|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| In the fall of 2023, I suffered my first ever bike accident as an adult (though I’d experienced plenty as a kid, largely due to a general lack of self-regard for my body flying off dirt ramps, across alleyways, and through dark wooded terrain). In fact, I suffered three accidents in a matter of … Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, indie filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been hired to reboot Camp Miasma, an in-universe cult slasher franchise. Early in the film, she stops at a remote gas station, buys a DVD of Camp Miasma Part VI: A New Beginning, and fills a shopping cart with a mountain, or at least a hill, of candy. She later … Continue reading
|Devin Warner| For those who are unfamiliar with the band Goblin (or as my Mom said upon hearing the Suspiria soundtrack she bought me for my birthday, “what is that noise?”), they are one of the most preeminent composers in cinema. They created … Continue reading
|Riccardo Williams| John Carpenter’s The Thing, released in 1982, has since achieved the status of horror legend, in many ways eclipsing the book it’s based on, Who Goes There written by John W. Campbell Jr. There’s a strong argument to be made that it overtakes the previous adaptation… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| Honeymooning in order to see as many haunted houses as possible is, admittedly, a bit eclectic. Because we were COVID brides, my wife and I had to make a LOT of changes to our wedding plans, including moving… Continue reading
|Harry Mackin| The Exorcist knows you’re afraid of it from the moment it begins. Well before its disturbing supernatural plot starts in earnest, you can feel the malice Friedkin imbues into every shot and frame, like “fear in a handful of dust”… Continue reading
|Devin Warner| The Horrorthon is back in just a few short weeks at the Trylon, and once again, my body is ready to experience watching film after film after film. Movie marathons are something that you just can’t really get anywhere else… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| My first experience of cinematic horrors shattering the porcelain white purity of the holidays had to be The Nightmare Before Christmas. Six-year-old Andrew was not prepared for Santa to be kidnapped by demonic trick ‘r treaters and tortured by the Oogie Boogie Man, a sentient bag… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| The Wicker Man begins like a typical “everyone in this town is hiding something” crime story. Sergeant Neil Howie arrives by seaplane to the fictional Hebridean island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He discovers that the locals, who seem ordinary at first, … Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Or did I? Do you believe everything I write in these reviews? Do you take me at my word when I mention details from my life, or is there a sliver of doubt? Do you know who I am offline? When I’m not the person behind the keyboard telling you… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| Along a ruggedly beautiful coastline, a middle-aged man dressed in an incongruous white robe struggles as he is forced up a hill by villagers who sing cheerfully, as if celebrating—because they are. The man’s eyes… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| The following assertion is perhaps already an old saw by now, but still I think it bears repeating from time to time: The notion of “elevated horror” is pretentious AF. It’s a crass moniker meant to distinguish horror cinema’s more prestigious vendibles from… Continue reading
|Jillian Nelson| When Rosemary’s Baby released in 1968, conflicts over women’s rights raged on as second-wave feminists battled governmental restrictions that seeped into interpersonal relations. Birth control pills had only just been made legal. New York had recently… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| take so much pleasure in every rewatch of Rosemary’s Baby that it often feels more like I’m visiting old friends, not watching one of the scariest films of the twentieth century. I love the pink font used in the title sequence, the New York Christmas scenes, the way… Continue reading
|Phil Kolas| Pulled pork tacos were a poor choice. That was my first thought when I started this movie. After the opening flash photography montage depicting half-decomposed human bodies, leading into the zoom-out reveal of… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| Last week I learned about the fate of the original house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It appears the house was cut into several pieces in the ‘90s and transported to a town 60 miles away. The house is now a restaurant in Kingsland, TX. This revelation is… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| Obedient tool. That phrase from the intertitles of Metropolis describes what a group of men desire in another science fiction film made decades later, The Stepford Wives (1975). In Metropolis… Continue reading
|Kit Stookey| Night of the Living Dead plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. It is common wisdom that any given piece of media says more about the period in which it was produced than the period it was trying… Continue reading
| Wil McMillen | Dead of Night aka. Deathdream plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “My brother came home yesterday From somewhere far away He doesn’t look like I remember As he stares off into space He must’ve seen… Continue reading
| Jake Rudegeair | Prepare to have your heart curdled and pressed. Prepare to have your nervous system rattled like a corpse-black skeleton in a crossroads cage. Elem Klimov’s last masterpiece COME AND SEE is cinema in the raw. It’s caustic, an aching descent into the ugliest, most engrossing… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| Claire Denis has always made monster movies. Or, at least, movies with monsters in them or, most commonly, movies about the survivors of monsters. Most of her films revolve around (or feature in a capacity) people who have intense sense of dread permeating… Continue reading
|Benjamin Jarman| My mom doesn’t like horror movies much, but she is open-minded enough to sit down and watch Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead with her son. I wasn’t expecting her to become the newest fan of the franchise, but I was interested in what could keep someone from thinking positively about the horror genre. One of the clearest memories… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| When I was 22, I wanted to be Samuel Marshall Raimi. You probably know him as Sam Raimi, director of The Evil Dead. I was a young, eager kid just out of film school, and he was my hero. His story seemed so close to my own, so attainable. In the fall of 1979, he and his buds Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell wrangled up a small cast and a skeleton crew, descended upon… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| In the pantheon of suspected or perhaps nonexistent genres of film, one of my favorites is the foreign film that has the copy-pasted soul of a Hollywood blockbuster but feels strangely fresh and new. Such films relieve me of the burden of familiar movie stars. They relieve me temporarily of the peculiarities… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| For many who have endured a ninth grade and/or AP literature class, Shakespeare brings to mind big emotions and melodramatic ideas: forbidden romance, corrupt monarchs, or mistaken identity. An underrated aspect of a good chunk of his work, however, is its exploration of the horrors of the great beyond… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| “Your movie is like the Jaws of Airbnbs,” jokes Korey Coleman, host of the Double Toasted podcast to writer/ director Zach Cregger for whom Barbarian, in 2022, was his solo feature debut. For those who don’t remember the cultural impact of that record-breaking 1975… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| Half the fun (well, maybe a quarter of the fun) of going to the movies is the trailers shown before the main event. Do I want to see—or avoid—a new release? Well-made trailers are almost like tiny little movies themselves, and indeed, there’s an art to making a good trailer. The first rule of good trailers is … Continue reading
|Chris Polley| I was lucky enough to see David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows in the theater when it was originally released a little under 10 years ago today. At a movie theater that no longer exists, playing hooky from work after lunch but before daycare closed, I was already a bit anxious, being a goody two-shoes… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| Like so many, when I first saw It Follows, I found it smart, scary, fresh, dreadful, and fascinating. Part of what initially grabbed my attention was the oft-discussed dream logic of the film. Watching it feels like the same relentless, hyper-focused dreams… Continue reading
|Doug Carmody| Bong Joon-ho’s The Host opens to scenes of tension and tragedy. First, in a politically overt sequence, an American doctor forces a Korean doctor to dump formaldehyde… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddough| I first saw it embroidered on my coworker’s hat: “You are on Native land.” Then I noticed it emblazoned in neon signage at Owamni, the indigenous restaurant. Those five words: are they a fact? A reminder? Are they meant to spark remorse? Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Ugly injustice and righteous anger fill the frames of nearly every fantasy revenge flick, but the best of the genre go beyond the emotion. They consider their targets and punishments carefully as well as provide a convincing argument as to why pacifism… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| A foundational memory of mine is sitting in Dr. Doug Julien’s “Comedy Text and Theory” course at the University of Minnesota and realizing the slender thin line that separates a scream from a laugh. Dr. Doug, as he liked to be addressed, told the class he was… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know something about One Cut of the Dead. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need me to tell you how special it is, nor would you want me spoiling it. An unassuming genre-bender like this, packed to the gills… Continue reading
|Cole Seidl| Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead has been incredibly, yet quietly, influential since its initial release in Japan in 2017. It has spawned a small independent film movement in Japan known as “nagamawashi” films (or “long take” films) which aim to exploit the… Continue reading
|Caitlyn Speier| 2016, the year I turned 16, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, and more importantly, 10 Cloverfield Lane was released to a nearly unanimous “meh, not terrible” from audiences and critics alike. Everything was perfect… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| I. Gringos en Arica. The first of my three weeks in Arica, a city on the Chilean-Peruvian border, was spent in a beachside hotel. We had free breakfast in the mornings, a pool overlooking the ocean, and most importantly, a bar just a five-minute walk away. Many of us were… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| What is the first movie you remember seeing Tim Curry in? It is a question of when you first saw him in something, not if you have ever seen him in something. The British actor has been an inescapable presence on the silver screen since 1975. Incidentally, Continue reading
|Penny Folger| The Museum of Home Video is an online streaming show that took flight during the pandemic and seems to have created an empire. Started by Los Angeleno film programmer/distributor Brett Berg, it takes place at museumofhomevideo.com at 7:30 pm PST most Tuesday evenings. Since its inception in July… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| Hearing it solely on its own terms, “Goodbye Horses” is an achingly beautiful song. Q Lazzarus’ voice quavers but never loses its assuredness. She makes the most of her low resonance, embracing her voice’s androgynous qualities. William Garvey’s gorgeously cryptic lyricism is just as crucial to the song’s mystique… Continue reading
