Writes at culturalgutter.com, blogs at screamsharing.com
Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation (2015) is the kind of film that almost resists genre as its genre; that is to say, its mutability makes for part of its substance. As an impressively sustained exercise in ambiguous dread, it tries on the skins of awards-season drama, psychological thriller, a […]
We people of Earth are experiencing a renaissance in horror on TV like we’ve never enjoyed before, as traditional gatekeepers are dispersed in the wild hunt for content, any content that is compelling or innovative or just plain outré enough to collect people at watercoolers, where presumably advertisers can […]
You will always know schoolgirl Tomie Kawakami by her preternatural beauty, the mole under her left eye, and her smiling cruelty. The changeless villainess of Junji Ito’s shoujo manga series Tomie, and the film and TV series based on same, cannot be killed, although she will be butchered, […]
Sometimes, you must have an awakening, and if it’s a good ‘un, it will hurt. Your chest will cave into heartbreak. You will screw your eyes shut against sudden terror of the future, maybe even of your fellow humans. You will suffer the swift, disabling evacuation of all […]
Consider the problems of Dr. Sam Loomis. You are a resident psychiatrist at Smith’s Grove sanitarium. You have a patient, Michael Myers, who was institutionalized after he knifed his teenage sister to death on Halloween night as a mere 6-year-old boy. At the time, you were told he […]
I love me some Edgar Allan Poe. That man lived a fantastically harsh, brief life, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t wring some great writing out of it anyway. It might seem strange then that out of decades and decades of Poe film adaptations, my very favorite […]
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The Cultural Gutter 