Horror - vo.rs

The Thing (1982): Carpenter's Paranoia Machine and What It Owes Who Goes There

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

There is a story critics like to tell about The Thing, and the story is almost true. It opened on 25 June 1982, two weeks after E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and audiences who wanted a friendly alien recoiled from John Carpenter’s version, which arrives by crashing a spaceship into the ice and then eating the sled dogs. The reviews were savage. The film lost money. Carpenter, who had come off Halloween and Escape from New York as one of the most bankable genre directors alive, spent years in the commercial cold because of it. All of that happened. What the story leaves out is that The Thing was right and everyone else was wrong, and the ice took forty years to admit it.

His House: A Ghost Story About Asylum and Debt

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The best haunted-house films are never really about the house. They are about the people who cannot leave it, and why. His House, Remi Weekes’s astonishingly assured 2020 debut, understands this so completely that it builds its entire architecture — literal and dramatic — around a couple who are told, in plain bureaucratic English, that they are not permitted to move. Bol and Rial are asylum seekers from South Sudan, granted a fragile probationary status in England on the condition that they stay put in the dilapidated council house assigned to them. The ghosts arrive almost immediately. The trap was set before the haunting started, and it was set by an immigration officer with a clipboard.

Jordan Peele: The Horror of the American Premise

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Three films into his directing career, Jordan Peele has already done something most horror directors never manage: he made the multiplex think while it was screaming. He arrived from sketch comedy, of all places, with a gift the horror establishment had half forgotten it needed — the ability to build a premise so clean and so loaded that the pitch alone does half the work. A Black man meets his white girlfriend’s unnervingly welcoming family. A family is attacked by their own doubles. A ranch tries to film the impossible thing in the sky. Each is a horror idea and a national anxiety folded into the same sentence, and Peele’s whole method is to let the two unfold together until you cannot separate the scare from the argument.

Under the Skin: Alien Cinema at Its Coldest

Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Most alien films are anxious to explain the alien. They give you a homeworld, a motive, a plan, a face you can read. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin gives you almost none of that, and it is the coldest, most genuinely unearthly film in the modern science-fiction canon because of the withholding. A woman drives a white van through Glasgow. She stops men, asks directions, offers lifts. Some of them she takes home, into a black room where the floor is a liquid that swallows them. That is nearly the whole plot, and describing it does nothing to prepare you for the experience, which is one of the great feats of pure cinema this century.

George A. Romero: The Dead as a Social Mirror

Sun, 17 May 2026 13:00:00 +0000

George Romero invented the modern zombie almost by accident, and then spent the rest of his life proving it was the most useful monster anyone had built in a generation. The creature that shuffles through his films is never really the threat. The threat is always the living — the neighbours who turn on each other, the soldiers who shoot the wrong man, the survivors who would rather bicker over territory than board up a window. Romero worked this seam for forty years from outside Hollywood, in Pittsburgh, on money he raised himself, and the independence is inseparable from the vision. Nobody was going to greenlight a film in which the horror is that America eats itself. He had to make it in the suburbs with his friends.

Dario Argento: Colour, Glass, and the Killer's Glove

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Ask a Dario Argento film to make sense and it will look at you the way a cat looks at a closed door — briefly, then never again. This is the great scandal of his career and the reason his best films outlive tidier ones: he did not care whodunnit, he cared how the light hit the knife. Plot, for Argento, is the excuse that gets the characters into the beautiful room where the terrible thing will happen. Once they are there, logic is dismissed for the evening and the film becomes a fashion shoot conducted at the point of a straight razor. Fifty years on, his imitators are legion and his best sequences remain unrepeated, because almost nobody else was willing to be this silly and this serious at the same time.

Videodrome: The Prophecy About the Screen

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Some films age into their meaning. Videodrome was a commercial disappointment in 1983 — a strange, sticky, unclassifiable thing that confused audiences who wanted either a clean horror picture or a clean idea and got neither. Then the world caught up with it. Watch it now, in a house full of screens that watch back, and David Cronenberg’s fever about television reads like a document that was simply filed forty years early. It is a horror film, an addiction study, and a piece of media theory that happens to have a pulsing, breathing videocassette in it, and the reason it endures is that its central worry has only grown truer.

Guillermo del Toro: The Monsters Are the Good Guys

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:00:00 +0000

There is a moment in almost every Guillermo del Toro film where the camera has to decide who it loves, and it always loves the wrong thing. The pale amphibian in the tank. The faun with the goat legs. The vampiric grandfather clinging to a gold beetle that grants him eternal life and a terrible thirst. Del Toro points the lens at the thing the audience has been trained to flinch from, holds it there a beat too long, and dares you to keep flinching. Thirty years and a shelf of statues later, that is still the whole trick, and it is still working.

The Fly (1986): Cronenberg's Love Story Told in Meat

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

People remember The Fly for the fingernails. The ear. The baboon turned inside out. The moment a man walks his own severed body parts to a bathroom cabinet he keeps like a museum of what he used to be. Chris Walas won an Academy Award for that makeup, and he earned it — the effects still look wet and specific and horribly plausible forty years on. But the gore is the delivery system, and mistaking it for the film is like remembering a funeral for the flowers. David Cronenberg made a monster movie whose real subject is the thing nobody wants to watch: love standing at a bedside while a body it adores dissolves.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Dread Without a Jump Scare

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

There is no one else in horror who scares you with an empty room the way Kiyoshi Kurosawa does. No jolt, no orchestral sting, no figure lunging from a cupboard. He gives you a wide, grey, badly lit space — an abandoned factory, a flooded basement, a dim clinic corridor — holds the shot longer than is comfortable, and lets your own eye do the terrifying work of scanning the corners. Something is wrong in the frame before anything happens in it. That is the Kiyoshi Kurosawa signature: dread as an atmospheric pressure rather than an event, a sense that the world itself has gone slightly, permanently off.