There is a conventional wisdom that says works of horror are at heart cautionary tales and that once you tear up their planks, all you will find beating beneath is a pulpy warning to the curious, a brutal morality tale leftover from darkest days and firelit nights. This […]
Prince of Darkness (1987) is not often included among John Carpenter’s greatest films. To be fair, he has a lot of great films. The writer-director-composer-grumpy soundbite generator has clocked an embarrassment of beloved cinema in his time. Halloween (1978), Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Big […]
As so many people did over the last month, I set out for my local multiplex to engage in a practice called Barbenheiming. If you’ve been insulated from any sort of news or media this summer (in which case I envy you, friends), this means pairing up a […]
Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022), also called Gæsterne (The Guests) in Danish, easily places among the most disturbing horror movies I’ve ever seen, and not for the usual reasons. There’s no body horror, no stalking, no over-the-top violence. There’s hardly any violence at all for that matter, […]
With a carnival accordion wheeze, woodcut interstitials, and titles in Wicker Man font, Ric Rawlins’ Rewilding announces itself as exactly what it is–a feast of folk horrors rooted deep in green modern pagan dreams of green pre-Christian pagan rites and the conflict when the modern world scuffs up […]
“It watches,” he added suddenly. “The house. It watches every move you make.” “We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it […]
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The Cultural Gutter 