![]() The filmmakers understand that people’s sexual tastes don’t conform to a handbook concerned with politically correct gender relationships. The rejection of Noelle’s art sets up a story of troubling self-actualization, as director Natalia Leite and screenwriter Leah McKendrick use rape as an inciting incident for Noelle’s emergence as a daring artist and superficially confident sexual being. Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) is an art student who sketches and paints female portraits that’re dismissed by her classmates for their formal timidity. dramatizes an intersection of exploitation, government-sanctioned violence, gendered bitterness, and personal expression that’s ironically fostered by trauma. As both Vicki and Evelyn struggle in their own ways against the unhinged and impulsively homicidal John, Hounds of Love builds to a crescendo that earns its emotional catharsis while staying true to its roots as a truly chilling and intense thriller. Writer-director Ben Young’s camera is expressive yet tactfully implies rather than revels in the depths of the characters’ depravity, while his framing and editing fractures the space within John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn’s house so as to amplify the sense of Vicki’s entrapment. ![]() Through the character’s confrontation of her inner demons and the kidnapped Vicki’s (Ashleigh Cummings) attempts to cope with her own dilemma, the film tackles the disturbing issues of domestic violence and pedophilia without relying on exploitative shock tactics. Throughout Hounds of Love, Emma Booth is uncannily dexterous at projecting the internal struggle of the battered Evelyn’s inner turmoil. This, the film argues, is the power that unreclaimed stories have: if not literally to kill us, then to destroy us inside. ![]() The kid-killing Sarah Bellows came to see herself as village gossip described her, the same way that Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) blames herself, based on small-town whisperings, for her mother leaving her and her father (Dean Norris). Most interestingly, it offers its victim-victimizer a chance to break the cycle through storytelling: by rewriting her narrative. This film adaptation, which retains the archetypal settings but opens up the emotional and psychological lives of its characters, is about how the abused can become abusers, seeming to appeal to bullies through self-interest. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)Īlvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books are full of horror stories taken from folklore and presented like fairy tales. Budd WilkinsĮditor’s Note: This entry was originally published on October 10, 2018.ġ00. And for every milquetoast compromise, there’s a ferocious take-no-prisoners attempt to push the envelope on what we can honestly say about ourselves. For every eviscerated remake or toothless throwback, there’s a startlingly fresh take on the genre’s most time-honored tropes. They are, in what amounts to a particularly delicious irony, a “safe space” in which we can explore these otherwise unfathomable facets of our true selves, while yet consoling ourselves with the knowledge that “it’s only a movie.”Īt the same time, the genre manages to find fresh and powerful metaphors for where we’re at as a society and how we endure fractious times. Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors, to incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. Horror films remain perennially popular, despite periodic (and always exaggerated) rumors of their demise, even in the face of steadily declining ticket sales and desperately shifting models of distribution. Through the decades-and subsequent crazes for color and sound, stereoscopy and anamorphosis-since that train threatened to barrel into the front row, there’s never been a time when audiences didn’t clamor for the palpating fingers of fear. Ever since audiences-at least according to myth-ran screaming from the premiere screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 short black-and-white silent documentary Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the histories of filmgoing and horror have been inextricably intertwined.
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