Warning: This essay contains many spoilers. A dozen men are holed up in a research station in the unforgiving wastes of Antarctica, caught up in a relatively peaceful life of scientific inquiry, casual camaraderie and boredom. The bleak landscape outside dominates John Carpenter’s The Thing, through both the isolation it imposes as well as the ambient hostility […]
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 […]
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 […]