Tag: Horror

  • Coraline (2009)

    Picasso mused that every child is born an artist, but that the hard part is how to remain one after they grow up. Nothing is more surreal or vivid than the imagination of a child, where even the most seemingly mundane experience can evoke stark fear or unbridled joy. It’s a frontier ripe for storytellers,…

  • Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

    The first thing you might notice about the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive is how effortlessly cosmopolitan they are. Smart, artsy, sexy — these undead are unequivocally cool. That’s no surprise when you consider this is the work of writer-director Jim Jarmusch, a purveyor of the idiosyncratic (Dead Man, Night on Earth, Ghost Dog:…

  • Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967)

    The Merrye children of Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told don’t seem like they would have much to be merry about. The unfortunate brood suffers from a rare neurological disorder particular to their bloodline. As a voiceover narrator helpfully explain in the opening, at around the age of 10 or so, Merrye family…

  • M3GAN (2023)

    Hey, all you parents of screen-addled kids: Stay away from M3GAN. At least, that is, stay away if you don’t want to feel horribly guilty for letting computers and smartphones raise your child. This fiendishly dark horror-comedy has a lot to say about parenting and tech addiction, but such social observations are neatly ensconced in the…

  • Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009)

    By the late 2000s, vampire was the new black. Between the popularity of the Twilight franchise and HBO’s True Blood, bloodsucking hadn’t been this lucky since the Wall Street bailout. … Which brings us to another vampire-centric tale, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. Truncating the first three novels of Darren Shan’s YA book series,…