hanging Rock
|Sophie Durbin| I first learned about Picnic at Hanging Rock from the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (which I've been glued to for two years) and was instantly intrigued. I finally saw it yesterday after several failed attempts on Youtube. On a visual level, the..

Mosquito Coast: Or, Man Absolutely Loses it in a Hardware Store
|Michael Wellvang| There’s something about shopping that makes middle-aged men snap. Maybe it goes against the whole hunter-gatherer thing where men kill and women do everything else. There’s nothing to hunt for in a store. Going shopping implies you don’t already...

Ice is Back With My Brand New Invention
|Lucas Hardwick| Beware: Spoilers Ahead. Believe it or not, instead of earning money by writing for a living, I actually have a real, honest-to-God day job of the blue-collar persuasion where I recently found myself engaged in the spirited pastime of bitching about work with a colleague...

The Cars That Ate Paris and the Bone-Shaking Consequences of the Past
|Chris Ryba-Tures| “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.” Walter Benjamin

Already Too Late
|Cole Seidl| It is not particularly difficult to find films of resistance, or films in which colonized subjects fight back, asserting their rights and their refusal to go along peaceably with the agenda of their colonizers. Seek out the cinema of any colonized people and there will be many...

Dude, Where’s My Car? Car Culture Examined in The Cars That Ate Paris
|Matthew Lambert| There’s a quintessential moment of madness in the 1974 low-budget horror film The Cars That Ate Paris that is seared into my brain. It’s Charlie (played by the ultimate Australian character actor Bruce Spence) standing outside his fortress of wrecked cars, blood...

Weir(d) Fiction
|MH Rowe| One triumph of Peter Weir’s Witness (1985) is its sense of dreamy metaphor. The score, the cinematography, the simmer of desire between its lead characters, John Book (Harrison Ford) and Rachel Lapp (Kelly McGillis), and the situation of a hard-bitten Philadelphia