3:33 AM
| a horror blog
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Class of 2021: The Best Horror Movies of the Year
I love a year-end list, but the obligatory opening paragraphs are starting to feel like those personal memoirs that precede every online recipe (so I’ll keep this short). The main reason I compulsively click on yearly horror roundups is because I never stop marveling at the range of subjective responses to the art that we…
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The Ways We Eat Our Own: Imperialism & The Zombie
“Watch me create divinity in this world you have given me that is so ugly and so hard. Watch me become God in front of your eyes.” — Ira Lowenthal, on Haitian Vodou How do you make a monster? Sometimes, I’d like to think, it happens around a fire. Sometimes it happens in the dreary…
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The Empty Trauma of Little Marvin’s ‘Them’
Horror is booming. And within the genre, Black storytelling seems to be coming into its own. Critics and bloggers (myself included) have been quick to declare a new renaissance in Black horror, the most important since the 1970s. Writer/producer Tananarive Due pumps the brakes on the hype a little bit, but even she has to…
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The Ways of the Heart Cannot Be Explained: The Quantum Love of Netflix’s ‘Dark’
“What we know is a drop. What we don’t know is an ocean. – Isaac Newton Warning: this series review includes some big picture spoilers. My family was in the midst of another feverish discussion between episodes of Netflix’s German-language mystery Dark—this one about the revelation that one of the show’s main characters was, in…
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Class of 2020: The Most Important Horror Movies of the Year
I will say this right at the top: I’m not going to get overly precious about our “unprecedented year,” and I will not say that I hope this list finds you well. If you’re reading this you lived through the year (congratulations!) and surely you’ve had your fill of platitudes. These are the horror movies…
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Barnaby’s Blood Quantum: Colonialism in Horror
“An Indian is an Indian regardless of the degree of Indian blood or which little government card they do or do not possess.” – Wilma Mankiller In June of 1981, Quebec Provincial Police, game wardens and fisheries officers raided the Restigouche Indian Reserve located on the north side of the Restigouche River, which marks the…
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31 New or Noteworthy Horror Movies to Stream in October
Genres are only as useful as we make them. Etymologically, genre and gender are both adopted from the French, and you can trace them back to the Latin genus, meaning “class” or “kind.” Go back a bit further and you will find the Proto-Indo-European root “gen,” which led to words like genealogy and genesis and,…
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Review: Host (2020)
Host is not a pandemic movie. Director Rob Savage made that clear in an interview in which he described it instead as a “lockdown thriller”—a novel take on the screen life subgenre born in the early-to-mid aughts. The genre was named by Kazakh-Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov in reference to his 2014 horror film Unfriended (directed…
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21 Aquatic Horror Movies To Watch Before Swimming
“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.” – Vincent van Gogh When we gaze at the crashing waves, it is akin to staring into a smoldering fire or up at the night sky. We engage with something elemental,…
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Capitalism Has Failed Us, and South Korean Horror Is Furious
Disclaimer: This post discusses the relationship between real-world socio-economic crises and three specific South Korean horror films. Important spoilers are included. There is something wrong in the world. Do you feel it? As of this writing the novel coronavirus Covid-19 has officially killed over 700,000 people worldwide – a number that increases every day, and…