Girl Meets Freak

Girl Meets Context: Throughout the month of May we will be watching 1970s films about cults and conspiracies – from covens of witches to New Age self-help groups to neo-Pagans. This week we watched The Stepford Wives, Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of Ira Levin’s best-selling novel (note: Levin also authored Rosemary’s Baby). Forbes actually passed away this … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Throughout the month of May we will be watching 1970s films about cults and conspiracies – from covens of witches to New Age self-help groups to neo-Pagans. This week we watched Ken Russell’s controversial art film. Based both on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 book The Devils of Loudun and the subsequent John Whiting play from … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. John Dies at the End is cult director Don Coscarelli’s (of Phantasm and Bubba Ho-tep fame) adaptation of the cult novel by Cracked.com writer David Wong (which is actually a pseudonym … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. Detention is the second feature film by director Joseph Kahn (his debut was the Ice Cube-starring motorbike racing flick Torque). Kahn is mostly known as a music video director, spending … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. The Descent is the second feature by British director Neil Marshall (after 2002′s Dog Soldiers). In the film, a group of six friends (most of them Brits) go on a caving … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. Strigoi is British director Faye Jackson’s feature-length debut. It concerns Vlad (Cătălin Paraschiv), a med school dropout who has returned to the Romanian village of his childhood after spending time … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. The House of the Devil was actually the second movie Kristine and I watched for horror movie club, way back in the days before our blog existed. We chose to revisit … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. Between 2009 and 2010, three films came out that all had a similar premise – setting the superhero story in a real-world milieu, as opposed to a fantastical one. … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: It’s Indie Horror Month, where we cover some of the best original and independent horror movies to be released in the last few years. First up is The Revenant, the feature directorial debut of special effects guy Kerry Prior. The movie’s about Bart, an American G.I. killed in Iraq (played by Alias/Vampire Diaries baddie David Anders) … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Horror Franchise Month concludes with this goth-inflected “vampires vs. werewolves” action-horror flick. The film is set in an unspecified European city (most probably Budapest) in which Selene (Kate Beckinsale), a vampire assassin or “death-dealer,” is caught up in a centuries-long conflict between Lycans (as werewolves are known in this universe) and vampires. It … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Horror Franchise Month continues as we visit with the most recent of the big mainstream horror series. The first of the Paranormal Activity films was made for only $15,000 and raked in over $193 million worldwide. Combined, all four Paranormal movies have grossed over $700 million, not including the Japanese and Latin spinoff films. The … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Horror Franchise Month takes a turn into teen antics with the first Final Destination film. In the movie, a pellucid teenage goblin named Alex (Devon Sawa) has a terrifying vision of a plane crash during his high school class trip to Paris. He and several of his peers are thrown off the plane, … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Horror Franchise Month soldiers on… literally. Resident Evil is based upon Capcom’s long-running series of survival horror video games. The first Resident Evil game debuted on the Playstation 2 in 1996, combining action/shooter elements with puzzle-solving. The plot of the game concerned the characters of Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield, two police officers, who fight … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: We kick off Horror Franchise Month with the first film in the top-grossing horror franchise of all time. Like many horror movie success stories, Saw was made for a song – a mere 1.2 million – and proved to be insanely profitable when it grossed over a hundred million dollars. Kicking off a long-running … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: This is the best known and most critically lauded adaptation of Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. It was not a commercial success at the time of its release, but the film has gone on to have a long life as a “classic” psychological thriller (Scorsese included it on his “11 … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Post-WWII Japan gave rise to a Golden Age of samurai films (called chanbara movies). These movies of the 1950s and 1960s were often cynical and psychologically complex, from Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954-6) to Kurosawa’s masterpieces like Seven Samurai (1954) or Yojimbo (1961) to the genre’s crowning jewel, Masaki Kobayashi’s spell-binding Harakiri (1962). Director Kaneto Shindô merged the chanbara … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: I’ve read that Roman Polanski and his collaborator Gérard Brach quickly wrote the screenplay to Repulsion and made the movie only so they could secure funding for the project they really cared about: the 1966 thriller Cul-de-sac. Ironically, Repulsion is considered one of Polanski’s masterworks and a classic of psychological horror, while Cul-de-sac has faded to … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: John Carpenter has alluded that the basic concept for Michael Myers’ mask in Halloween was inspired by the mask Christiane wears in Eyes Without a Face. Watching the movie today, a whole host of modern movie references seem to be traceable back to Eyes Without a Face - the barrage of tests Paulette undergoes foreshadow the sequences … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: As of January 2013, David Lynch hasn’t made a movie since Inland Empire. The film found Lynch returning to the full-on surrealism that began his career with 1977′s Eraserhead, though Inland Empire is far more discursive and impenetrable than Eraserhead. The three-hour long film concerns an actress named Nikki Grace who hopes to revive her stagnant … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Children of the 1990s know Rob Zombie as the frontman of White Zombie, a.k.a. the feral guy with dreads doing ‘magic hands’ in the “Thunder Kiss ’65″ video. But it turns out Zombie was dead serious about that video’s aesthetic statement – it wasn’t simply a bunch of empty references meant to … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) spent about 10 years making low-budget and direct-to-video pinkies and yakuza pictures in Japan before he won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute in the early 1990s. He then rose to prominence making a series of intellectually and aesthetically rich (if methodical) horror movies, starting … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Director Tom Six has good taste in some things. He cites Pier Paolo Pasolini, David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Takashi Miike as his cinematic idols. Six allegedly came up with the idea for The Human Centipede (First Sequence) by amalgamating some dirty child molesters jokes he once told with his own experiences as … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Inspired by Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wes Craven (director of 1972′s controversial grindhouse classic The Last House on the Left ) made The Hills Have Eyes both as an homage to Hooper’s movie and also an attempt to cash in on it’s success. Set in the Nevada desert, The Hills Have Eyes is … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Often considered to be the first traditional slasher, Black Christmas was a moderate success upon its release (though it was infamously pulled from television broadcast in the late 1970s when viewers complained it was “too scary”). Drawing heavily on the giallo tradition established by the films of Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: The mainstreaming of the slasher movie, which was all ready wildly popular thanks to the Halloween and Friday the 13th films, was codified with the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. Freddy Krueger, over the next decade, became THE face of horror movies and America’s most recognizable boogeyman. Blending dream logic, sexual violence, a … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Twelve years after the release of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, director Tobe Hooper finally made a sequel to the film. Written by Kit Carson (the ex-husband of scream queen Karen Black), the sequel picks up 13 years after the events depicted in the original film: Lefty (Dennis Hopper), a former Texas … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Writer/director Don Coscarelli is responsible for three objects of bonafide cult worship – 1982′s beefcake fantasy film The Beastmaster, 2002′s Elvis-battles-the-Mummy buddy flick Bubba Ho-Tep and Phantasm (his latest movie, John Dies at the End, an adaptation of Cracked writer David Wong’s cult novel, seems poised to also enter the cult canon). Phantasm was Coscarelli’s first horror movie … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: In the wake of a crippling depression, Lars von Trier wrote and directed the controversial Antichrist, which debuted at Cannes in 2009. Audience members fainted during the screening, von Trier smugly declared himself “the greatest director in the world” when confronted by journalists about the film and the festival’s Ecumenical Jury derisively gave the … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: At the start of the 21st century a little Canadian werewolf movie crept onto and off of screens without much fanfare. In fact, it was practically ignored outside of Canada. But the movie found a new life on DVD and is now considered one of the cult movies of the early 2000s. Ginger Snaps … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: If Martyrs is the blood-soaked Cinderella of the mid-2000s wave of so-called “New French Extremity” films, then Inside is that movement’s Ugly Stepsister. Made by first-time co-directors, the film has been hailed by horror  fandom (and press) as one of the 21st century’s signature classics. The film has a bare-bones premise: a young woman named … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Self-described feminist filmmaker Lucky McKee’s first solo-directed feature film (he co-directed the low-budget 1999 zombie film All Cheerleaders Die) has become enshrined as a cult classic and rapturously reviewed by the film press (including renowned horror-hater Roger Ebert who called it “a horror film and something more and deeper, something disturbing and oddly moving”). … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Ten years after the success of the original Night of the Living Dead, George Romero was inspired to pen a sequel after a visit to the Pittsburgh-area Monroeville Mall (where Dawn was filmed). Unable to find financial backing domestically, Romero was mentored and supported by Italian horror legend Dario Argento (director of films such as … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: In the wake of The Exorcist‘s massive popularity, dozens of “Satanic thrillers” were made in the mid-to-late 1970s, of which The Omen might be the most famous one. The film is about Robert Thorn, an American diplomat (played by screen legend Gregory Peck) who comes to believe that he may have unwittingly adopted the son of … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: The Shining was Stephen King’s third published novel and the third of his works to be adapted for the screen (his debut novel, Carrie, had been turned into a successful Brian DePalma film in 1976 and his second novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, was released as a CBS TV-miniseries in 1979 by Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper). But … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Alien was the second feature directed by Ridley Scott, and instantly became a cultural phenomenon. Critics praised it, audiences flocked to it, and the film won a slew of awards, including an Oscar for Special Effects, a Hugo and a bunch of Saturn Awards. The film was infamous, like Psycho and The Exorcist in years prior, … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Halloween was made on a small budget of about $320,000 and went on to gross $70 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Conceived as a simple “killer stalks babysitters” picture by producer Irwin Yablans, John Carpenter and his co-writer and co-producer Debra Hill turned the material into … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Sam Raimi chose an unusual path for his sequel to the cult classic The Evil Dead. Rather than making a film that continued the story of the first movie, he rebooted the film entirely. Just like in the original, Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda go to a remote cabin in the woods … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Directed by the son of legendary Italian horror auteur Mario Bava, Demons takes some of the giallo tradition’s stylish nonsense and blends in supernatural elements, over-the-top gore setpieces and a bleak dystopic worldview. Demons was stewarded and co-written by horror meastro Dario Argento, and may be the most celebrated of Lamberto Bava’s extensive filmography. … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Dead Alive is one of the most notorious splatter movies of all time, and is often cited as New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong) first signature masterpiece. The movie is set in 1950s Wellington and concerns a zombie virus that begins after a rare Sumatran rat monkey bites … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Re-Animator was the most exciting directorial debut in the world of horror since Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead in 1981, and it put director Stuart Gordon on the horror map in a big way. Combining the manic intensity of H.P. Lovecraft’s original story with a pitch-black sense of humor, Re-Animator became an instant cult classic. It … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Dead Ringers is loosely based on the lives of real-life identical twin gynecologists Stuart and Cyril Marcus (who also inspired the Peter Greenaway movie A Zed & Two Naughts). Cronenberg’s film concerns Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons in twin roles), esteemed specialists in women’s fertility who are nearly impossible to tell apart. … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: We continue Erotic Thriller month with Brian De Palma’s riff on Hitchcock’s Rear Window (with elements of Vertigo thrown in for good measure). It continued his spate of films based on the work of Hitchcock, after Sisters (1973), Obsession (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980). Body Double came out right after De Palma’s huge commercial success with Scarface, and it has a … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: We continue Erotic Thriller month with an unconventional choice: Pedro Almodóvar’s strange tale of captivity, obsession, sex and movie-making. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is about Marina (Victoria Abril) a former drug addict/porn star who is wrapping up production on a horror movie called The Midnight Phantom when she is abducted by Ricky (Antonio Banderas), … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: The 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of European horror films (often referred to as EuroShock or Eurotrash horror). These movies were often highly stylized and erotic, but usually lacked solid narratives and compelling characters. Though beloved for their camp sensibility (such as the werewolf films of Spain’s Paul Naschy) or comical … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: For Phenomena, Dario Argento moved his regular antics to a remote all-girl boarding school in the Swiss countryside. The whole set-up is very reminiscent of his classic Suspiria (considered by many to be his signature masterpiece), in which an American girl finds herself abroad at a strange European school where uncanny events occur. In this version … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Since we’ve all ready visited with Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, it was high time that Kristine finally get introduced to the so-called Master of the Giallo, Dario Argento. The most well-known and oft-discussed of Italian horror directors, Argento burst onto the scene with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970. At … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context: Don’t Torture a Duckling was Lucio Fulci’s favorite of his own movies. He referred to it as his “most personal film.” It was also the first of his films to truly garner him notoriety in Italy, in part because of the controversies surrounding the film’s release. It was blacklisted across Europe for appearing … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context:  Considered to be the precursor to the modern American slasher film (with it’s emphasis on “body count”), Blood and Black Lace may be one of the most influential Italian films of all time. It single-handedly created the “giallo” genre that directors like Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and Luciani Ercoli would go on … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context:  Witchfinder General was the third and final film made by Michael Reeves before his tragic death-by-overdose. He was only 25 when he died, and at the time he was considered to be one of the most promising and exciting young genre directors in the U.K. Now considered his masterpiece, and one of … Continue reading »

Girl Meets Context:  When an unfortunate twist of fate landed Kristine back in the Old Pueblo for the weekend, we knew it was time to tackle one of the genre’s most infamous movies: the French ur-torture spectacle Martyrs. The movie is considered to be one of horror’s most polarizing films and Kristine, knowing it’s reputation, insisted … Continue reading »