[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p35JDJLa9ec&w=560&h=315] 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 […]
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 […]