Adapted from a Buddhist morality tale, Onibaba – literally translated “demon woman” – never shocks, but rather haunts with the baleful atmosphere of its natural landscape. In fourteenth-century feudal Japan, the peasant wife and mother of a soldier have taken to slaying lost samurai for their valuables Read More …
Jacques Tourneur’s The Curse of the Demon follows skeptical psychologist John Holden (Dana Andrews) as he travels to England to debunk a Satanic cult led by the affable Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). But, as it’s mentioned in the film, “[The devil] is most dangerous when he’s pleasant,” Read More …
What Jame Gumb (aka “Buffalo Bill”) does to his victims is a crime, but calling it that seems insufficient. When Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) finally puts him down, it is not an act of punishment but self-preservation. Perhaps because of centuries of rhetorical appropriation, it Read More …
The Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi earliest faithful-to-the-book rendition of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel still remains one of the most iconic vampire films today. Lugosi brings a power and presence to his role as the most famous monster in literature, representative of the devil as described in Read More …
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now tells the story of a couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), who are forced to reckon with past family tragedy when they meet a strange couple of women who claim to be able to communicate with their deceased Read More …
It took over five years and the tapping of every resource for David Lynch to fund his first feature-length film. The results of this painstaking process are obvious; the film is resonant in its visual renderings. Set in the decay of a post-industrial wasteland, Eraserhead delves into Read More …
Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction nightmare still terrifies audiences even though its sequels have lacked its chillingly intelligent design. The aliens, attacking from without and within, frighten us with the prospect that we might be carrying the cosmos’ most destructive force within us. Worse, the Read More …
The romantic entanglements of circus performers and the darkness of the human heart drive this bizarre film. While the mere thought of working with a cast of real-life sideshow performers appalled many moviegoers, director Tod Browning further shocked audiences by giving the freaks common human Read More …
Director James Whale’s sequel deepens the philosophy as well as the terror established in Frankenstein (1931). When the monster learns language and compassion from a kindly blind man, its need for companionship is also awakened, leading the monster to confront its creator. Boris Karloff and many of Read More …
Although they are both based on the same Shirley Jackson novel about a group of people investigating the supernatural in an eerie old mansion, don’t mistake Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) for the 1999 Jan De Bont film, The Haunting. Where De Bont piles on the special effects Read More …