There is a wide range of physical sensations from the frustrating to the debilitating with which most of us are familiar. We've all stubbed a toe. We've all had a nosebleed, a hangnail, a cut in an inconvenient place. Given that horror seeks to elicit a physical response from its audience, it makes sense to build on this language of universal sensations. Clive Barker's Hellraiser is one of the best examples to be found, a primer for using these commonly held experiences to build up a...
2019-10-11 14:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Perhaps the most elementally upsetting concept in horror film is one human doing terrible things to another. Demons, zombies, vampires, and other creatures of the night prey on the living by nature, but human on human violence is outside the logical structure of the food chain and can force us into contact with a variety of uncomfortable truths about the ways we interact with one another. In Robin Hardy's seminal 1973 folk horror flick The Wicker Man a group of pagans living on a pri...
2019-10-10 14:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Where does tension come from? How do movies manufacture it? As with most atmospheric effects the answer stems from no single source. Score, storytelling, acting, editing, blocking, and camera work all play a part in creating a feeling of suspense. David Robert Mitchell's It Follows relies heavily on suspense to imbue its action with immediacy and to bring viewers into the mindset of protagonist Jay, a young woman being hunted by a faceless and seemingly unstoppable entity. It's an id...
2019-10-09 14:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Heike watched the countryside go by outside the window of her compartment while its other occupants — a pair of goblin workmen who’d got on at Talfarde and a snoring human barrister whose spectacles were slipping down his nose — dozed in their seats. Green farmland burgeoning. Tidy farmhouses, whitewashed and trim No salt blight here. No orc hordes to strip the soil bare. ...
2019-10-09 00:02:56 +0000 UTC
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In horror a film's events and images unfold outward from a structuring violation. The death of a loved one. Domestic abuse. The mounting violence and/or wrongness of a horror film is in a way an expansion and exploration of this initial wound. In Rosemary's Baby everything that befalls Rosemary, infernal and mundane, stems from her impregnation via rape. The entirety of Twin Peaks occurs within the negative space left by Laura Palmer's murder. Each new supernatural or disord...
2019-10-08 14:01:00 +0000 UTC
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There are deeper truths than understanding a character's motivations, deducing what an object means, or tracking a story's progression from A to B. There are more elemental ways of understanding art and horror. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's famously elliptical, fragmentary movie about jealousy, self-destruction, and the desire for and fear of one's idealized self and the manifestations of one's dreams, is horror's greatest single piece of solution-proof storytelling. It presen...
2019-10-07 15:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Imagine if Terrence Malick had exactly the same level of ambition but no imagination whatsoever and you've got a pretty good idea what to expect from James Gray's Ad Astra, a movie about a grown-up boy learning that sometimes it's important to have exactly one feeling. Brad Pitt stars as Roy McBride, a misanthropic astronaut whose equally misanthropic father disappeared two decades ago on a deep space mission to discover intelligent life outside the solar system. McBride is considera...
2019-10-07 02:37:44 +0000 UTC
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It's rare that one can look at a man and know beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that he has done material damage to the psychological functioning of an entire nation. Aaron Sorkin is that man. His hit series The West Wing induced a kind of national delusion about the nature of politics while also fostering a bizarrely sunny outlook on the things big government could do and the ideals it stood for. His followup series, The Newsroom, which aired on HBO from 2012 to 2014, m...
2019-10-04 15:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Manhunter is a movie about looking deep into the putrid innards of the worst humanity has to offer and examining that welter of gore and bile not with disgust, but with empathy. It's perhaps the single most important lesson horror has to teach: that to dismiss what repulses us out of hand is to foster its growth in our own hidden places, that the dangerous work of empathizing with the most degraded human beings alive is not merely some trendy criminologist strategy but a vital necess...
2019-10-04 14:00:04 +0000 UTC
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CHAPTER ONE: A SPECIES OF WOOD TICK
"You found him like this?" asked Doctor Clarkson, making a note in his little leather-bound book as he stood beside the sickbed of Mr. Carson in the former butler's bungalow. It was strange; the old man's blood pressure, heartbeat, and respiration were as regimented as the Northumberland Hussars on parade. So far as his instruments and training were concerned, there was nothing whatsoever the matter with Downton Abbey's retired majordomo.
...
2019-10-03 21:37:05 +0000 UTC
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Carnival of Souls theatrical poster, artist unknown
A primary way in which horror differs from other genres in that its characters are typically less able to resist or change the world around them. When a threat appears in a horror narrative it is far more likely to injure, derange, or kill the protagonists of that narrative than it would be in another genre. This sense of inevitability is key to horror. Consider the ending of John Carpenter's seminal slasher Halloween
2019-10-03 15:38:19 +0000 UTC
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Downton Abbey is, like the show of which it is a continuation, best as a strictly sensual pleasure. The camera work seldom inspires, but the costuming and set dressing are beautiful and without a hint of artifice. The actors are charming and fascinating to look at. The dialogue, if not revolutionary, is quick and witty in a way that doesn't make me want to tear my hair out. Michelle Dockery is there. It's an entertaining movie, comforting and well-made, with few ambitions beyond givi...
2019-10-03 04:17:42 +0000 UTC
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Poster art for Jaws by Roger Kastel
Spielberg's Jaws, as ruthlessly streamlined as its ocean-going antagonist, is the perfect entry point into the world of horror film. It includes a smattering of upsetting but not gratuitous gore, a small handful of jump scares, and enough suspense to hang a bridge -- sort of like a tasting menu of horror's key elements. It's also surpassingly easy to become invested in. Brody, Hooper, and Quint are one of film's great trios and...
2019-10-02 16:07:42 +0000 UTC
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Cover art to Alien: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, N.C. Winters
The purpose of horror as a genre is to elicit a physical response of revulsion from its audience. There are many ways (some clearly recognizable, others more elliptical in concept or execution) in which horror film seeks to elicit this response. At one end of the spectrum lies the classic "jump scare", the sudden appearance of a violating figure or image at an unexpected moment (the specter of Pazuzu's face in ...
2019-10-01 12:51:55 +0000 UTC
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Dear Gretchen,
Horror - particularly body horror - has always had a peculiarly healing effect on me. I have never truly understood why; I simply know that watching the protagonist of Revenge impaled upside down on a tree in the desert, blood globbing down her face to fall and crush ants into the sand, makes me feel far better when I'm struggling than any 'feel-good' movie could. In that vein, I'd love to know what your thoughts are on horror's capacity to help and heal those in...
2019-09-27 22:15:50 +0000 UTC
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There are things to like about Donnie Darko. Much of the camera work is solid and patient. The science fiction plot is small and neatly executed, if conceptually thin. Jena Malone is there and punching well above the movie's weight class. The elements of a solid independent thriller are all present, including just-skilled-enough and adventurous direction, but the film's tone is insufferably self-satisfied, its protagonist, played by a young Jake Gylenhaal, mishandled by a script with...
2019-09-27 07:41:46 +0000 UTC
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First Blood, the 1982 action-thriller based on David Morrell's novel of the same name and directed by Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright, Weekend at Bernie's), is the definitive post-Vietnam movie. It reckons with deep humanity with the government's abandonment of veterans, with the soul-scarring horrors of war, and with the inferiority complexes and violent dispositions endemic to American police officers. It's a deeply anti-social movie, pushing through suburban small-m...
2019-09-25 15:48:47 +0000 UTC
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I hate The Office with a pure frustration usually reserved for pop-up ads and those smug door-to-door evangelists who are just so insufferably certain they've got all the answers. I hate it like I hate having dry skin in the small of my back during the winter, or an itch on the bottom of my foot. Its chirpy, abrasive brand of humor is bad enough on its own, but its insistence on parlaying that sandpaper approach into endlessly prolonged sentimentality results in a show that ...
2019-09-20 17:18:12 +0000 UTC
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Like his earlier film Gladiator, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a period piece firmly entrenched in the values of the present. The film's characters are sharply divided between more or less mustache-twirling medieval brutes and a few benighted secular humanists struggling to overcome the world's barbarity. Much of its three-hour-plus running time is taken up by scenes of these enlightened characters lamenting the violence and inhumanity of the Holy Land, espousing refor...
2019-09-13 21:06:09 +0000 UTC
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If you'd told me in 2000 that Unbreakable would have two sequels constituting its own little bizarro-world MCU, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet for better or for worse, here we are, Shyamalan's Bruce Willis-starring superhero yarn about an invincible, super-strong security guard and his brittle-boned nemesis now three films deep into a gonzo story of suffering-as-superpower. For all their idiosyncratic weirdness, though, in some ways Shyamalan's movies are as sq...
2019-09-08 19:37:12 +0000 UTC
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Art by @horstmannart for an upcoming zine of short illustrated ghost stories.
2019-09-08 17:02:22 +0000 UTC
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This movie prominently features digitally de-aged fifteen-year-olds, which should give you an idea of how much thought its creators put into the process of adapting and filming Stephen King's gargantuan 1986 horror novel. The child actors look like polished plastic cherubs, their faces stiff and uncanny, their voices sped up to an obnoxious pitch to conceal puberty's effects. The Foley work remains indifferent at best, a lot of scary whispering and indistinct children's voices doing sing-song...
2019-09-08 07:25:40 +0000 UTC
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Dear Gretchen,
Are there any movies you consider morally irredeemable? If so, do you still think that there’s something to be gained from watching them?
-Christian
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Thanks for your question, Christian!
The short answer is that no, I don't really think of any art as irredeemable. The exceptions would be propaganda and corporate art, which exists solely to prey on insecurities...
2019-09-03 23:25:11 +0000 UTC
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A complete directory of every Thanks, I Hate It for the reader's convenience.
2019
January 6th: Heat
January 7th: Requiem for a Dream
January 11th: Mad Max: Fury Road
January 18th...
2019-08-31 17:56:32 +0000 UTC
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2014's Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Max Borenstein, is a disaster movie. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Titanic is a good disaster movie. So's Force Majeure. Where both diverge from Edwards' film is in their understanding that it's human connection and psychology which make disaster interesting, not the other way around. Godzilla simply shows us disaster and trusts that it'll be enough to keep us entertained. Juliette Bin...
2019-08-30 19:39:51 +0000 UTC
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Vampires, Saskia forced herself to remember as she stood by the mountain road’s drainage ditch, staring at the coffin, could be killed. Stanislav had shown her how to do it. Silver garrots, sunlight or, at night, white phosphorus, garlic concentrate delivered by bullet or bolt — it could all be brought off with no more than a steady hand and the element of surprise, or sufficient weigh...
2019-08-23 22:07:49 +0000 UTC
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Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's Goodnight Mommy owes a lot to the new French extremity, a school of film making primarily occupied with the boundaries of the human body and their violation. Think the waking c-section from L'interieur, or Climax's endless drug-fueled dance scenes in which stroking and gyrating leads inevitably to violent penetration. The problem with Goodnight Mommy is that its viciousness is never successfully married to its characters o...
2019-08-23 15:40:06 +0000 UTC
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He ran through the forest with the other boys close behind him. The boughs were greening. The sun shone through them. He crashed through brakes of fiddleheads curled tight in dreams of summer. Blackberry brambles caught at his hose and the hem of his tunic and drew red lines of blood across his shins. Pheasants burst from the undergrowth in whirring coveys somewhere to his left and he near...
2019-08-21 21:02:17 +0000 UTC
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I compiled every D&D snippet I've ever written on twitter over the past three years into a single document! Download it here anytime, and consider it a small thank-you for your generosity toward me.
2019-08-20 17:21:45 +0000 UTC
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Dear Gretchen,
Given your penchant for generating D&D characters for people, I presume you have some affinity or affection for the game. What are your thoughts on D&D's surging popularity and the prevalence of streamed games/shows?
-Paul
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Thanks for your question, Paul!
I've been playing D&D for almost two decades now, beginning in early high school when I had to hide th...
2019-08-19 17:28:08 +0000 UTC
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