I never liked good guys. Squeaky-clean white knights riding off into the sunset with cardboard cut-out princesses were less satisfying than a troubled soul groping toward the light. That’s probably why growing up I never related to women in horror movies--they were either flawlessly good Final Girls, promiscuous Meat, or, worst of all, a nameless excuse to get some R-rated nudity in before the next gore shot.
Read MoreThe Innocents (1961) #WiHM
In Kier La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, the author makes a fascinating and cogent observation about the role of women in horror cinema: They’re constantly going nuts. From such prominent classics as Repulsion to more obscure totems like The Mafu Cage, the genre seems preoccupied with depicting the slow mental breakdown of its’ female protagonists. Unfortunately, La Janisse doesn’t do much in the way of developing or exploring a thesis, devoting a disproportionate amount of text to the “autobiographical” part of the title.
Read MoreNosferatu (1922) #WiHM
Along with interviews featuring some of the horror genre’s most fascinating women, CineDump is also proud to showcase reviews, discussions, and ramblings celebrating some great horror movie heroines and villainesses. For our first entry, we’ll look back at one of the earliest horror movies made, 1922’s Nosferatu. Coming just three short years after the groundbreaking The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu employed some at the time cutting edge technology, surreal imagery, and a familiar story to capture the fears of its audience.
Read MoreSplit (2016)
M. Night, we need to talk, sweetie. I’ve been there with you for awhile, and I always defended you. Sure, I didn’t see The Last Airbender or anything like that, but I did scold everyone who gave you grief.
Read MoreDearest Sister (2016)
It could be said that a country’s horror movies tell us something essential about its culture, its fears, and its desires. America, the great melting pot, gleefully cribbed monsters from European novels like Dracula, our own imperialist impulses, and later, we began to express a more individual, distinctly “American” sensibility in 1950s with the birth of creature features and atomic age fever dreams. The Vietnam War followed by Reagan’s reign gave us the slasher--helpless people stalked and brutally dismembered in the woods, usually after betraying a moral or cultural norm.
Read MoreMSF: Male Seeking Female (2014)
There’s a particular difficulty in reviewing so-bad-they’re-good films. By the very fact of including “bad” in the descriptor, you’re necessarily being critical of the creative forces behind the movie. Rare is it that an intentionally “bad” film turns out to be enjoyable.
Read MoreMemory Box (2015)
Attendees at this year’s Fantastic Fest who checked out the delightfully surprising dramedy Aloys were in for a treat of a different sort before the film proper began—a tragic, beautiful little short called “Memory Box.” The simplicity of its’ title betrays the complex framework of the story. In a not-very-distant future, people can pay to participate in “boxes”—elaborate role playing scenarios that let individuals relive past experiences, allowing them to literally relive their happiest memories, with companies and their employees painstakingly recreating places, events—and people.
Read MoreLady in White (1988) #BluRay
With the frequency with which Hollywood productions change or fall apart, the history of the industry is littered with “what ifs” and “almosts.” We’ll never get to see what would’ve happened had Alejandro Jodorowsky directed Dune; we’ll probably never see the result of Orson Welles filming Charles Williams’ Dead Calm. On the other hand, there are productions which do see it to fruition that are so out of the ordinary for their creators, or so far removed from any other films out there, that they function as the fulfilment of certain what-if scenarios without even involving any of the parties in question.
Read More