Is it Horror? | The Zone of Interest (2023)

Is it Horror? | The Zone of Interest (2023)

It was with no small amount of excitement that I anticipated Glazer’s latest, ten years on from Under the Skin. The Zone of Interest is a German-language film set in Poland during World War II, as far from the sun-drenched Cockney mafia of Sexy Beast as you can get, and miles removed from the austere Manhattan winterscape of Birth. But that’s fitting for Glazer, whose work regularly defies categorization. After casting Natasha Romanoff as a man-devouring extraterrestrial prowling the streets of Glasgow, an adaptation of Martin Amis’ 2014 “zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological” best-seller seems as logical a move as any.

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

Frankly, it's not hard to see the similarities between the two, between Rosemary's Baby and The Mephisto Waltz, or at least the imprint of one on the other. We've got this educated passing for sophisticated, sufficiently urbane couple, and they're drawn in by a pair of Satanists of indeterminate age, and then they get involved in magic that benefits the Satanists more than the sweet young couple. So it's a little bit Faustian, but it's got jazz hands.

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Vincent Price in the role of Edward Sheridan Lionheart is going to chew the scenery so boldly and so vividly in the kinds of important theatrical roles he always wanted to play, but felt his stature and reputation in horror cinema kept out of his reach. Luckily for Vincent Price, and by extension for us, Lionheart's final season was a survey of some of the biggest and juiciest roles in Shakespeare's canon. The Shakespeare plays contained in Theatre of Blood were more likely than not chosen for the inventiveness with which characters are dispatched than for the significance of the plays themselves, but Price does get to wrap his mouth around monologues from Hamlet, Richard III, Shylock, and on and on.

Frankenstein's Army (2013)

Frankenstein's Army (2013)

The gruesome discoveries that the recon team stumble upon: are they simply the horrors of war? Or are they somehow something even sicker? How is there artillery damage to a church in this region, wherever we are, when there have been no soldiers deployed here? Why is there a giant pile of immolated nuns? And why is there a churchyard that's just punched open with empty graves? And to return to the idea of watching the full-frame without distraction, I think this is especially important, because the director utilizes it in very complete, imaginative, and surprising ways that you might not be able to appreciate if you're not giving his composition your full attention.

Is it Horror? | Scream (1996)

Is it Horror? | Scream (1996)

Not having really ‘discovered’ horror until my later years, which is to say, the latter half of the 2010s, I completely missed the phenomenon that was Scream, which is just as well, because its references would have flown over my head and landed somewhere in the midst of my high-brow culture intake of the time. Having consumed considerably more genre content since, thanks in large part to this podcast, I was finally in the proper headspace to watch Wes Craven’s 1996 blockbuster.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Unlike many of the spookers that we talk about in this hallowed lecture hall, Les Yeux Sans Visage is not one that I discovered walking behind the rows at my local VHS rental shop when I was nine. Instead, I was shown this for the first time by one Micah Bucey, a former New York actor who is now the pastor of Judson Church in Washington Square, when I was somewhere in the post-Vassar but pre-Drama Desk years of my early adulthood. And like a clinical Cocteau film that is an indictment of the French bourgeois society, which can't confront the horror and trauma of its not too distant past and is loaded with callbacks to the Nazi occupation, the story of a month in the life of the Genessiers unfolds in almost exactly 90 visually poetic, dreamlike, melodramatic, gothic fairy tale minutes. It explores the psychology of darkness from a complex moral point of view.

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