Rear Window may not have the slasher pedigree of Psycho, but it does boast some of the finest tension and suspense of director Alfred Hitchcock’s extensive career. Utilizing a single set and no musical score, Hitchcock delivers a higher degree of believability than most films attain on location with hand-held cinematography.
Genre deconstruction has become quite chic in the years following Wes Craven’s reflexive horror classic, Scream. It gave a boost to the horror genre, which was then immediately slogged with cheap spoofs, high-profile remakes and at least two new sub-genres: found footage and the unfortunate and aptly-named torture porn.
Session 9 is an atmospheric creeper about an asbestos removal crew working at an abandoned mental asylum, and the mounting tensions between them as they begin exhibiting unusual behavior. Director Brad Anderson hired experimental music band Climax Golden Twins to score his subtle psychological horror and what they created is a fascinating aura that defies conventional motion picture composings.
For those of us disenchanted with the new films that have plagued theatres this year, the good news is there are a good many classic film revivals lighting up screens in the third quarter of 2012. Perhaps the imminent end of the worldis triggering a bout of movie nostalgia.
Four years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and four months after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Universal monster movies gasped their last as literary monsters gave way to monsters of the atomic age. The plot itself is a Frankenstein creation, cobbled together from bits and pieces of previous Universal monster movies for one last cash grab. That doesn’t mean it lacks any kind of enjoyable charm.
A bizarre revenge tale mixed with elements of horror tragedy. Universal went all out to bill this as an extreme monster mash-up, deliberately creating the archetypes that have become so familiar, reaching as far back as The Hunchback of Notre Dame to label the simpering Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) as the Quasimodo-ish assistant.