horror – Page 31 – PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – Basketful of Heads

Basketful of Heads (2020)
Written by Joe Hill
Art by Leomacs

It helps to have a famous dad, I suppose. In 2019, DC Comics announced a horror comics imprint, Hill Comics, that would be overseen by horror novelist Joe Hill, son of Stephen King. I have never read any of Hill’s prose, but I did read his previous comics series, Locke & Key, which is quite a fun & disturbing horror mystery with all sorts of twists and turns along the way. Hill Comics’s opening salvo would include Hill’s own Basketful of Heads, The Dollhouse Family by Peter Carey, The Low Low Woods by Carmen Maria Machado, and more. I plan to read through these as the trades are released, and we have some great horror comics that bridge the gap between the pulpy comic anthologies of old and more modern horror sensibilities.

Movie Review – I’m Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Written & Directed by Charlie Kaufman

Ending things can have many different meanings. At first, we assume our main character’s internal monologue is referring to breaking up with her boyfriend. For most of the movie, that appears to be the intent of the phrase. However, as the walls of reality melt away, and our perspective begins to shift, we start to think about how much more fatal “”ending things”” can be. Does anything end or, when we think life has ended, do we fall into a jumbled void of memories and imagined experiences, drowning in our own confusion? Charlie Kaufman never gives us something easy to decipher, and he desires to challenge our mindset.

Book Update – July/August 2020

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

I have not dug into Stephen Graham Jones as much as I should have, but the work I’ve read is fantastic. This is his latest novel (released in July with another book coming out in September, the man is a workhorse) and continues his blending of Jones’s indigenous background with his love of horror. The Only Good Indians centers on four Native men who took part in an elk hunt a decade earlier. During the hunt, they did something and witnessed a horror that haunted them to varying degrees. The plot is structured to move from man to man and see how the curse on them plays out. In that way, the book is sort of a mish-mash of linked short stories and novellas. The book’s core is Lewis’s story, a postal worker who has moved away from his hometown and is living with a white woman. There’s some cultural guilt there, especially when a Native woman a little younger than Lewis starts working at his job. He’s torn between his individual wants and the expectations of his culture looming over him. Through this triangle, the horror begins to manifest itself, culminating in the middle of the novel and creating ripples that shape the rest of the text. There’s no way this story could be recast in a different culture, especially not whitewashed. This is a specifically Native people’s horror story, yet Jones taps into universal themes that cause the novel to resonate on multiple levels.

Movie Review – The Changeling

The Changeling (1980)
Written by William Gray & Diana Maddox
Directed by Peter Medak

Does tragedy make a person more open to other planes of existence? If we come close to death or experience, profound loss, are we then able to brief make out the shades of another world that exists within our own? The Changeling explores these ideas in a tightly crafted and well made haunted house picture. Long before the days of Blumhouse, this was a movie that trafficked in many of the same tropes and themes but didn’t need to lean into empty jumpscares or tired formulas to keep audiences interested. That isn’t to say this is a perfect film, but it is made by people who understand what is genuinely horrific about existence.

Movie Review – She Dies Tomorrow

She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
Written & Directed by Amy Seimetz

The world is a scary place right now, fueled by a mix of real horrors and a general sense of growing uneasiness with modern life. People seem to be inching towards a collective mass mental breakdown that is playing out on viral videos peppered across social media. The American population is being confronted with its mortality in a stark manner that you can see is not setting well. Some people are in outright denial and become unhinged, encountering others who very proactively try to keep themselves and others healthy. These anxieties and contemplations of death are what make up the nightmarish ground She Dies Tomorrow covers.

Movie Review – The Fog

The Fog (1980)
Written by John Carpenter & Debra Hill
Directed by John Carpenter

John Carpenter is a well-known master of horror & the fantastic and in the early 1980s he was doing the best work of his career. By 1980 he’d directed Dark Dark, Assault of Precinct 13, and the film that propelled him to greater heights, Halloween. Two years later, he would make one movie a year for five consecutive years. It began with The Fog. The idea for The Fog came over several years dating back to the early 1970s as Carpenter recalled a British horror film he saw from a child about monsters in the clouds. While visiting Stonehenge while filming in the UK, he noticed the eerieness of a fog that crept over the site. After hearing about a tragic shipwreck off the northern California coast, Carpenter sat down with then-girlfriend Debra Hill and worked out the screenplay.

The Cinema of Misery

Doesn’t the world feel exceptionally shitty these days? Would you like to watch a movie that will lift your spirits? Well, that’s not this list. When I originally planned this list, COVID-19 cases were going down, and it seemed like the BLM uprisings were pushing back at power semi-successfully. As I publish this, we have soaring case numbers and now federal stormtroopers acting in outright violation of the Constitution in Portland, Oregon. Just yesterday, political commentator Michael Brooks passed away suddenly at the age of 37. Brooks was in my home every day through his work on The Majority Report and his own podcast. Add to this anxiety surrounding schools opening back up soon while the virus rages, and I can safely say my head is not in a good space these days. Seems like the perfect time for such a list.

Movie Review – Deliverance

Deliverance (1972)
Written by James Dickey
Directed by John Boorman

The opening dialogue of Deliverance, based on the novel of the same name by James Dickey, tells us everything we need to know to understand the conflict that underlies the entire film. The quartet of friends talks about a new damn built on the fictional Cahulawassee River and how this effort of modern industrial ingenuity is going to change the landscape. This plays out over scenes of massive earth-moving machinery and explosives clearing away cliffs. This will be a story about modernity clashing with primal forces of nature and how masculinity navigates how a strange old world redefines it.

My Favorite Unsettling Films

The Butcher Boy (1997, directed by Neil Jordan)

In 1960s Ireland, 12-year-old Francie Brady allows his imagination to take over his mind and body quite often. His mother suffers a nervous breakdown and commits suicide, and his father becomes emotionally distant, relying on alcohol to get through the day. Francie’s fantasies become full of aliens, monsters, comic book heroes, and most upsetting nuclear annihilation. Francie is driven to committing a horrific act in his community, which makes him an outcast and lands him at a reform school where he’s habitually molested by one of the priests and communes with a foul-mouth Virgin Mary statue. The line between his fantasies and the trauma of his abuses finally coalesce in a violent, bloody act.

Movie Review – Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Written by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, & Gustav Hasford
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Full Metal Jacket was seemingly accepted at face value by critics and audiences alike, and this is one of the most baffling moments in Stanley Kubrick’s directorial career. It shouldn’t surprise us though, as A Clockwork Orange was assumed by so many to be the filmmaker’s endorsement of rape and youth violence. Never underestimate people’s ability to not want to put in the work to think about a piece of art beyond its basic presentation. I have known “Chad” types who have quoted Full Metal Jacket with glee, and I can remember the first time I saw it not understanding why they thought this was a movie glorifying the Marine mindset. In the context of Kubrick’s full body of work, this rewatch has helped clarify for me that this is not the “funny” movie those sociopaths seem to think it is.