A Review of mother!, or How I Learned to Stop Being Dubious and Write Something about This Film
“Whatever exists, [the judge] said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West “There’s imagery there. The religious text is great mythology. Out of that…
Oh! The Horror… | of IT (2017)
My personal history with the image of, specifically, Tim Curry’s 1990 incarnation of Pennywise the Clown is mired in chronological uncertainty and revisionist history. I don’t remember when I first came in contact with film, let alone the clown. When…
Oh! The Horror… | of Anthologies
There is something deeply satisfying about how peoples’ stories intersect and collide in the strangest ways. One of my good friends was recounting how he had gone to see the metal band, The Sword, in Fort Worth at Lola’s. As…
Oh! The Horror… | of a Silent Scream
I was raised on a healthy diet of classic film and television growing up, everything from It Happened One Night to My Three Sons and so on. Once I set my sights on horror as a genre, it would not be long until…
Oh! The Horror… | of Double Features, Vol. II
I am so pleased this week to be collaborating, once again, with my good friend, Joseph Nooft, who is a contributor for Mockingbird. We wanted to bring to you some more suggestions for double features—a non-horror film paired with a horror…
Oh! The Horror… | of Dissolution
Imagine for a second: an amorphous mass of gelatinous ooze engulfs a person and, just as they open their mouth to air their protests of fear, the pulsating form reaches out its bulbous tentacle and begins to slide down the…
Review| Baby Driver
If you expect your films to have narrative complexity, don’t go see this film. If you expect your films to break apart common cinematic tropes and characterizations, don’t go see this film. If you want your musicals to contain characters…
Review| It Comes At Night
There is no way to spoil this film, because the film never reveals the “it” of its title. “It” is shrouded in as much resistant mystery by the end of the film as it is in the first scene. Its…
Oh! The Horror… | of Slaughtered and Transformed Masculinity
Clearly Rambo (I refer to the general type) has his secure place in popular cinema. That place is not horror, however. If Rambo were to wander out of the action genre into a slasher film, he would end up dead.…
Oh! The Horror… | of Displacing God
James Whale brought to the screen what is considered the most dynamic film in the first cycle of Universal monster pictures of the 1930s, 1931’s Frankenstein. Though diverging from Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, in three significant ways–making…