“The Best Horror Movies of the 2010s”

The decade ain’t over ’til the ball drops, but eh, close enough in Internet years; let’s all get the pants scared off our persons. Continue reading →

“How ‘The Witch’ Accidentally Launched a Horror Movement”

Andy absolutely will not shut up about how bad “Hereditary” is until you agree that “Hereditary” is bad. Continue reading →

“Crimson Peak Showed Us What Unapologetic, Award-Winning Horror Looks Like”

For those of you who are not yet sick to the point of barfing from hearing Andy kvetch and piss and moan about how bad “Hereditary” is…here’s another piece where Andy kvetches and pisses and moans about how bad “Hereditary” is. Continue reading →

BOFCA’s 2018 Awards (And My Personal Ballot)

Well: We did it. It’s not often that a critics group’s awards match up closely with my own feelings, and if I’m being really nitpicky, this year’s Boston Online Film Critics Association awards miss a few marks for me; if you know me well and you’ve followed this blog since I started bitching about a certain … Continue reading →

“The 15 Best Horror Movies of 2018”

Well, you can’t win ’em all. Thought exercise: Even if I did like Suspiria and Hereditary (they’re bad), I’d probably put Mandy ahead of them both. Mandy is a distinct horror throwback, but the film feels current, of the moment, a time capsule for reviewing its era sans wistful nostalgia, and it frankly stands to move the genre forward in … Continue reading →

Review: Clara’s Ghost, 2018, dir. Bridey Elliott

I suspect, by now, that a number of those of you reading my work and my Twitter feed are just about sick of hearing me complain about Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Well…I’m going to complain about it a couple times more, though in this instance, we’re talking less about a complaint than a comparison. If you’re going to make … Continue reading →

Be Reel Podcast: “The Horror of John Carpenter”

On episode 107 of the great, wonderful, and very good Be Reel podcast, hosted by the splendiferous Chance Solem-Pfeifer, we talked Halloween. And the Halloween franchise. And John Carpenter’s career as a whole. And “elevated” horror, a buzz phrase that nearly makes me Hulk Out™, because boy is it just the worst buzz phrase. It’s so bad I might … Continue reading →

“Would ‘Halloween’ Be Revered If It Were Released Today?”

Upfront: Questions like these, at face value, don’t have good answers, because we can never know with 100% certainty what those answers might be. That said, I think horror, at least “horror” that does not satisfy the genre’s growing prestige among critics and check respectability boxes, is on a sort of decline among tastemakers, and … Continue reading →

“How ‘Hereditary’ Skips the Horror Until Its Final Minutes”

  Look: I fucking despised Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I don’t care whose movie it’s supposed to be, or whose perspective we’re supposed to take*, or how the movie sets up its climactic reveals. It’s never what a movie is about that’s a problem. It’s how it’s about it. Hereditary, one of the most misleadingly named movies … Continue reading →