Girl Meets Freak
Hagsploitation
Movie Discussion: Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba (1964)
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
Movie Discussion: Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
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
Movie Discussion: Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985)
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
Movie Discussion: Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling [Non si sevizia un paperino] (1972)
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
Movie Discussion: Iain Softley’s The Skeleton Key (2005)
Girl Meets Context: The Skeleton Key was made as a “mainstream” supernatural thriller pitched at a wide audience. It starred Kate Hudson fresh off the huge success of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. The film was written by Ehren Kruger, a genre screenwriter with a very spotty track record. He penned the super-successful … Continue reading
Movie Discussion: Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980)
Girl Meets Context: The enormous financial success of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 inspired Paramount Pictures to want to emulate its model: a slasher like Halloween could be made on the cheap with no-name actors and reap huge profits, even if only moderately successful at the box office. Friday the 13th, made really only as a cash-grab using this … 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
