Pentagrams, Crows, and ‘Satan’s School for Girls’
In folklore, when witches appear in stories, it’s usually during a time of upheaval. So it comes as no surprise that witch-related cinema also emerges during times of increased female autonomy. It was...
View ArticleBreaking Free From Trauma in ‘We Are What We Are’
November is often considered a time for family, traditional meals, and being thankful for what you have in life. What better way to celebrate this than with a Uterus Horror film featuring a family of...
View ArticleIntimate Fears of the Service Industry in ‘The Stylist’
In today’s current movie-viewing climate, there sometimes can be an unrealistic expectation that every movie needs to be for everyone. Films that focus on a specific life experience tend to have a...
View Article‘Mr. Jones’ Is a Twisted Take on Found Footage – And So Much More
“Trust what you see.” It’s a simple rule to live by, a digestible truth that comforts weary and paranoid skeptics. How, then, can we make sense of our surroundings and their potential dangers if our...
View Article‘Slashers’ Has No Patience for Reality TV
No two genres in horror combine the cosmic potential and lackluster filmographies of the found footage and death game films. Found footage plagued the noughties with predominantly factory-produced...
View ArticleHow ‘Absentia’ Foreshadowed Mike Flanagan’s Horror Legacy
In October 2023, Netflix released The Fall of the House of Usher, marking a new entry into the ‘Flanaverse’ – a series of successful originals directed by Mike Flanagan. 13 years prior, before...
View Article‘The Great Satan’ Puts the ‘Found’ In Found Footage
The Great Satan is a horror experience that transcends traditional genre labels. Without having seen it – without being indoctrinated into the found footage collective Everything is Terrible! (EIT!)...
View ArticleIn ‘Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning,’ Men Are the Real Monsters
It’s been more than three and half years since this column began. In that time, I’ve discussed the way Ginger Snaps used lycanthropy to show the horrors of going through puberty, then how Ginger Snaps...
View ArticleBefore Reality Television, There Was ‘House on Haunted Hill’
The uncertain boundary between reality and illusion is a theme found in many horror movies. William Malone’s House on Haunted Hill manages to take this idea a step further, predicting the rise of...
View ArticleThe Millennial Techno-Anxiety of ‘Landlocked’
It takes guts to put your childhood home on the big screen, let alone your entire family and home movies from your 1990s upbringing. But Paul Owens bares it all in Landlocked and puts a curse on it,...
View Article‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’ Is a Fable for the Lonely
In the dead of winter, one can’t help but feel lonely. But what if loneliness stretches beyond the season? Osgood Perkins‘ debut project The Blackcoat’s Daughter – also known as February – poses...
View Article‘Return To Oz’ Still Breeds Adolescent Horrors
January 2024 marks the second year I’ve used my birthday month as a bargaining chip to convince my amazing Certified Forgotten editors to let me write about a childhood favorite. Last year, I wrote...
View ArticleExploring the Cosmic Horror of ‘The Beach House’
Secluded location. Strange intruders. A relaxing trip gone wrong. These are all familiar traits in the horror genre that we’ve seen explored in many ways. However, the road that The Beach House takes...
View Article‘The Dentist’ Brings Oral Hygiene Nightmares To Life
At first glance, The Dentist seems a run-of-the-mill, low-budget psychological horror film that does what it says on the tin. Yet under Brian Yuzna’s skillful direction and a talented cast and crew,...
View Article‘Queen of the Damned’ Brought Vampires Into the 2000s
They say that vampires never truly go out of style. Trends come and go, often in a cycle, but great tropes of speculative fiction endure because of their inherent appeal. On top of that, the best ones...
View ArticleIn ‘Perpetrator,’ Empathy Is a Gift—And a Weapon
While this column primarily focuses on horror films that are at least a few years old, every once in a while, a new film comes out that I just can’t wait to discuss. In the case of writer and director...
View Article‘Sanzaru’ Sees Evil in a Family’s Buried Secrets
There’s a hidden double meaning to the title of Xia Magnus’s Sanzaru. Taken from the Japanese proverb best known as “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” the accepted meaning of the saying is...
View Article‘The Scooby-Doo Project’ Is Still the Gang’s Strangest Adventure
In 1999, Cartoon Network aired the television special The Scooby-Doo Project as a part of their Scooby-Doo Halloween marathon. An animated/live-action parody of the found footage horror film The Blair...
View ArticleHow ‘The Children’ Reset the Bar for Killer Kid Films
It’s the early aughts, and I’m playing Mario Kart with my buddy in his basement. Mid-race, his little brother dashes down the stairs, leaps in front of me possessing a gleaming butcher knife, and...
View ArticleThe Image-Sickness of ‘Benny’s Video’
There are no monsters in Benny’s Video; no creatures to feature save the suggestion of miasma lurking behind the TV static. Like David Cronenberg’s techno-paranoid cinema, Michael Haneke’s film is...
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