Robert Eggers movies are always frightening, even when they aren’t horror movies. They thrust viewers into a different and borderline alien world so convincingly, so intensely, that one can’t help but feel a little horrified by the experience. When The Northman puts the audience directly into the world of Norse mythology, the experience is so overwhelming that…
Uzumaki ends with a terrifyingly apocalyptic finale that doesn’t quite undo the weaknesses of the series post-Episode 1. While the series overall has struggled with pacing issues, Episode 4 is focused and tight, rarely feeling rushed or overpacked with plotlines. The result is a wonderful cosmic horror ending that ratchets everything up as far as…
The third episode of Uzumaki is more focused than the previous two, but the cracks in the show’s structure are showing more. Thematically, this episode continues to expand on the ideas of generational conflict, leading to breakdowns in society, while ramping up the scale of the narrative. While episodes 1 and 2 contained overlapping narratives…
Fans have been waiting for upwards of five years for the Adult Swim Anime adaptation of Uzumaki, Junji Ito’s horror Manga masterpiece. After some delays, fans were skeptical that it would ever find a release, and when it was announced that it would only be 4 short episodes (the manga is about 650 pages), fans stayed…
I will never forget the experience of watching the original Alien for the first time. My weekly trips to the local library to check out classic science fiction and monster movies with my dad meant that I was fairly familiar with the genre space that it inhabited. I lived on a steady diet of Kaiju movies, classic…
By the time most horror fans became aware of Takashi Miike with 1999’s horrifyingly disturbing Audition, he’d already directed 31 movies. Between that horror classic and his other, almost equally infamous Ichi the Killer, he’s got a reputation as being a J-Horror master although his extremely prolific filmography now totaling 122 movies, pretty much runs the gamut…
The People in the Walls begins with such promise. A fairly fun ’80s-style synth track plays while the camera slowly zooms in on a cellphone displaying flickering analog TV-style static as a person’s voice, obscured by electrical vocal fry, screams seemingly in rhythm to the score. This creates a fun and unsettling combination of modern…
Evil Does Not Exist is a hauntingly elegant movie that brings all of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s incredible talents into focus. His films are often painfully beautiful tone poems about the lives of characters who feel as though they live beyond the confines of the screen. After watching one of his movies, I feel as though I…
Harmony Korine is one of the very few truly transgressive filmmakers working today which makes him extra precious in the American landscape. Eschewing any semblance of traditional narrative form or structure, his movies are more like a series of vignettes within the lives of his characters, who are themselves outsiders. He is a poetic mystic…