Tag: Bette Davis

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 […]

Now, Voyager and Mental Illness

At Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Now, Voyager, its presentation of mental illness and hope. “In the years since its release, the film has garnered a reputation as Davis’s best performance and a quintessential example of the women’s picture, a proto-feminist subgenre that took shape in 1930s […]

“Classy Ladies, Scary Movies”

At Mostly Film, Blake Backlash writes about films “mixing of Hollywood’s Grande Dames with Grand Guignol.”  “Such cinematic mixing of Grande Dames and Grand Guignol had its heyday in the second-half of the sixties, and such films are sometimes (more-or-less) affectionately known as psycho-biddy pictures. They tended to […]

To Kill A Mockingbird and Horror

“Even if we were to discount the element of Southern small town prejudice and the ugly courtroom trial that occupies the film’s center, this adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Harper Lee is just plain spooky… and it is my feeling that it has bestowed upon […]