Writes at culturalgutter.com, blogs at screamsharing.com
In The Hunger (1983), Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) and husband John (David Bowie) are rich and young and in love and have absolutely everything: an inexplicably labyrinthine estate in the heart of Manhattan, yawning, idle days spent on books and orchids and cellos and nights strobing full of […]
The following contains spoilers for every version of The Shining and both versions of its sequel Doctor Sleep. With a legendary, cross-genre publishing career pushing toward its fifth decade, Stephen King’s name has become a thing unto itself. It is adjectival; it has top billing; it is printing […]
Horror as a genre satisfies many social and psychological needs. These are the stories we are compelled to tell because they’re fun, because they’re exciting, because it’s natural to crave the thrill and the sweet, sweet dopamine of survival. They allow us to talk about trauma and grief […]
Halloween (1978) wasn’t the first slasher film, not by a long, long shot, and Laurie Strode wasn’t the first Final Girl, but — as I have discussed here before — the commercial appeal and success of Halloween codified the slasher subgenre and set the rules for at least […]
Angela Englert is being tormented by demons from her past. She’ll be back next month! In the meantime, consider her piece on the video game, Until Dawn. ~~~ Horror has been part of video games since at least 1981’s 3D Monster Maze, but it’s not always a seamless […]
Bernard Rose’s Clive Barker’s Candyman is an intensely 1990s film. Characters smoke a LOT inside public places. A senior professor, Philip Purcell, refers to our main character Helen (Virginia Madsen) and research partner/Black Best Friend trope Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) as “my two most beautiful graduate students” and there […]
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The Cultural Gutter 