What’s a Women In Horror series without Jamie Lee Curtis? Not just the most famous Final Girl in cinema history but one of the most influential and a main originator of the term, Laurie Strode is, for me, the queen. Future horror heroines would emerge from the building blocks of Laurie’s character and develop in... Continue Reading →
Widely lauded for its slow burn tension and practical effects, Paranormal Activity is at heart a cautionary tale: don’t fuck with supernatural forces. That’s not a new theme in horror, nor does it offer a particularly inventive take on the subject, but the film does do something rare with its haunting/possession premise: deconstruct masculine arrogance... Continue Reading →
Love him or loathe him (or somewhere in between), Dario Argento is the king of giallo, and 1977’s Suspiria remains his masterpiece — an operatic, surreal, feverish exercise, the closest cinema has come to capturing a nightmare on film. Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise) stars as Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student enrolled at a prestigious... Continue Reading →
Mothers get a bad rap in horror movies. They’re either defined as the angelic defender, seen in The Exorcist, The Shining, and Poltergeist, or an inherently corruptive evil: Carrie, Psycho, Friday the 13th. That latter characterization evolved into a prominent sub-genre, the Bad Mother, a force of terrifying violence born from an inability to conform... Continue Reading →
“No one ever thinks chicks do shit like this. A girl can only be a slut, a bitch, a tease, or the virgin next door. We’ll just coast on how the world works.” Ginger Snaps is one of the most clever, thematically dense, and unrepentantly female-focused horror films ever made. A wholly original gem written by... Continue Reading →
When you think about A Nightmare on Elm Street, odds are you think of that guy with the burned face and knives for fingers. But why isn’t the heroine as iconic as the villain? That’s a question Heather Langenkamp, the actress behind Nightmare’s leading lady Nancy Thompson, seeks to answer in her 2010 documentary I... Continue Reading →
“I kind of use Luke Cage as a Trojan Horse to talk about everything else I’ve ever wanted to talk about in terms of New York hip-hop and black culture.” (Cheo Hodari Coker) Stories influence and reflect our world. It’s been that way since ancient mythology and prehistoric cave paintings— we try to understand ourselves and... Continue Reading →
