Christine Kelley

The Thing startles me whenever I revisit it every year or two. It's not that I forget that it's brilliant — whenever I think of great horror films, The Thing is one of the first three or four movies that pop into my head. But perhaps I'm prone to recalling a few moments from it rather than the thing

No film has loved God quite like Ken Russell's The Devils. It exalts His great priest Urbain Grandier by casting sex icon Oliver Reed in his part and making him the moral center of the film. He is of course an imperfect moral center — this is a man who sleeps with and impregnates his pupil (perhaps

The Exorcist III has a confounding and tormented relationship with The Exorcist. William Peter Blatty clearly wants to direct an adaptation of his novel Legion rather than to assiduously fashion a reverent sequel to one of the greatest horror films of all time. While Friedkin's The Exorcist was a do

My girlfriend and I caught a fairly well-attended Wednesday night screening of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The audience was perhaps less queer than we expected if the paucity of blue hair dye in the room was any indication. The audience was largely college students looking to catch the new

The 1995 indie horror film Mute Witness goes through three distinct phases. The first and shortest is its opening scene, a suitably lurid and unexpectedly well-shot slasher which concludes with its murder victim thrashing around her apartment as she bleeds to death, knocking over every piece of furn

A couple minor spoilers ahead. Weapons is more indebted to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining than any other horror film I've seen in the last five years. The film is replete with Steadicam shots tracking characters from behind in addition to a sometimes quasi-Wendy Carlos score, themes of the rot of Ame

Distinguishing between how well a movie works and whether or not I enjoyed it usually isn't a problem for me. I can think of many movies I respect on a technical level that I hated watching. What's more difficult is figuring out if a movie that personally upset me a great deal is successful or not.

After creating America's finest horror film to date, George A. Romero tried to avoid typecasting like the radioactive plague. He made There's Always Vanilla, a fascinating half-romcom/half-exploitation movie about the impossibility of surviving in the nuclear family. He then moved onto the feminist

I've talked before about how cool Wendy Torrance is, but seeing how Shelley Duvall has been dead for a while, it's time to talk more about that character and Duvall's performance. When I rewatched The Shining on 4K (recommended), Wendy pointed out a detail I'd never really spotted before: the ballro

Hammer's five-pictures-per-year deal with Columbia seems to have worn everybody down. By the early 1960s, Terence Fisher has gone from shooting classics like The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula to misfires like The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll and The Brides of Dracula. But Jekyll and Brides were Fishe

I've been falling behind on the Patreon lately due to a million personal reasons, so y'all deserve a twofer at the end of the month: two Tarantino-scripted movies for the price of one. True Romance is a fairy tale only a demented 20-something-year-old virgin could write. Tarantino has said that he w

Alex Garland has long been fascinated by the death of Man as a social animal. Throughout 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle amplifies that fascination — the man who made Trainspotting was always going to be good with stories about antisocial (or postsocial) Man. The characters in 28 Days Later mostly face n

Spoilers ahead. Sinners introduces its vampire characters around the halfway point, just in time for the protagonists to congregate in a juke joint owned by Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan). Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) performs at the joint. At this point we know our horror mo

There was potential here. For a moment, Salem's Lot was poised to deal with race and gender in interesting ways. Making Dr. Cody a Black woman led to some cool places. Same with Mark; the story almost becomes about bigotry in a way King's book wasn't. And the setpiece with the drive-in theater is ki

The formula of young people coming to a haunted house with varying degrees of enthusiasm is a standard trope of horror, often associated with The Haunting, slasher films, or, god help us, The Cabin in the Woods. But it's not the sort of thing you expect to see in Hammer films, which, for all their g

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) has his first premonition of his daughter Christine's death while looking at a photo of a church. Spotting in the corner of the photo a small person in a red coat. At that moment, he senses that something is horribly wrong; that his daughter in a similar red coat is i

Screened on a 4K remaster DCP at the Little Theatre in Rochester, New York Watch this with an audience if you get the chance. Mostly with people who've seen it before, with a couple rows of newcomers. You'll hear all the collective gasps and laughs. George Romero will smile upon you. I'm sure he was

The Brides of Dracula sees Hammer once again taking a page from Universal, in this case doing a Dracula sequel without the Count, focusing instead on female characters. Instead of hampering the movie, Dracula’s absence liberates Brides of Dracula, at least for a little while. In Brides of Dracula, D

The Mummy is a challenge for Hammer. It doesn’t give them a classic novel to fall back on, even a messy one like Dracula. The Universal movie lacks the powerful iconography of Frankenstein or Bela Lugosi’s deliciously campy performance in Dracula (or for that matter, The Bride of Frankenstein’s bril

The Revenge of Frankenstein picks up right where The Curse of Frankenstein leaves off, and that’s a pretty apt metaphor for the production of Hammer’s early color films. Terence Fisher directed one movie after another, starting principal photography for The Revenge of Frankenstein only three days af

Sometimes life and art sit down together for an intense meeting that quickly devolves into a tense, long-awaited hate fuck. They will agree on exactly one matter, which they will force onto the world stage, drawing out the most agonizing, subconscious fears of the public. They will force the public