Insidious (2010)

Insidious (2010)

When the movie came out, it was a bit of a sensation. It was a real genre juggernaut. I remember the poster, and being annoyed by the poster. “Insidious is.” I -S, Is in red in the middle of the title. I remember seeing the trailer. Boy, did they make liberal use of that “Insidious is.” Fashioning it into the marketing tagline to beat all marketing taglines, “Insidious is… insidious.” Which in fact, it kind of is, because it has a way of insidiously making you feel like maybe you've seen it before. And that might give you a false sense of security or complacency, until it expertly subverts or exceeds your expectations, terrifying you. But its claws are sharp and getting sharper, and they get under your skin. Because it is a little self-referential and it's a lot genre-referential.

House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Starting around 1929, America experienced this fascination with the idea of voodoo. And in July of 1932, a little pre-code film directed by Victor Halperin and starring Bela Lugosi, fresh from the grave as Dracula in the 1931 classic, was released to fairly boffo box office business and mostly mixed to negative critical assessment. This film is notable for a couple of reasons. Bela Lugosi plays a character with perhaps my favorite name in the history of cinema, “Murder Legendre.” With its scant 69-minute run time, it has the distinction of being the first full-length zombie picture ever made. About 60 years later, its title would be appropriated by one Robert Bartleh Cummings when he named his heavy metal band White Zombie. And of course, his nom de guerre in that band would be Rob Zombie.

Is it Horror? | Red Dawn (1984)

Is it Horror? | Red Dawn (1984)

Even when contextualized as the product of a gung-ho America juiced by patriotic fervor, some aspects of Red Dawn have not aged well. The film’s take on masculinity is so potent, you can practically smell the testosterone (yes, Virginia, it smells like victory). After they bag a deer, Matt and Jed encourage their buddy Robert (C. Thomas Howell) to drink its blood so he can feel its “spirit” and be “a real hunter.” The group handles their newfound weapons with astonishing ease, as if they’ve been firing bazookas since birth. Following the death of friends and loved ones, the young men are told to resist crying and turn their emotions to anger. It’s a wonder they don’t don animal skins and go full-on Lord of the Flies.

House (1977)

House (1977)

This is the kind of movie that you might dream about making when you're eight or nine and have figured out that movies don't just happen, but they're made. Before you have any kind of regard or understanding of act structure or traditional storytelling. It’s a radical descent through stratum after stratum of artificiality that consistently left me wondering at every turn whether what I was seeing was real. Is it real to the characters or are these young fabulists taking me on constant detours through their own subjective experiences and imaginations?

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

In total, in the sum of its parts, Bride of Frankenstein pits the sacred against the profane. It shows us both the ridiculous and the sublime, sometimes in the same frame. The prototype of the Hollywood monster is entranced by the strains of Ave Maria played by a blind man on his violin. By another who is afflicted, the mute creature is taught to speak, and from thence to express his fundamental, elemental desires. And in the last reel, we see those desires satisfied in deleterious ways when they are unreciprocated. Because, as Dr. Pretorius explains, the human heart is more complex than any other part of the body.

Is it Horror? | Sarah Kane's "Blasted" (1995)

Is it Horror? | Sarah Kane's "Blasted" (1995)

BLASTED is not an easy watch. The play’s 1995 world premiere, at London’s Royal Court Theatre, was met with outright derision. The Daily Mail called it “a disgusting feast of filth.” The Independent likened the experience of watching the play to “having your face rammed in an overflowing ashtray for starters, then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.”

Is it Horror? | Society of the Snow (2023) and The Impossible (2012)

Is it Horror? | Society of the Snow (2023) and The Impossible (2012)

It’s impossible to overstate the popularity of disaster films in the mid-to-late-1970s. The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974), The Hindenburg (1975), Black Sunday (1977), the Airport series (1970, 1975, 1977, 1979) and others were huge box office draws, with star-studded casts: Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Dean Martin, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, James Stewart, Gene Hackman, Jacqueline Bisset, Steve McQueen, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Olivia de Havilland — all showed up to have their worlds rocked.

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