Essays - vo.rs

The Prestige Reissue and the Sanding-Down of Genre

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

A grubby exploitation film shot for the price of a used car, meant to be watched in a fleapit or off a fourth-generation VHS dub, now arrives in a hardcase slipcover with a new 4K restoration, a booklet of scholarly essays, an audio commentary by a film historian and a fold-out poster. This is a genuine golden age for anyone who loves disreputable cinema. It is also, quietly, a process of laundering — because the prestige reissue does not only preserve a film, it reframes it, and the reframing can sand the danger clean off the very films whose danger was the whole point.

Regional Horror: The Local Legend as Engine

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The most durable horror films are the ones you could redraw as a map. The Wicker Man is a Scottish island. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a stretch of scorched Texas back-road. The Blair Witch Project is a specific patch of Maryland woodland named after a specific town. These films are frightening in a way the interchangeable haunted-suburb picture never manages, and the reason is not budget or talent alone. It is that they are powered by place — a real landscape carrying a local legend — and place is the single most underrated engine in the horror machine. Generic fear evaporates. Fear with a postcode stays with you.

Why the Midnight Movie Needs a Crowd

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:00:00 +0000

You can stream The Rocky Horror Picture Show tonight in perfect resolution, alone, on a screen the size of your palm, and you will have watched a mediocre film. Twenty thousand people have watched the exact same movie in a packed midnight house with rice in their hair and toast in the air and thrown themselves into a decades-old call-and-response, and they will tell you, correctly, that it is one of the great nights of their lives. Same film. The difference is the room. This is the thing the streaming era has quietly forgotten: a whole category of cinema was engineered to be completed by an audience, and without the audience the engine has no fuel.

The Based on a True Crime Boom and Its Ethics

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Somewhere around the launch of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series in 2022, the true-crime dramatisation stopped being a genre and became a utility, like true-crime podcasts and true-crime cold-case Reddit threads before it. The Dahmer show topped charts worldwide, and while it did, the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims — Rita Isbell, who had delivered a famous victim-impact statement at the 1992 trial — went on the record to say no one had asked her, and that watching her own courtroom breakdown recreated for streaming felt like being robbed. That is the true-crime boom in one image: enormous profit on one side of the screen, a family that was never consulted on the other. The films and series that survive scrutiny are the ones that took that imbalance seriously before a frame was shot. Most do not.

Subtitles or Dubbing: What a Genre Film Loses Either Way

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

When Bong Joon-ho stood up at the 2020 Golden Globes and described subtitles as a one-inch-tall barrier that Anglophone audiences should learn to climb, he was making a moral case, and he was right. But the moral case skips over a mechanical fact every cinephile knows in their body: reading a film is not the same as watching one. The bottom third of the frame becomes a ticker. Your eyes drop, scan, climb back, and in that half-second Bong’s own precise blocking — the exact moment a face changes in Memories of Murder — has already moved on without you. Subtitles are the honest option. They are also a tax on the image, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never tried to catch a Kurosawa composition and a line of dialogue in the same beat.

The Giallo's Fingerprints on the Modern Slasher

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The American slasher likes to tell a tidy origin story about itself — a masked killer, a group of teenagers, a final survivor, all of it springing fully formed from a handful of late-1970s films. It is a good story and it is missing a continent. Nearly every mechanism the slasher treats as its own invention was already running, a decade earlier, in the Italian thrillers called gialli, named for the yellow covers of the cheap crime paperbacks they descended from. The black-gloved killer, the point-of-view stalk, the elaborately staged death, the amateur who has to solve the murders because the police cannot — Italy built all of it first, and the fingerprints are still on the modern slasher, smeared but unmistakable, if you know where to look.

Why the Sequel Is Where Genres Mutate

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The sequel has a terrible reputation and mostly deserves it. For every follow-up that earns its existence there are five that xerox the first film with the contrast turned up, and the word “sequel” has come to mean diminishing returns, a franchise squeezing a corpse for one more drop. That is the commercial reality. But it obscures a stranger truth that any patient watcher of genre cinema eventually notices: the sequel, precisely because it is a compromised commercial object, is where genres do their most interesting evolving. The original invents a set of rules. The sequel is contractually obliged to give you the same thing again, cannot, and in failing to repeat itself is forced to mutate. That failure is the engine of a great deal of genre history.

The Unreliable Narrator on Screen

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The unreliable narrator is a comfortable trick in prose and a genuinely dangerous one on screen. On the page, a first-person voice can withhold, distort or invent with perfect deniability, because the reader has agreed from the first sentence to see the world only through one set of eyes. Fiction can hide inside a skull. The camera cannot. Cinema, by default, shows you things — it presents images as fact, an objective window onto events, and the audience trusts that window far more completely than they ever trust a narrator’s voice. Which is exactly why, when a film makes the image itself lie, the betrayal cuts so much deeper than any literary twist. The screen breaks a promise the page never made.

The Death of the Man in the Suit: Creature Design After CGI

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000

For most of the twentieth century, a film monster was a person. Somebody sweated inside a foam-latex suit under hot lights, saw the world through a mask with terrible peripheral vision, and moved that body across a real set while a real camera watched. The constraint was total and it was the making of the whole art form. When creature design went digital, the industry celebrated the liberation — anything imaginable, no more actors fainting inside rubber — and it was right about the freedom. It was slower to notice what it had thrown away. The man in the suit was a set of limits, and those limits were where the fear lived.

The Video-Shop Aesthetic and Why It Won't Quit

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Tape has been a dead format for the better part of twenty years, and film keeps resurrecting it. Not the cassettes themselves, which mostly rot in landfill, but the look of them: the horizontal tracking bar that judders up the frame, the smeared chroma that bleeds red past its own edges, the drop-outs that punch white confetti through a dark scene. A generation of directors who were children when the last video shop closed keep reaching for that texture, and they reach for it deliberately, at cost, because clean digital could give them a spotless image for free. The question worth asking is not whether the VHS aesthetic is a fad. It has outlasted every prediction that it was one. The question is why it works, and what it actually does to a horror or science-fiction film when a director drags a pristine 4K capture back down through a decades-old degradation.