My Own Little World

I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats. Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark W...

Upgrade really, really, really tries to be smart. It knows that it has the confines of a familiar story arc of a man seeking revenge for the killing of his wife. It knows it has a small budget which means it cannot do anything too ambitious. It knows that it needs to have an aesthetic like films much more intelligent and meaningful than itself. Upgrade knows something else, too: it has a get-out-of-jail-free card inside the mind of its protagonist. And that makes it one of the laziest films I have seen this year. STEM, the computer implanted in the protagonist Grey’s spinal cord, can do whatever it wants to with Grey’s body if he gives it permission to do so. We see this happen near the beginning of the second act in a fight scene that caught me by surprise with its tone and fun cinematography, both of which were altered dramatically from the moments before it. As scenes like this began to make a pattern, however, my mind began to see how the script was using STEM as...

Horror films have two main ways of scaring their audiences. The more conventional option is to hold the audience in suspense by what they do not see coming, scaring the audience by the surprise factor of the scare itself. This is an easy, no-risk way of building tension that many good mainstream horror films put to frequent but satisfying use. The less-utilized method, and my favorite, is by telegraphing what is going to happen and let the audience fear come from the knowledge of the inevitable or from the danger most likely to come. This requires far more skill to execute properly, but when done so – a la Stanley Kubrick’s immortal classic The Shining – there is an ambiguity to the audience’s fear that makes the whole film creepy and unsettling because there is no indication to whether something should be feared. Hereditary falls firmly into the latter category, and that is why it is the most disturbing horror film I have seen in quite some time. It uses almost no cheap ...

If A Quiet Place has taught me anything, it is the importance of good sound design. This is a highly effective horror film for a lot of reasons, but the way it uses sound to its advantage creates such a tense atmosphere that I won’t be forgetting soon. It is almost entirely silent with few portions of spoken dialogue. The production team tried to make very little noise so that every on-camera sound could be amplified in post-production, and it paid off. Because the suddenly loud noises are so loud and because we know that the creatures in the film are only attracted by these kinds of sudden noises, every time those sounds occur the tension instantly goes up. It is a perfect setup for a lot of good jump scares, but it also lends itself to the character development. One of the children of the family focused on is deaf, and when the film is from her perspective all the on-set sound goes away, giving us some very suspenseful and even emotional moments. In fact, A Quiet Place ...

I loved literally everything about Get Out . There hasn’t been a horror film that reminds me of the more classic form of the genre in the past few years that has been as inventive and impactful as this one. I love being scared in the way this film scared me with its brilliant pacing and tension. Nearly all of this is due to Jordan Peele’s writing and direction. This guy amazed me in how he was able to move into a completely opposite genre from his prior comedy work and make his first movie and not miss a single beat. There is so much tension and eeriness surrounding the first and second acts that play beautifully into the third act that I swear Hitchcock or Kubrick must have been responsible. Peele has a way of using somewhat unconventional shots in cool ways – in particular when Chris (the film’s protagonist) arrives at his girlfriend Rose’s house, using a wide shot the whole time instead of cutting close to see Chris meet her parents for the very first time. Because it doesn’...

I have a love-hate relationship with mother! On some level, I do love this film. It has some of the most evocative and unforgettable images I have seen in the past several years of film. It also has the guts to do things I would never have imagined with its story and in particular its perspective. Director and writer Darren Aronofsky has created one of the most intriguing yet still puzzling films ever made, and almost all of this comes from its use of allegory. Actually, let’s talk about that. Aronofsky’s use of metaphorical and allegorical imagery and narrative is bold, to be sure (and not something that I will be discussing in detail so I can avoid spoilers); however, there are times where it almost lost me – in fact there’s a lot of those times – because of this film’s slow pace. In retrospect after having talked with other people about this film, the sequences of monotony that slow the film down do have a lot of meaning, but that doesn’t mean I appreciate them any more...

I have no words. Guys, Annihilation is one heck of a movie. It doesn’t hold my hand through its runtime; instead, it forces me to think with the iron grip of its narrative. For that reason, it is one of the most unique movies I have had the pleasure of experiencing in a theater. Of course, this film goes nowhere without director Alex Garland. I remember watching his first film Ex Machina and getting floored by the points it made about human nature by using an artificially intelligent robot to demonstrate our unique ability of attachment and how that could eventually be our downfall as a race. Besides that, that film was beautiful and brilliantly crafted, a slow burn that exploded in a pitch-perfect climax. Annihilation changes the game a little for Garland as he continues his exploration into human nature. This time, the film centers on our desires and how they ultimately will lead us to our self-destruction. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character posits at one point that ...

There are very few things that are as much of a sure thing in film as a thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Movies like Psycho , Vertigo , Rear Window , and To Catch a Thief remain some of the most tautly crafted films I have seen, and 99% of this is due to the man himself. Hitch has this unusual ability to take an otherwise ordinary moment and make it more suspenseful than anything else you've ever seen. Nowhere is this more evident than The Birds . Coming off one of his many masterpieces in Psycho, Hitchcock had pretty much free reign when it came to making thrillers and horror films. For some reason, he decided that birds out of all things were the best villain for this. Unsurprisingly, he makes it work incredibly well. Simply a bird landing on a playground outside of a schoolhouse goes from a normal occurrence to something terrifying and suspenseful because of how this man helms this film. The Birds is a good old-school thriller, showcasing some of the genre’s b...

There's something to be said for the art of the twist ending. A really good plot twist towards the end of a film, no matter the genre, can make repeat viewings incredibly insightful and very rewarding which in my mind makes a film more valuable. I personally love plot twists in the course of watching a film for the first time and how they often make me look for the trail of breadcrumbs filmmakers leave throughout their work. One of the films most renowned for its twist in modern times is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense . When this came out in 1999, everybody ate it up (at least from what the box office numbers show). It catapulted Shyamalan to the front page of filmmaking, and for good reason. This is a really well-constructed supernaturally-driven drama with some horror elements. Here's the secret to this film, though, and why the twist works so well: The Sixth Sense  has a really keen understanding of what it is as a film. It realizes that its content does ...