horror – Page 19 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Souls (1962)
Written by John Clifford & Herk Harvey
Directed by Herk Harvey

I made a dumb statement in my review of The Innocents. I caught myself. No one had to call me out. I used the term “elevated horror.” Ugh. I was reminded by seeing an excerpt from a John Carpenter interview that the term is meaningless. The word “elevated” implies better than something else, and when we talk about art, it’s profoundly reductive. I know what I meant and what I should have said. There is some horror that takes itself seriously and other horror that is tongue-in-cheek. I prefer the former because I want that suspension of disbelief. Tongue-in-cheek horror can be good, especially if you don’t want to lose yourself entirely in the work; you need some healthy distance & an ability to laugh at what is on screen. “Elevated” is often used to disparage low-budget films that did not have the resources of others. Yet, plenty of moving pieces of horror didn’t cost much to make. Carnival of Souls is undoubtedly one of those.

Movie Review – The Innocents

The Innocents (1961)
Written by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer
Directed by Jack Clayton

Horror is an umbrella term for diverse subgenres that all focus on one emotion: Fear. As a human being, you know fear has many levels and tones. You can have a momentary fright or slowly sink into the quicksand of dread. Horror cinema has films that fit this spectrum of intensity, with cheap jumpscares ruling the box office (for the most part). My personal favorite type of horror leans into existential fears. Gothic horror often does this exceptionally well, emphasizing atmosphere and striking visuals that linger. Alien is an excellent example of Gothic horror, even though it’s set in space. The fear comes primarily from our sense of dread, knowing that something terrible will happen yet not knowing why or if it can be stopped. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is about facing something you cannot fully understand, but it still speaks to something you’ve suppressed within yourself. For many people, that type of horror is all too real.

Movie Review – Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
Written by Tony Randel
Directed by Clive Barker and Peter Atkins

The story of Film is littered with production companies & distributors who, at one point, seemed fairly dominant only to vanish overnight. New World Pictures is one of those companies. In 1987, they changed their new New World Entertainment to reflect their ownership of multiple media & product lines. They had purchased Marvel Comics, which dumped a load of potential film & television projects in their laps. New World produced the television series The Wonder Years and the soap opera Santa Barbara. They came close to purchasing Kenner and Mattel, both toy powerhouses of the decade. Ironically, this same drive to expand was followed by a significant financial slump and restructuring.

Movie Review – Village of the Damned

Village of the Damned (1960)
Written by Wolf Rilla
Directed by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch

Uncertainty is a regular part of life, but the systems we live under often create ways to blunt it. This is done by providing the citizens with a host of needed resources and using propaganda to shape their worldview. However, these systems can’t hold back the tide of reality forever and cracks inevitably appear. COVID-19 has been one of those uncertainty moments, something so significant that it pierces the veil and creates chaos. We are also conditioned to go into immediate denial (the effects of the propaganda) even if we see it happen right before us. “But I was assured,” we say, “That the people in charge have everything under control.” If you haven’t been convinced yet, just wait; things will get worse as denialism grows in the face of multiple global catastrophes.

Movie Review – Black Sunday (1960)

Black Sunday (1960)
Written & Directed by Mario Bava

While the French critics were wringing their hands over Eyes Without a Face, the Italian cinematic world was embracing the fervor of horror movies in the same way all of their films seemed to overflow with passion. Elements of gore and the Gothic were treasured, and the filmmakers associated with these pictures clearly understand the nature of spectacle in film. Mario Bava is the father of Italian horror movies, having directed the first horror “talkie” in the country, I Vampiri. Black Sunday was his first solo effort; he was no longer collaborating and could finally indulge in the lush horror he loved. The result would be a piece that formed his trajectory for the rest of his days and established actress Barbara Steele as one of the scream queens of the decade.

Movie Review – Eyes Without a Face

Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Written by Georges Franju, Jean Redon, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet, and Pierre Gascar
Directed by Georges Franju

The 1960s were the prelude to the horror boom of the 1970s. This means you’ll find some archetypes and tropes refined here, elements that will be at their zenith in the following decade. Foreign film markets were gaining strength during the Sixties, with places like France & Italy at the forefront. There weren’t many French horror films then, so Eyes Without a Face was quite different. Producer Jules Borkon thought it was an untapped market in France and purchased the rights to a horror novel he’d recently read. Director Georges Franju had only made documentaries, so this was his first fictional narrative feature. Smartly, he hired writers who had worked on Les Diaboliques and Hitchcock’s Vertigo to help work out the script. The result is something that feels like a horrific modern fairy tale. A princess locked in a tower in the woods who has been turned into a monster by another.

Movie Review – Hellraiser (1987)

Hellraiser (1987)
Written & Directed by Clive Barker

The 1980s were a significant transformation in horror movies. In the 1970s, the horror genre often followed the trend of bleak social commentary and used genre tropes to communicate more prominent themes. Like the rest of the movies in the following decade, more emphasis was put on the spectacle. You can see this in the gratuitous kills of series like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street. The Evil Dead movies of Sam Raimi also fall into this category. While cleverly written and filmed, they are more like a cinematic experience than a storytelling one. Hellraiser lies in the middle, both attempting to tell a story about some dark subject matter while delivering envelope-pushing visuals. The result is something I’m not in love with, but I can appreciate it. I also definitely understand why a film like this can be so beloved by particular groups of people.

Movie Review – Nitram

Nitram (2022)
Written by Shaun Grant
Directed by Justin Kunzel

There is no horror that man can imagine worse than what he does to his own kind. It can feel like this moment in history is the worst it’s ever been, but that’s simply because we think things most powerfully as we experience them. Memory has been proven to be one of the most fail-ridden human functions, and imagination is always based on present anxieties. We still have such a limited understanding of the human mind, and people with severe mental disabilities can be frightening because we lack that comprehension. When someone does something genuinely horrible or commits an atrocity, we want to reduce things down to concepts of “good” and “evil,” but if we are honest violent individual acts are rarely able to be defined in such terms. There is a justified fear of looking into the eyes of someone who could apparently kill dozens without cracking, but only through understanding can we ever hope to prevent these things from repeating themselves.

Patron Pick – The Mountain

Don’t forget to respond to our poll about your most anticipated Fall film release.

This is a special reward available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 a month levels. Each month those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

The Mountain (2019)
Written & Directed by Rick Alverson

Rick Alverson has very little interest in entertaining you. In fact, he has no interest in it. To a lot of people, that would be shocking. Don’t movies exist to entertain? Well, some of them do. Art can serve several purposes, but Western audiences have clearly pigeonholed movies into escapism. Alverson sees movies as a form of confrontation. You are confronted with visuals and sound along with the story. All these elements working in concert can create discomfort in the viewer if arranged correctly. Alverson accomplished this previously in his more notable work, The Comedy and (ironically enough) Entertainment. But I think The Mountain is his most accessible of these three, more narratively driven but still steeped in themes of alienation & anger that characters do not know how to express.

Movie Review – We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022)
Written & Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Reality is breaking down. By this, I mean humanity has fragmented into billions of hyper-individualistic pods, each of which often seems to be creating its own version of reality in its head. You can see this most prominently in the QAnon types who construct wildly elaborate fantasies of their childhood favorites not really being dead, that Trump is still the president, and the inevitable arrival of disease-curing medbeds. These are all real delusions that a significant portion of the American population is under now. The youth are escaping in their own way too. A TikTok trend a few months ago (or was it years? Time is also falling apart) had teenagers and young adults speaking with conviction about manifesting themselves into a parallel reality where they were students at Hogwarts. They would describe elaborate scenarios of having relationships with fictional characters they’d been reading about since they were children. I would look at this and say they were just lucid dreaming, but it was a version of tangible reality to them. We create dream realms because the systems we live under have done a shit job preparing us to face the horrors of the present moment.