Girl Meets Freak
Special Recognitions
Movie Discussion: Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976)
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
Movie Discussion: Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)
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
Movie Discussion: Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992)
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
Movie Discussion: Tony Maylam’s The Burning (1981)
Girl Meets Context: The Burning isn’t a well-known movie outside of horror movie fandom, but it is often cited as one of the best of the 1980s slasher craze (alongside films like My Bloody Valentine, Black Christmas and Alone in the Dark). It was produced at the same time as Friday the 13th Part 2 in order to cash in … Continue reading
Double Feature Discussion, Part 1: Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Girl Meets Context: After a rough couple of weeks complicated by insane work commitments, personal tragedy, and inclement weather, we decided to do our first-ever “Creature Double Feature.” We chose two vampire flicks that both draw heavily from the zombie and splatter movie traditions: Robert Rodriguez’s Tarantino-scripted From Dusk Till Dawn and Daybreakers, an Australian … Continue reading
Movie Discussion: Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981)
Girl Meets Context: The premise of The Evil Dead couldn’t be simpler: five college-aged friends rent a remote cabin in the Tennessee woods for the weekend and are terrorized by demonic forces. Those forces are unleashed when they find and play tape recordings of a scholar translating passages of an ancient Sumerian text (referred to in … Continue reading
Movie Discussion: Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972)
Girl Meets Context: On February 9, 2012 we queued up Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate movie, a serial killer shocker about a rash of sex murders in London. The movie stars Jon Finch as Richard Blaney, a retired RAF serviceman who finds himself on the run from the police after he’s implicated in the serial stranglings when his … Continue reading
Movie Discussion: Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In [Låt den rätte komma in] (2008)
Girl Meets Context: On February 2, 2012 we sat down to watch the Swedish vampire epic Let the Right One In, which was based on a book of the same name that came out in 2004. The movie follows a nerdy outcast middle-schooler named Oskar who spends his days being harassed by classmates and his nights … 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 Comparison: Kurt Neumann’s The Fly (1958)/David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986)
Girl Meets Context: On Friday, January 13, 2012 we gathered to watch the original 1958 version of The Fly, even though we’d watched David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake last year. In the original version, The Fly is about an upper-class Montreal family that is torn apart when the wife, Helene, is implicated in the bizarre murder of … Continue reading
