Girl Meets Freak
Saturn Award Winner
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
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: 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
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
Super-Sized Movie Discussion, Part 2: Frank Darabont’s The Mist (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
Movie Discussion: John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Kristine, Full disclosure: I’ve considered An American Werewolf in London a classic staple of the genre and one of my favorite horror movies ever since I watched it obsessively as a teenager (probably 20 or so times), but I had not watched the movie in probably 10 years and so my memories of it had faded. The most iconic scenes … Continue reading
