James Wan’s filmography did not begin with the most idealistic debut: Saw, to date, is recipient to the larger sample in the collective dismissal against the modest filmmaker. However, none of this should imply that Wan’s inauspicious debut is plainly schlock—a plot(?) surrounding a mysterious killer that entraps the morally-fractured
Tag: Horror
Dementia
Dementia is a thing of curious alchemy. There is a scene nearing its end that simultaneously affirms and overturns its ideological confusions: Heavily influenced by New Asian horror, Percival M. Intalan’s debut feature as director is not a story strictly about hateful ghouls, but it is about hurt and betrayal
The Babadook
Because it hides amorphous behind so many masks, no bogeyman is outgrown by its tormented. The Babadook, Jennifer Kent’s brilliant debut as director, appears latched to this idea of everyday phantoms which on every level is true. It opens with a sequence in which Amelia (Essie Davis, literally floating in
Maria Leonora Teresa
If the mechanics of terror are as superficial as placing drum-hits and cheat-scares, then the genre might as well be dismissed moot, at the easiest, as it is sometimes dismissed by the high-brow cinephile. And there is a reason why it is not. For one: the genre of horror — for
Siquijor: Mystic Island
In horror, sincerity stands as the most welcoming and, simultaneously, repelling factor for a genre filmmaker. Terror is forthright; this fundamental directness of the genre both introduces to and restricts itself from countless possibilities. Explaining then how few sincerely understand the business of fear; how few of them succeed. Then what,
Wolf Creek
The smaller moments in Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek inspire liberation from the conventions of grotesque cinema: a slight, giggly yet sincere wedding of the lips; the occasional jealous-driven tantrums; all the friendly bickering, among countless, all-treasured others. In close to an hour, our three backpackers — displaced in McLean’s at once
Les Revenants
In Les revenants (They Came Back, 2004) the threat posed by a vast river of bodies inexplicably risen from their recent deaths, is far more internal than losing jugulars and seeing outbreaks of mass contagion. The film — directed by Robin Campillos — relies on the primitive terrors of tragedy, pressed
Final Exam
Echoing John Carpenter’s seminal slasher, Jimmy Huston’s almost-forgotten Halloween wannabe Final Exam (then an unconscious subversion of the slasher genre), is an audaciously soiled exercise yet comes to dissatisfying fruition. The film may also be viewed as a gesture to boycott what is to come upon the release of Friday the 13th, the
The Sacrament
Ti West is among the very few contemporary genre filmmakers to receive much-deserved admiration: ‘tis from both the sizable fraction of the following he has cultivated over the years, people who enjoy most of all his abrupt third-act carnage; and the rest of his admiring audience, who perhaps are more
