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| a horror blog
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Review: VFW (2020)
There is a serene moment near the end of the first act in Joe Begos’ midnight thriller VFW when the diminutive war vet Doug (played by David Patrick Kelly) steps outside the local veterans watering hole that forms the rundown center of the film’s small, grim universe. He sparks a joint, looks up at the…
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Island of Lost Souls, And The Power Of Movie Music
On the cusp of the climactic moments of Paramount’s 1932 cult classic Island of Lost Souls, a group of tortured beast-men work out the central hypocricy of their maker, a sociopathic Dr. Moreau played by the masterful Charles Laughton. Bela Lugosi, nearly unrecognizable under his wild mane of hair, plays the Sayer of the Law.…
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Review: The Hunt (2020)
The Hunt may be a cursed film. Its overtly political themes and over-the-top violence caused small waves of preemptive outrage even before anyone had really seen it, and a pair of mass shootings in the U.S. only added to the electricity in the air before its scheduled release. Despite these precarious table settings, its existence…
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Review: The Invisible Man (2020)
Decades before the Marvel Cinematic Universe (almost a century!), Universal’s Classic Monsters became the first shared universe in film. Certainly you know them by reputation alone: Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man … the broad success of this universe spanned over three decades, and defined the…
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10 Horror Movies To Stream While Self-Isolating
Hagazussa (Prime) Hagazussa is an Old High German word meaning something close to “hedge sitter,” and it refers to an old woman who would sit on the border between worlds: literally, the shrubs between society and the wild forest, and symbolically between that of the physical and the unknown. It is also where we get…
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Why Horror Matters
“The great writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole. The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it,…
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Class of 2019: The Most Important Horror Movies of the Year
The best horror movies of 2019. A collection of the most important, essential, or influential horror movies of the past year.
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Review: The Lighthouse (2019)
Robert Eggers’ debut feature The Witch centered on an isolated and increasingly tormented family in 17th century New England, besieged by fears of starvation and witchcraft. Four years later, his second full length film The Lighthouse is similarly obsessed with the details of a particular time period, and the ways in which we are often…
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Play The B-Sides: The Terror (1963)
In the early 1960s, horror was still lurching out of a decade dominated by creature features and theatrical gimmicks brought on as a response to the advent of television. The ’50s had its gems (The Fly, House of Wax, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc) but most of the auteurs in horror and cinema were…