Now this is what interests me about horror: not gore but excavations of the ineffable and oneiric, not the stalk-and-impale template but subconscious projections mapped onto established forms (here, something like Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" refracted through an isolated woman's fear of contact, the off-kilter manners of everyone from the parish priest to the concupiscent neighbor giving off a more than passing resemblance to Lynch's latent suburban rot), whose effects are neither subservient to, nor can be explained…
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84 Charing Cross Road 1987
My sensibilities run to quiet mornings in a sun-bathed living room, nestled into the couch with coffee cup and book in hand. Give me that hour before the world's business runs riot, and I'll do whatever onerous thing must be done during the rest of the day with contented acceptance. Of course, I could extend that morning routine past dusk and on into midnight, letting the world do what it will; that viewpoint, the inner life and the bookish habits…
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Jaws 1975
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
On the occasion of my tenth (?) viewing, and following closely on the heels of my first reading of the novel on which this quintessential summer movie is based, here are some quick, desultory observations:
• I only now understand the screenplay’s mastery of condensation and elision. Gone are the book’s subplots establishing the mayor’s financial motives for keeping the beaches open (in debt to the mafia!) and the character-significant but superfluous affair between Mrs. Brody and Hooper. Instead, the…
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The Thing 1982
Review from 2004:
In a word: austere. U.S. government research team stationed in the desolate Antarctic tundra is visited by an indestructible shape-shifting alien. Carpenter's decidedly remade version of Howard Hawks's The Thing from Another World is an unsparing examination of the human psyche under stress, the pressure of a tactile existential crisis rendering the group’s attempts at solidarity ineffectual.
The protean form of the eponymous 10,000-year-old extraterrestrial assimilates the bodies of the crew at random, facilitating a convincingly febrile…
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