Not sure you’ll get this. I’m writing it with a wet nail along the slimy walls of this well. But we’ve always had such a psychic connection, maybe you’ll still receive my thoughts.
I don’t hold the punishment against you. I understand. You were fond of those horses. Those simple, stupid animals. It’s like you to care for them. You’re so alike. That’s why you’ll go over the cliff too.
But before you do, I want to draw you a picture. Maybe a few pictures. Something to remember me by, while I’m here, alone, in the dark and wet. That is, here until some day, when another terrible mother is ready to put her child in harm’s way to save me.
Moms are so funny!
Love,
Samara
*by Hope Madden. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
Has it really been 31 years since Emma Thompson and Ang Lee beguiled us with Jane Austen’s iconic tale of love, sisterhood, and the crushing effects of patriarchy in Georgian England?
Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) helms the latest look inside the Dashwood family. Level headed Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her free spirited sister Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) face perils of heart and home after their father’s death leaves them, their mother (Caitriona Balfe, Belfast) and younger sister (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Shelter) facing homelessness as the estate passes to the sisters’ dullard half-brother and his greedy wife.
Class, the economic powerlessness of women, love, and sisterhood are among Austen’s most cherished themes, and every adaptation of each of her novels chooses its primary target. Usually, it’s love. But for Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid, Sense and Sensibility is about sisterhood.
That hardly means that the quiet aching between Elinor and Mr. Ferrars (George MacKay, ideal) goes ignored. Or that Marianne’s passions for the rogue Willoughby (Frank Dillane) don’t throw the Dashwoods into a chaos of emotion. The new Sense and Sensibility is perfectly swoony in those important ways.
But Reid’s adaptation streamlines tangential characters to draw focus, and Oakley’s attention is paid to the effect love, passion, worry, and dependence has on Elinor and Marianne. Their relationship anchors the film and colors the rest of the tale with a sense of hope and struggle for agency that reminds you how timeless Austen can be.
Oakley also lets the girls’ hair down. The Dashwood women are less cinched and coiffured this go-round. Marianne, in particular, prefers her hair loose. It makes her connection to the wilds more vivid, but this earthiness carries over to the story as a whole. The Dashwoods are far easier to connect to as they do their own laundry and then stain their dresses eating wild berries.
The bones of Austen’s story are absolutely intact, but Reid and Oakley amplify interactions that may mean more to a modern audience than those attended to in previous interpretations, big screen and small.
Flesh is horror cinema’s stock and trade. Peeling back the skin on the genre takes us to places like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Tattoo. But what it it’s more of a pesonal skin problem? Like The Fly or The Believers (there are spiders in that zit!) or even Acne?
No, we’re looking at more skin than just that. These films ask you who you are and who that skin you’re wearing makes you.
5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
There have always been those who claim The Silence of the Lambs is not a horror movie. A tale of a man who eats human flesh helping the FBI hunt down a man who wears human flesh feels like horror to us.
It’s to director Jonathan Demme’s credit that Silence made that leap from lurid exploitation to art. His masterful composition of muted colors and tense but understated score, his visual focus on the characters rather than their actions, and his subtle but powerful use of camera elevate this story above its exploitative trappings. Of course, the performances didn’t hurt.
4. The Skin I Live In (2011)
In 2011, the great Pedro Almodovar created something like a cross between Eyes Without a Face and Lucky McGee’s The Woman, with all the breathtaking visual imagery and homosexual overtones you can expect from an Almodovar project.
The film begs for the least amount of summarization because every slow reveal is placed so perfectly within the film, and to share it in advance is to rob you of the joy of watching. Antonio Banderas gives a lovely, restrained performance as Dr. Robert Ledgard, and Elena Anaya and Marisa Paredes are spectacular.
Not a frame is wasted, not a single visual is placed unconsciously. Dripping with symbolism, the film takes a pulpy and ridiculous storyline and twists it into something marvelous to behold.
3. Clown
Sympathetic, surprising, and often very uncomfortable, Jon Watts’s horror flick, though far from perfect, does an excellent job of morphing that lovable party favorite into the red-nosed freak from your nightmares. Because clowns are terrifying.
Watts, who co-wrote with the talented Christopher Ford, weaves a fantasy of Nordic folklore turned modern nightmare. There are moments of grotesque brilliance and edgy horror as poor Andy slowly, painfully morphs into a monster who feeds on children.
2. Under the Skin (2013)
Light on dialogue and devoid of exposition, Under the Skin requires your patience and your attention, but what it delivers is a unique and mesmerizing journey, a science fiction film quite unlike anything else out there.
Early elements call to mind Kubrick’s 2001, and once the film falls into its pace it conjures last year’s brilliant Upstream Color, but Glazer’s effort is certainly its own artistic achievement. Though an almost relentless series of similar incidents, somehow he punctuates this weird monotony with a fascinating balance of perplexity and humanity, and slowly, themes, character and plot emerge.
1. In My Skin (2002)
One of the less-scene gems of the New French Extreme, In My Skin is a tough watch. Esther (writer/director Marina de Van) loses grip on who she is at her very core when she fails to notice a serious injury done to her leg. This alienation from her physical self becomes an obsession with her physical self.
As bloody and uncomfortable as any film you will ever see, In My Skin succeeds as a horror film and a comment on identity and control both mainly due to de Van’s laser focused performance. Introspective, never showy, and unrelentingly believable, the turn anchors all the wild behavior in a way that makes it simultaneously mesmerizing and revolting.
*by Hope Madden. Voiceover and audio production by George Wolf. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
Is Crawlers the best arachnid horror movie ever made? No. It’s not the best arachnid horror movie made in the last couple of years. Did I nearly scratch myself raw watching it, certain I had spiders crawling on me? And did I have a nightmare later that I was looting a shoe store trying to find tie-up boots for my son to protect him from the spider invasion?
Yes, to both.
So, obviously director Ángel Gómez Hernández was doing something right as he traps us for 90 minutes in a quarantined 4-floor LA apartment building very recently overrun with spiders. Not just any spiders. Spiders that, as clarified by the opening title cards, have decided to eat people.
Decided. They decided this. But you know what? Writer Jayson Rothwell’s lack of imagination here frees us up to spend more time where we want to spend it. And if you’ve chosen to see a movie where an apartment building full of tenants is trapped inside with thousands of killer spiders, my guess is that you want to see some nasty spider business. Crawlers has it.
Matilda Lutz (Revenge) is Serena, the put-upon would-be musician/building super, who finds the first body. It looks bad, so the police put the building on lockdown until they can figure out what kind of virus took out George (Chris Rogers). And then once they realize it was no virus, they drape the building so nothing goes in or out, just as Serena’s neighbors are starting to see evidence of the infestation.
It’s a great way to build tension. And we’ve spent just enough time with the tenants to root for some to survive, and root for others to get into that elevator. And the film’s CGI is believable enough that I was forever scratching and swatting in my seat.
There’s little underneath the basic story, so you’ll have to make do with surface level tension and character development. For more visual panache, check out Kia Roache-Turner’s 2024 terror Sting, and for more visceral scares with character, Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested makes every move Crawlers makes and does it better.
But those movies are not on the big screen right now, and if you want to be in a dark room full of skittering, hungry spiders, Crawlers delivers the creeps.
You killed my sister. She hated me, yes. And I hated her. But I also loved her in my way.
And you steal her shoes?! What kind of monster takes a pair of shoes from a dead woman’s body? Well, they’re all I have left of her. You’ve left me with nothing. No family. Give me the shoes. They aren’t yours. You stole them. Stole them from my sister’s dead body. Yet somehow I’m the ghoul?
You cannot have them. You’ve no right to them. Just because this mob tells you that you do, you must know in your soul that it’s wrong to steal from a corpse, to deny a grieving sister. Have you no soul?
Give them to me! Don’t test me, girl, I am beyond my limits! It’s an easy choice, an obvious conclusion. Why do you vex me? Give me what belongs to me so I can grieve my sister! What are the shoes to you?!
Your pointless greed is cruelty! Why would you treat someone so, even as they look at what little you have left of their only family, the only person they ever cared for, who ever cared for them? I don’t know what I’ve done to merit your hate and torment, but you will live to regret it.
Those you do not know have taken all else from me, ostracized and taunted me, shown me nothing but hate all my days. And you, a stranger, have destroyed and stolen what little remained. There is nothing left in me but seething, bottomless rage and I will destroy with malicious glee you and all you hold dear.
And your little dog too.
W
*by Hope Madden. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
Most slasher movies these days tend to harken back to either the “unstoppable killer” fare of the late ’80s popularized by Freddy and Jason or they set their sights on attempting to be the next Scream-style meta-slasher. While there’s nothing wrong with either pathway, it is nice when we are occasionally still handed one that falls more in line with the subgenre’s earlier efforts from the late ’70s and early ’80s.
John Valley’s American Dollhouse is such a film. There may be some DNA from the other two aforementioned classes of slasher present here, but this is way more a maniac psychodrama than it is a masked killer riff.
There is no mystery as to who is bringing the violence to suburbia here. Kelsey Pribilski’s Sandy is creepy terror on two legs and she makes an absolute meal out of her viciously weird villain.
Sandy inhabits a world that resides between the psycho slashers of old – think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and When a Stranger Calls – and the modern horror masters of today. There are also shades of Hereditary and Weapons here, as well as some visual stylings akin to the work of Oz Perkins. The cinematography is just as standout an element as Pribilski’s performance, making American Dollhouse even more of a must-see for horror fans.
A secluded cabin in the woods is a benchmark in the horror genre. From The Evil Dead to CabinFever and The Cabin in the Woods, few settings offer such a surprisingly rich canvas for horror filmmakers. Liv’s Last Ride might not find itself in the upper echelon of cabin-based fright flicks, but it makes a strong case to be in the conversation.
After renting a cabin to celebrate the upcoming marriage of the titular Liv (Sutter Nolan), a group of friends finds themselves wrestling with old resentments, bargain-basement strippers, and some very unwelcome masked party crashers. As the bodies stack up, so do the questions behind the killers’ motivations.
Liv’s Last Ride is the kind of film I’d call a “kitchen sink” movie. Namely, there’s something in it for everyone. The acting is top-notch. The cinematography looks like it belongs in a movie from a studio. The characters are interesting and well cast. And maybe most importantly: the movie doesn’t skimp on the kills. Director Thaddeus Armstrong (who also acts in the film!) has crafted a crowd-pleaser that manages to check a lot of boxes while not feeling like it’s trying to check boxes.
The cast deserves special notice as so much of the film involves them bouncing off one another in a single setting. It’s an especially talky film, but enjoyably so given how much of the humor is character based and comes from their interactions. The black humor in Liv’s Last Ride isn’t necessarily from the violence, but more so from how easily—and without much thought—these characters drag each other down or end up turning on one another.
Liv’s Last Ride is the kind of fun horror comedy that could easily become a sleepover classic. Even with the darkness at the film’s periphery, that ornery sense of fun stays front and center for the entire running time.
With a novel approach to a movie-within-a-movie, Friday the 69th scares up plenty of laughs with this comedic slasher.
A couple of down-on-their-luck adult filmmakers attempt to jump on the profitable slasher bandwagon by using their already established cast and crew. As they work their way through the first table read of the script, the filmmakers slowly realize that they might be in over their heads.
Mimicry of the 70s & 80s film aesthetic reached a fever pitch after the release of Grindhouse in 2007. Although the film wasn’t a massive success, horror fans and filmmakers alike latched onto the deliberately beat-up look that defined so many exploitation horror flicks. While those original films had this look because of age, poor projection, and limited budgets, many homage films deliberately aimed for it, but they didn’t always hit the mark. Friday the 69th is one of those films that successfully manages to match that vintage aesthetic while also having a personality of its own. As someone who’s watched a lot of those early grindhouse-era films, Friday the 69th has all of the hallmarks: scratches and dirt, missing reels, overlit scenes, and very questionable acting.
Many of the jokes within Friday the 69th require a certain understanding of the horror genre, but the film doesn’t feel the need to constantly go “Get it?! Get it?!” You either get the joke, or you don’t. The jokes come so furiously that you’re liable to miss at least a handful each scene. And they’re good jokes too! Writer/Director Alex Montilla’s knack for infusing humor with his love and knowledge of horror cinema is on full display.
Despite covering a lot of the same well-trodden cinematic ground, Friday the 69th still offers up 91 minutes of solid gags and laughs.
Found footage is a tricky subgenre. Its very appeal – the gimmick of being shown first-hand footage of some sort of horrifying incident – can also be its prison. One is bound tightly by the format. Deviating from it too much can break an audience’s suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, if one doesn’t deviate enough, their film won’t stand out from an ever-increasing pool of titles.
When You See It manages to deftly walk that line, delivering an increasingly tense experience akin to the subgenres titans, The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. While it does opt for the stock “paranormal investigators actually may have finally encountered the paranormal” narrative that most films of this type have these days, it does do it better than most.
Without giving anything away, director John Abbott’s When You See It manages to play around in that sandbox in some interesting ways. This is aided in a major way by the performances, which are a lot more natural than in most similar films. The editing is also on point, ratcheting up the tension at a steady pace from start to finish.
Found footage fans will find a lot to love here. If this is your subgenre of choice, you’re going to want to seek it out, be it on the festival circuit or when it arrives in wider release on down the road. Those with an aversion to the subgenre are unlikely to be converted, but if you’re open to this kind of tale, When You See It will deliver the goods.
