Tag: supernatural
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Black Phone 2 (2025)
About five years after siblings Gwen and Finn defeated the Grabber, a serial killer targeting boys in their neighbourhood, they’re both still troubled by the events. Finn self-medicates with marijuana, while Gwen has dreams of a phone call being made by a Christian camp counsellor in the late 1950s, talking about numbers written on ice…
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Terrifier 3
The basic appeal of the Terrifier films is that they’re of the same crude simplicity as the Friday the 13th franchise (1980 to 2009, as of Halloween 2024) and other Golden Age slashers, but with much more gore that you couldn’t get away with back then. It’s amusing to think of how slashers of yore were pilloried…
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Halloween Pick ‘n’ Mix: Shocker (1989) and The Blood Beast Terror (1968)
Surprisingly cheesy and dull Wes Craven thriller, Shocker is nowhere near as good as The People Under the Stairs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and his other classics. It’s about a young man pursued by a serial killer, Horace Pinker, who kills most of his adopted family, his girlfriend, and sundry other people in…
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and really enjoyed it. The plot is a little busy and overcomplicated, but it’s delivered at such a level of whimsy and love of tongue-in-cheek macabre storytelling that it works, from a scene of a dismembered succubus nail-gunning herself together while “Tragedy” plays, to a literal soul train and a…
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
I just saw I Saw the TV Glow and it was honestly fantastic. What starts as a typical if somewhat atmospheric YA drama about disaffected high schoolers in the ‘90s bonding over a television show becomes stranger and spookier until it’s an almost David Lynch-ian mystery, with resonant themes of fear and self-loathing. When I…
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Longlegs (2024)
I just saw Longlegs and it was really good. It has one of the best minimalist prologues that I’ve seen in a while, ruthlessly exploiting the child’s POV to create a haunting moment without any violence at all. It also begins with a quote from the classic rock band T-Rex that informs both the prologue…
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In a Violent Nature (2024)
I just saw In a Violent Nature and it was really good. I would have thought that there were no more places to take the slasher film, a subgenre that’s been played both straight and ironically in just about every permutation imaginable. But this Canadian entry manages it, pitching somewhere between (very) black humour and…
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Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
Dracula AD 1972 is one of the not fondly remembered Hammer films to star Christopher Lee as the eternal bloodsucker, the penultimate entry before The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) finally stuck a stake in the franchise’s heart. When AD came out it was widely panned and it seems to have retained its dire reception…
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Immaculate (2024)
You’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re in a glut of the sub-genre that is Catholic horror movies, after last year’s The Nun II (2023), the upcoming First Omen (2024), and now Immaculate, directed by Michael Mohan and written by Andrew Lobel. How about, for once, a horror movie where a couple of atheists sit…
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Imaginary (2024)
Well, I just saw Imaginary, the latest Blumhouse excretion, and it’s an Oscar contender for most boring film of the year. This was actually a major disappointment since the trailers made it seem as though it’d be visually and conceptually interesting. Filmed through what seemed to be eyeholes in a mask and evoking a topsy-turvy…
I Just Saw 