Tag
Horror
Every article tagged Horror across the Atmosphere.
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That will be within the DOMAIIN(S)
Just a overview of the DOMAIINS horror experience game1
Pretty Lethal
C4? I mean, I see at least 16. If you know anything about Pretty Lethal going in, you know that it's bound to be an absurd film. It knows that and is gleeful in its execution. A ballerina troupe is set to perform at an event in Budapest. Their flight is diverted, their bus breaks down and they trek to a hotel in — as far as they can tell — the middle of nowhere. Innocent, if irritating, protagonists meet a stereotype of eastern Europe. Pretty Lethal has the visual tone and palette of the John Wick franchise with none of the franchise's seriousness. What kind of ballerina doesn’t know how to make themselves throw up? Everyone's got a first name, a pair of ballet flats and the chemistry one might expect in an ensemble. Bones is the fearless leader, Princess is as spoiled as her name implies, Grace is preachy and high, while Zoe and Chloe are a pair of sisters with irritatingly similar names. The employees at the hotel seem hospitable until the son of a local crime boss shoots their teacher in the head. Why? She was there, mostly. Iris Apatow (as Zoe) has some expressions that are eerily like those of her mother, Leslie Mann. Chaos ensues. Fight scenes incorporate ballet; Bones ends up with a razor blade embedded in the toe of her flats (novel and effective) and numerous unnamed goons die. Because films like this are never, ever, in any way subtle, the hotel owner (played by Uma Thurman) was, in a past life, a ballerina. She lost her leg to the local crime boss and prepares for one last dance. The enemy of your enemy is your friend and this friend handles your enemy in a single, massive explosion. The best part? The girls make it to Budapest on mopeds conveniently left outside the hotel and nail their performance — toe blades, gore and all. First position!thrillerhorror
Pretty Lethal
C4? I mean, I see at least 16. If you know anything about Pretty Lethal going in, you know that it's bound to be an absurd film. It knows that and is gleeful in its execution. A ballerina troupe is set to perform at an event in Budapest. Their flight is diverted, their bus breaks down and they trek to a hotel in — as far as they can tell — the middle of nowhere. Innocent, if irritating, protagonists meet a stereotype of eastern Europe. Pretty Lethal has the visual tone and palette of the John Wick franchise with none of the franchise's seriousness. What kind of ballerina doesn’t know how to make themselves throw up? Everyone's got a first name, a pair of ballet flats and the chemistry one might expect in an ensemble. Bones is the fearless leader, Princess is as spoiled as her name implies, Grace is preachy and high, while Zoe and Chloe are a pair of sisters with irritatingly similar names. The employees at the hotel seem hospitable until the son of a local crime boss shoots their teacher in the head. Why? She was there, mostly. Iris Apatow (as Zoe) has some expressions that are eerily like those of her mother, Leslie Mann. Chaos ensues. Fight scenes incorporate ballet; Bones ends up with a razor blade embedded in the toe of her flats (novel and effective) and numerous unnamed goons die. Because films like this are never, ever, in any way subtle, the hotel owner (played by Uma Thurman) was, in a past life, a ballerina. She lost her leg to the local crime boss and prepares for one last dance. The enemy of your enemy is your friend and this friend handles your enemy in a single, massive explosion. The best part? The girls make it to Budapest on mopeds conveniently left outside the hotel and nail their performance — toe blades, gore and all. First position!thrillerhorror
They Will Kill You
When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs. — Benvenuto Cellini Movies like They Will Kill You are funny in that they're clearly about class warfare and position themselves, narratively, on the side of the downtrodden protagonist. Which is fair. Income inequality is an ever-widening chasm and there's a catharsis and appeal in that. I welcome it. But it's worth knowing how much money goes into making any given film and the motivations and constraints associated with the interests providing it. What happened in there? Rich people. Anyways, fuck rich people. Billionaires suck. Clearly, as you see here, they're a cavalcade of Satan-animated pig on a stick worshipping weirdos. They Will Kill You is rife with over the top violence. Not the horrifying realism of a Cronenberg film. This is more of the everyone is a highly pressurized balloon full of pink water and every severed limb hides a sprinkler variety. Good? Bad? Artistic choice. Zazie Beetz is a badass lead (she was a badass in Atlanta too) and Myha'la is excellent as her sister, Maria. Heather Graham is present to be repeatedly beheaded and Patricia Arquette is a fittingly absurd villain who ends the bloody mess wearing the demonic pig head as a helmet. The score matches this perfectly. Sparse synth music as needed, victorious tunes where appropriate. The camera work is excellent and bottling this up in a building makes it feel a bit like The Raid (though this has a lone eyeball navigating the ducts). Is this similar to Kill Bill ? Maybe. I don't know. I haven't watched it and don't you dare tell me what to do. The working class Asia butchers the rich, devil worshipping weirdos. She gets her sister back and makes the world better, one severed limb at a time.horroraction
The Horrorweb Inquirer #3
Horror TV shows for kids, A review on the Backrooms, and Halloween in the summertime?horrorbackrooms
Cobweb
Cobweb is a middling autumnal horror movie rooted in family secrets and childhood trauma. Lizzy Caplan excels at the crazy-lady role and is perennially trapped in it. Antony Starr is hard to mentally separate from his role as Homelander in The Boys . Starr is a capable actor but Homelander is such a perverse character and the shadow cast by a role like that is hard to escape. Peter is a quiet, reserved kid who hears tapping inside his bedroom wall until, one day, a voice calls out to him. His mother Carol (Caplan) and father Mark (Starr) are simultaneously dismissive, controlling and outwardly overprotective. They are, in reality, protecting the dark secret that lurks in their walls. The creature in the walls is, in fact, Peter's sister. A monstrous creature who alludes to having learned to climb while kept in the basement. She dismembers some bullies who break into Peter's house and Peter is rescued by the only person who actually cares about him, his teacher. They lock his sister in the basement and she promises to haunt him for the rest of his life. There's nothing to take away from this and no resolution. It's a dreary and only vaguely entertaining film.mysteryhorror
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is standard horror fare. The leads are both extremely capable and it's all bottled up in a single location. The slow unwinding of events is effective at building tension, from the mysterious finding of Jane Doe's body at a gruesome murder scene to the layered discovery of who and what she is over the course of the autopsy. Austin Tilden is open minded about the nature of Jane Doe as the autopsy progresses and things get stranger and stranger. His father, Tommy Tilden, is implacable and roots his understanding of events solely in what their inspection of the body reveals to them. It's an effective balance and Tommy comes around as things become irrefutably supernatural. Jane, it turns out, is very much alive in some form or another. Trapped in her body, unmoving and unspeaking, but very much in agony and aware of events as they transpire. She lashes out, subverting the Tildens' reality into a horrifying nightmare that ends in the death of Austin's girlfriend, Emma, Tommy and Austin himself. Jane Doe was responsible for events where she was found, for events at the Tildens' mortuary and will continue to destroy whoever she's around as she's passed off again and again as some sort of cursed object.mysteryhorror
Hokum
Hokum is a bleak film. It's slow, it's atmospheric and it is dark and, in that way, is not at all unlike Damian McCarthy's Oddity . Ohm Bauman is a writer haunted by a tragic childhood. It's in his writing and in the casual cruelty with which he interacts with others. The epilogue he starts the film working on feels like something he's trying to work through — is the conquistador his father and the boy him? Is he traversing the desert trying to prove himself only to have the adventure end in an act of brazen violence? His father's anger at him over what happened to his mother manifested in fiction. Bauman is on a retreat to scatter his parents' ashes in Ireland, staying at the inn where they spent their honeymoon. The goats eat mushrooms and climb on the cars while the owner scares the children. Ohm puts his parents to rest, drinks with a local and spirals into a drug-fueled suicide attempt. He wakes up, alone, in the hospital. He survives, but his rescuer, Fiona, is dead. Ohm searches for answers with the aid of Jerry, his forest-dwelling drinking companion, and they press for access to the suite where his parents spent their honeymoon and which the owner, Cob, insists is haunted. It's here that things turn. Is it in fact haunted? Perhaps — certainly by recent events as Ohm discovers Fiona's body there and a tape recorder containing her final moments. An event so dark will always hang over a space. That her death was spurred by something as mundane as an affair makes it no less haunting. You see events split and fray while Ohm is trapped in the suite. He sees flashes of his childhood, a monstrous bunny he watched on TV, the accident with a gun that killed his mother and destroyed his father. Her memory is there and her ashes are a walk into the woods away. Mal, the front desk clerk, is haunted and desperate. Fiona, the victim of his crime, is in the suite with Ohm, tethering them together. One accident, one murder, two acts of violence. In search of an escape, Ohm tries and fails to attract Jerry's attention. He takes the dumbwaiter to the basement as Fiona had, improvising an admittedly clever escape mechanism and finds no escape. The basement is sealed off and had served as a temporary tomb for Fiona. She's uncovered, Mal's secret is revealed and Ohm descends. He sees flashes of the witch that haunts the place and hastily enshrines himself in a chalk circle. Mal descends. Ohm's mother appears. Mal is dragged into the darkness. Ohm is forgiven and emerges into an inn on fire. He finds himself in the hospital, again. Alby, a victim of Ohm's casual cruelty, visits and offers yet another drink as a gift. The gift is rejected and Alby promises to return with a revised manuscript — Ohm met the initial mention with a hot spoon to Alby's skin and an admonishment to grow thicker skin. Perhaps his small part in this all allowed him to do that. Ohm returns to his epilogue. The conquistador and the boy discard their map, sealed in a glass bottle with nothing solid in the endless desert to shatter it against. They embrace, knowing that, though they're doomed, they still have each other.horrordrama
The Horrorweb Inquirer #2
A movie review you can sink you fangs into, what's in theaters for this week, and a Tales from the Horrorweb update that might just surprise you.Horrorbackrooms
Sick Puppy
Your husband is a serial killer. You've accepted that and you lend him a hand disposing of his victims. But you also want him to take a beat and watch a 90 Day Fiancé . Maybe he'll change. You get him a pottery wheel as a creative outlet, since it's not that different from his other hobby and hope for the best. Until he runs a lawnmower over a cat, gets distracted by a teenage girl who shows up at a local art fair and smashes his pottery. The bully that tormented Charlie and Dale in high school? He's a cop, naturally. It's a good fit. Until he catches on to them and ends up dead in their front yard, framed for their crimes (this is after Charlie kills someone who recognizes jewelry she's wearing that Dale gifted her from one of his victims). It's a twisted relationship and — perhaps — a loving one? It's twisted and Charlie and Dale are devoted to one another. Whether it's intended to be comedic or not, I don't know, but the odd, jazzy music and cock rock that make up the soundtrack do make an unbelievable film feel a bit silly.horrordrama
The Historian
I received Elizabeth Kostova's vampire novel The Historian for my birthday earlier this spring, and finished it last night. It has been great fun to read. I read Dracula back in 2023, but it seems like this year, for some reason, I have had more exposure to vampire stories, maybe because my Russian Literature professor...draculafiction
The Horrorweb Inquirer #1
The start of a new newsletter, complete with movie reviews, trivia, and more. This is Issue number 1.Talesfromthehorrorwebhorror
Hush
Hush is a pretty ok horror movie about Maddie. Maddie is deaf, she's an author and she lives alone in a small home in the woods. Sarah and John live nearby and seem like pretty great neighbors. They stop being good neighbors when they're stabbed to death by a guy in a mask who then terrorizes Maddie for the duration. It's more or less what you'd expect, with some wrinkles provided by Maddie's condition. The killer can hear Maddie and she has to come up with a plan to survive knowing that he can hear her. This, erm, cuts both ways when he thinks he has the drop on her and she manages to stab him in the knee. Cool stuff. I realize I'm being blithe and a bit reductive, but I don't think a movie like this needs to be taken seriously. The circumstances are serious, but not terribly believable and it's a rather rote take on the whole slasher genre. But, for a low budget and a small cast, it is pretty fun.thrillerhorror
The Strangers
Do you think they ever found Tamara? What if they'd had a no soliciting sign? Remember those old phone chargers that inevitably turned into a knot? Or how you used to be able to swap out batteries in your flip phone? Glenn Howerton is so effective at always playing exactly that guy. Charming, Dennis-adjacent and always a jerk on the edge of getting very angry. The Strangers is frightening, arguably even terrifying. Opening with crime statistics is a choice. The statistics are significant but it leaves no question as to what's going to happen to Kristen and James here. Unscrewing the bulb and getting them to answer the door is a terrifying first step and things simply escalate from there. The whole thing is expertly staged — the intruders silently observing Kristen in the background, the masks, the messages, the ever present threat until the bloody end. A tense, unsurprising classic.thrillerhorror
Let Me In
Let Me In is a surprisingly tender and sweet film that happens to feature blood, immolation and dismemberment. It's incredibly easy to screw up remakes, vampire movies and remakes of vampire movies (I haven't watched the original yet — give me a minute). Eat some now. Save some for later. This applies to candy, but not people. You eat all of the people. Right now. At it's core, Let Me In , is an adolescent love story. Owen and Abby are both tortured (in very different ways, granted). Abby helps Owen navigate a distinctly human situation, urging him to defend himself and then by radically escalating things near the conclusion of the film. Owen helps Abby feel less alone, less monstrous and more human. That bond sees them escape, together and leaves me wondering if something similar had played out with Abby's "father". How old is Abby? How old was he when they met? Will Abby's affliction lead Owen down the same path?mysteryhorror
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
Can I have a cigarette? Ready or Not 2 such a wonderful, over the top, gleeful exercise in horror, satanism and camp. The Faculty is perhaps my all time favorite movie, so seeing Elijah Wood and Shawn Hatosy back on screen together was such a treat. Throw in Sarah Michelle Gellar (hail Buffy ) and a David Cronenberg cameo? :chefkissemoji: This is not a sequel that tries to stand on its own — it opens right as Ready or Not closes. The reveal here isn't the nature of the game, it's that the game continues. It also allows it to improve upon where this all started. When I resumed this after a brief break, I accidentally started Limitless Violence off of Diabolic Messiah of the New World Order and that the two fit so perfectly is not lost on me There is so much to love here. Elijah Wood being oddly calm while administering the rules guiding a bizarre pact with the devil? Check. Samara Weaving with a distinct, horrifying, almost quavering scream that never gets old? Check. Weaving and Kathryn Newton as an incredible, reluctant leading duo? Check. Just enough people popping like balloons full of red corn syrup — until they all pop? Check. I will watch this again. I will watch the first one again. I'll watch them back to back and then I'll wait for the next one. Can we get a movie about The Lawyer? Hail Satan.thrillerhorror
Urban Legend
Do you smell something? Urban Legend occupies the same milieu as Cherry Falls and I Know What You Did Last Summer but is far closer in quality to the latter. I vaguely remember having seen this before or, at least, I believe I have. I could also be that the setting is extremely familiar. The coffee shop — Friends burned this into everyone's mind — feels so emblematic and central to the time. But, unlike Central Perk, where nothing ever goes all that wrong, what's discussed here are murders past and present. One after another. Rumored deaths, cover ups, urban legends and fixtures of the popular lack of imagination. There are house parties with misused microwaves, pop rock fatalities both real and imagined and vengeance for a wrong that the protagonist committed and fails to connect. Is this Jared Leto at his most normal? Remember when gas was right around $1? How do you not see the guy in your back seat when you reach for a tape? Does nobody look in their backseat? The puffy jacket is a good killer disguise for a college in Maine. Everyone's trying to stay warm and stay alive. An essential entry into the genre of 90s campy slashers.mysterythriller
Cherry Falls
Class dismissed! Cherry Falls is a ludicrous slasher that manages to be campy while landing oh so shy of self-parody. A serial killer is on the loose murdering high school virgins so all the high school virgins throw a sex party to exclude themselves from the list of potential victims. Which, of course, would never work because that's just a word the killer carved in their victims (only to carve the inverse in another victim who was both not a high schooler nor a virgin). Why does the reservoir in the closing scene turn red? Setting this in Cherry Falls, Virginia is really on the nose (though nothing about this movie is subtle). This isn't as good as as Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer but it's a perfectly entertaining entry into the genre.mysterythriller
Triangle
Triangle is a late aughts horror gem that takes the aesthetics of a slasher film and wraps them around a time loop ala Timecrimes . Visually it feels very much like Dexter — there's an overlap in timing, locale, the warm visual tones, abundance of blood and the fact that the sea features so prominently in the most violent scenes (death is never far removed from a boat, I guess). The loop in Triangle is unexplained. You're made to believe it starts when the party boards the mysteriously abandoned cruise ship. You capsize, you miraculously drift to a rescue and manage to find a mention of Sisyphus and a lone occupant trying to kill you. The loop, in fact, is one in which Jess kidnaps her son, Tommy, from herself and her sisyphean task becomes one of securing her return to Tommy at all costs. Instead of rolling a boulder up a hill, she's killing her love interest and acquaintances over and over and over again. It's a special sort of hell. Jess' behavior on the ship leads you to believe she's a caring mother. Past Jess' behavior at the tail end of the loop reveals that she's overwhelmed and abusive, necessitating a rescue that results in Tommy's death. But, the core events of the film show the lengths she's willing to go to to get back to Tommy. In that way, the true cruelty lies in the acts she finds herself forced to commit and the knowledge that they never free her or rescue her son. There's no telling when the loop started and it may never end. Does Jess deserve a fate so cruel? Perhaps.horror
My Friends and I Made Another Game in 72 Hours
Ludum Dare 59 retrospective1
Crimes of the Future
The Cronenberg family has made some of the most grotesque movies I've ever watched. To their credit, they're never needlessly grotesque. Crimes of the Future exists solidly within body horror, which is a subsection of horror I'm often repulsed by but can't look away from. It's eerie, atmospheric, minimally scored and bleak in its outlook. Society appears to be teetering — government offices are helpless and rundown, horrifying surgeries are performed as a public spectacle and Saul Tenser's body grows novel organ after novel organ. It's horror as art and it's an art that robs its victims of their humanity. There are morose echoes of transhumanism in Dotrice and his experiments transforming himself and others so that they can eat and survive off the plastic waste littering their high tech dystopia. Saul and Caprice exhibit their pain, Timlin and Wippet watch, Dotrice engineers a way through and Cope fights against all of it, seemingly motivated to preserve what it means to be human in a society that's quickly losing sight of what that means.scifithriller
undertone
Use promo code ABYZOU for 50% off your first meal kit! Movies like this are always fascinating because they hinge entirely on the ability of a single actor or actress to keep the audience engaged. Nina Kiri is more than up to the task. undertone is a slow burn that conducts itself almost entirely via a podcast recorded at Evy's mother's dining room table. I don't know that it's a novel concept, but it works. Kiri has a convincing podcast voice as does Adam DiMarco (her co-host, Justin) and a paranormal podcast is, naturally, a perfect medium for this. The audience is brought along with the hosts as they listen to files attached to a mysterious email, in order. It's an effective way to ratchet up the tension. The movie ending without answers is appropriate given that the hosts themselves have none to offer.mysteryhorror
Scream 7
AI? I refuse. That is the death of civilization. There were plenty of missed opportunities here to have even a vaguely meaningful discussion about AI and deepfakes and, while I appreciate the cheap shots at it, I know I shouldn't expect any depth from a Scream movie (unless you're talking about the depth of a stab wound). This isn't a bad entry for the franchise, but it's also not a good one. It was easy to predict how this would turn out knowing Melissa Barrera was tossed aside by cowards running a franchise they wouldn't survive appearing in and Jenna Ortega subsequently choosing not to return. That Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox remain present helps this avoid disaster and Isabel May is a welcome addition (she did a wonderful job in 1883 and narrating 1923 ). But, beyond the nostalgia, you'll get exactly what you'd expect out of this. (Oh yeah — great call including a Turnstile tune.)mysteryhorror