The Blood on Satan’s Claw (dir. Piers Haggard, 1971) Some critics contend that the politics of the horror genre are largely conservative. The most well known examples of this are found in the slasher subgenre where premarital sex and drug use make you a target for death by the maniacal killer, and the so-called ‘final … Continue reading The Blood on Satan’s Claw

The X-Files (dir. Rob Bowman, 1998) Bartender: So... what do you do? Fox Mulder: What do I do? Bartender: Mm-hmm. Fox Mulder : I'm the key figure in an ongoing government charade, a plot to conceal the truth about the existence of extraterrestrials. It's a global conspiracy, actually, with key players in the highest levels … Continue reading The X-Files (1998)

Little Monsters (dir. Abe Forsythe, 2019) Dave (Alexander England) is a deadbeat and busker, formerly the vocalist and guitarist of the stadium rock/death metal band God’s Sledgehammer, currently living with his sister and her young son Felix in the aftermath of a relationship whose dissolution we see as the opening credits play out. While taking … Continue reading Little Monsters (2019)

The Devil Rides Out (dir. Terrence Fisher, 1968) Christopher Lee made a career out of playing the villain. You can’t have cheekbones and a voice like that and not be the bad guy most of the time. Lee maintained throughout his career his frustration with this typecasting. There are only so many times you can … Continue reading The Devil Rides Out

Eye of the Devil (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1966) Most people who are aware of Eye of the Devil know it because of Sharon Tate. It’s understandable. It was her first major role after previously appearing in television and minor parts in films, such as The Americanization of Emily. She gives a magnetic performance as … Continue reading Eye of the Devil

Night of the Demon (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1957) Based on an M.R. James short story, Night of the Demon deviates in a few ways from the original, but one of the more interesting ones to me is that it recasts the protagonist as an American. While not an obviously significant difference between story and film, … Continue reading Night of the Demon (1957)

The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943) 1943’s The Seventh Victim, directed by Mark Robson and the first of four films produced by Val Lewton during his run at RKO in that year alone, concerns a young woman’s search for her missing sister, which leads to a mysterious cosmetics company and a Satanic cult in … Continue reading The Seventh Victim

The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story “The Black Cat” features many of the same themes of criminal guilt as the more famous “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but with many more instances of animal torture and an autobiographical undercurrent of alcoholism. While Poe achieved modest critical success, it would … Continue reading The Black Cat (1934)

As Above, So Below (dir. John Erick Dowdle, 2014) I should like a movie in which Ginsberg from Mad Men has alchemical misadventures in the Paris Catacombs much more than this. What went wrong here? The improbably named Perdita Weeks stars as the improbably named Scarlett Marlowe, the standard young, beautiful, and athletic academic that … Continue reading As Above, So Below

Apollo 18 (dir. Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, 2011) The conspiracy theories revolving around the moon landings exist because people are unsatisfied with the explanations for why we never went back. The Apollo program was very expensive, robots and probes don’t need to worry about oxygen or cosmic rays, and the space race was always a proxy battle … Continue reading Apollo 18