Category: horror

Be Our Guest

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, […]

There’s Nowt So Queer As Folk

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 […]

The Legend Of My House

“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 […]

A Summer Place

Burnt Offerings (1976) opens, as so many of my favorite scary movies do, with our relatable heroes driving winding roads deep–into the country, into the woods, into the mountains. Into deep space, for that matter, if you want to extend the metaphor to its outermost limit. It doesn’t […]

Silly Rabbits

1972’s Night of the Lepus is one of the last stalwarts of a grand storytelling tradition, all too rare in our decadent, expertise-skeptical times–a tradition that dares to preface the feature with a dry, informative lecture. No time to thread exposition into character-revealing events and dialogue; we begin […]