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thirteen things tagged “horror

No Time to Think

by Unknown

This reading comes from the resource Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. In the introduction to Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, writer Cynthia Ozick states, Indifference is not so much a gesture of looking away — of choosing to be passive — as it is…

Black Hole by Charles Burns

Black Hole (1995-2005)

by Charles Burns

Rating: A

About five minutes in, I felt like I was reading a masterpiece even though I know very little about the graphic novel format. This is some mesmerizing inking (Burns won a lot of “Best Inker” awards for this work). The panels almost look like woodcuts. It’s about teenagers and adolescence and how we…

The Outsider

Jason Bateman directed the first few episodes of this show and appears to be on a roll (saw this right after the third season of Ozark.) It was a 10-episode miniseries that was 5 episodes too long. Everything about the antagonist was either laughable or inconsistent. Cynthia Erivo was magnificent a…

Rating: B-
Vivarium

Vivarium

(2019)

An entertaining, unsettling, dissatisfying Lovecraftian allegory for suburban life and child-rearing (esp the teenage years.) Dragged on for a bit: I imagine it would’ve worked great as a Black Mirror episode. Jonathan Aris and Senan Jennings were supremely creepy and magnificent and perfectly cast…

Rating: B+
Midsommar

Midsommar

(2019)

Moody and plenty gruesome. Got tired of the commune’s many ‘rituals’. Florence Pugh is 💯, as is the creepy-ass soundtrack. Learned about senicide. First half is a bit of a slow burn like “Hereditary”.…

Rating: B+
The Wailing

Saw with LD. Long, slow, visceral, beautiful, gory. Kept me guessing. Excellent stuff. There’s a pervasive hush and sense of stillness that lingers over the region of Gokseong, and scenes of brazen, crazed madness are often preceded by shots of tranquil mountain vistas whose lush, thickly forest…

Rating: A
Hereditary

Deeply upsetting. One of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker on what gives it its potency Should you want to measure the psychological disturbance at work here, try comparing “Hereditary” with “A Quiet Place.” That recent hit, for all its masterly shocks, is at b…

Rating: A