Horror is for Grrrls

              Ah, yet another horror movie to encourage me to stay in the comfort of my home. A group of five obnoxious snowboarders, two couples and a fifth wheel, are enjoying some off-the-beaten-path sporting when the fifth wheel suffers a gruesome injury. Our hyper-capable final girl Jannicke takes charge, and the gang take shelter in an abandoned hotel that, of course, turns out to be not so abandoned. Murder ensues.             Disclaimer – my enjoyment of Cold Prey was seriously impeded by the fact that the digital copy I rented was dubbed. This was the worst dubbing I have ever seen, and I watch a lot of Italian movies. The words never match the characters lips, the characters never sound afraid, and the whole thing led to some Troll 2 level dialogue. I actually quite liked the film’s end, when it finally makes use of its chilly setting to offer up some symbolic...

              Shy and contemplative, young Melissa is the only Haitian and only Black student in her elite girls’ boarding school. She attracts the attention of her classmate Fanny, who invites her to join her literary sorority. To gain entrance, Melissa quotes Rene Depestre (I think) and tells them about her family life, her dead parents and her loving Aunt Katy, who happens to be a mambo. Fanny’s ears perk up at the mention of voodoo, and after suffering heartbreak she, like white horror movie characters before her, decides that fucking around with Voodoo to solve her personal problems is a terrific idea. This does not go well.             If this sounds like the voodoo version of The Craft , I hate to disappoint you. This slice of French arthouse from Bertrand Bonello places what would be the inciting incident in your typical horror film at the very end of the movie. The boarding school setup is...

              Let’s oversimplify things a little and say that the Dracula story has two halves, two main locations. The first is Dracula’s castle, where the unsuspecting Jonathan Harker, after a long journey and much harbinging, arrives. Here, Dracula is in his element, with his shadows and his vampiric brides, and poor Jonathan is increasingly adrift and preyed upon. In act two Dracula arrives in London, where he mingles with wealthy English society, suave and charming, his monstrosity unobserved, concealed beneath a strange sort of sex appeal.             It’s not that the novel is split into these two halves, but rather the pop culture adaptations that made Dracula’s reputation, and provided much of the raw material for cinematic horror, tend to choose one or the other. The Bela Lugosi Dracula chooses the latter – Renfeld pays a visit to Dracula in his castle, but thi...

              I was a wee tot when the remake of The Hills Have Eyes hit theaters and vague, terrifying posters peppered my local multiplex. I was haunted by the title for years, speculating with my friends as to what it could possibly be about. I maintain that it’s an all-time great title – evocative, baffling, eerie, promising an inescapable horror at the level of environment, something that surrounds. I actually put off watching the original for a long time because of that title. Like most things, it was better in my head.             The Hills Have Eyes shares a lot of DNA with Texas Chain Saw Massacre , but it’s not the straight-up rip-off I feared. Our setting is the Nevada desert instead of Texas, our victims-to-be are a family instead of a group of kids, and our villains have knives not chainsaws. We start with the Carter family, some of the most unlikable horr...

              A young woman in an all girls’ boarding school discovers that her tuition has not been paid in six months, throwing the stability of her life into question. But fortunately, this isn’t Picnic at Hanging Rock , and this woman’s headmistress is much kinder, even offering to pay her way to New York to track down the missing check-signer, who in this case happens to be the woman’s sister. As the woman turns to leave, one of her teachers follows her and tells her to not come back; it is time for her to be in the world, making me think that I’ve missed some important context about girls’ schools in the ‘40s. So begins The Seventh Victim , one of the strangest and darkest horror films in the catalog of early American cinema.             Young Mary’s search of New York for her missing sister, Jacqueline, is more noir than horror. She encounters shady characters, an ...

             Yesterday there was a coup attempt and so I obsessively reloaded Twitter and the New York Times instead of watching a movie. I would very much like to do less doom-scrolling today, since there’s no longer a situation actively requiring updates (knock on wood). Perhaps this write-up will be a helpful distraction.             …So anyway there was this guy called Mario Bava. Like most Italian directors of his time, Bava was extremely prolific. He made westerns, sci-fi films, superhero movies, Hercules movies, and sex comedies (every Italian director made at least one sex comedy). But he is best known for his horror films. Italian horror is most famous for the giallo , a hyper-stylized mystery-slasher hybrid that was a huge influence on American horror. And with films like The Girl Who Knew Too Much , Blood and Black Lace, and Bay of Blood , Bava basically invented the genre. But these...