Violence as an Aesthetic Device in Ichi The Killer (and That Ending)
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Takashi Miike, the celebrated Japanese director with many cult classics under his belt, broke new ground in 2001 with his violent, shocking, and beautiful Yakuza tale Ichi the Killer. If Audition brought Miike mass attention, Ichi the Killer is surely...
HP Lovecraft’s The Outsider and The Vanity of a Zombie
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We are surrounded by the undead. We are inundated with the undead. The undead crawl amongst the zeitgeist like rats within the walls, emerging every few years to remind us “hey, look, we’re scary!” Zombies always remind me of something...
Treehouse Tropes: Examining the Evil Krusty Doll in “Clown Without Pity”
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What could be scarier than an evil Krusty doll? That’s the question that the third installment of the Treehouse of Horror series asks us. It’s part of the brilliant fourth season of the show, one that is frequently ranked as...
Juvenile Terror: The Childhood Traumas of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu
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Best friends, Gorgeous and Fantasy, are playing with a camera between classes. Staging photos and posing for one another. Gorgeous looks serious wrapped in white, like a bride on her wedding day. Fantasy is about to snap the photo but...
How Flannery O’Connor Stories Made the South Terrifying
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I first encountered Flannery O’Connor's stories in college. She was being taught in the context of gothic literature, a type of storytelling that has existed for centuries. It focuses on the sublime, an almost out-of-body feeling that can be brought...
The Audition Movie Explained – A Masterpiece of Contrasts in Horror
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Cult horror movies often employ a “calm before the storm” approach to lull viewers into a false sense of security before the final big horror reveal. Over the years, this approach has been a crutch, a handy tool, and sometimes...