Girl Meets Freak
Ghosts & Hauntings
Movie Discussion: James Wong’s Final Destination (2000)
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
Movie Discussion: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961)
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
Movie Discussion: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse [Kairo] (2001)
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
Movie Discussion: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)
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
Movie Discussion: Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Girl Meets Context: It is difficult to even synopsize The Cabin in the Woods because the plot of the movie relies so much on twists and turns… so please be forewarned that there will be massive SPOILERS AHEAD!!! If you haven’t gone to see this movie yet, rush to your local theater to see it, then … Continue reading
Movie Discussion: Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf [Vargtimmen] (1968)
Girl Meets Context: On February 17, 2012 we decided to go full-auteur and watch an Ingmar Bergman movie. Known primarily as an arthouse darling who made spiritually bleak meditations on the purposelessness of man’s search for meaning, he actually did make one movie that self-consciously adopted the tropes of horror cinema: 1968′s Hour of the Wolf. Starring … Continue reading
TV Discussion: Season 1 of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story (2011)
Girl Meets Context: After continuing problems with Netflix’s Streaming services ruined our attempt to watch The Howling, we decided to tackle something we’d both watched attentively last year: Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s FX series American Horror Story. The show is a new kind of horror anthology series, in which a story plays out over the … Continue reading
Movie Discussion: Brad Anderson’s Session 9 (2001)
Girl Meets Context: On January 2, 2012 we battled massive technical problems with Netflix’s Instant Streaming system to watch Brad Anderson’s moody, deliberate haunted asylum flick, Session 9. The film follows a small demolition crew who’ve been hired to strip the asbestos from the Danvers State Hospital, a massive abandoned mental asylum (also a real-life location … Continue reading
Super-Sized Movie Discussion, Part 4: J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage [El orfonato] (2007)
Girl Meets Context: On Friday, December 2nd 2011, Kristine and I held our second Horror Movie Sleepover. We started with Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Mist, and couldn’t believe all the Walking Dead cast members that were in it. Then we watched another 2007 horror movie, the Spanish supernatural thriller The Orphanage by J.A. Bayona, who is … Continue reading
