Takashi Miike is easily one of the most fascinating directors working in cinema. His Audition is a deliberately paced and beautifully shot exercise in horror, a precursor of genre “break-outs” such as Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. In Ichi the Killer, a yakuza (gangster) flick with the sensibilities of a splatterpunk Looney Tunes episode, Miike created a masterpiece of hyperkinetic, highly […]
Click here for a complete selection of Eric Basso’s books. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” — James Joyce, Ulysses Stephen Daedalus’s statement, a quintessentially modern lament, could serve as a fitting epigraph for a number of Eric Basso’s pieces. His work, whether in dramatic (The Golem Triptych), novelistic (Bartholomew Fair), analytic (Decompositions) or short (The Beak Doctor) […]
The struggle for survival is one theme a good number of horror movies depend on to create a sense of tension. Will the protagonist survive a hideous situation, bloodied and battered but still in one piece? It takes imagination, character and, yes, even heart to construct a scenario which pushes through these obvious concerns and into the more nebulous […]