Horror Comedy - vo.rs

Spider Baby: The 1967 Gothic Black Comedy

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Spider Baby opens with Lon Chaney Jr singing the theme song, a mock-spooky ditty about cannibals and murder delivered in the voice of an actor who by 1964 had been the Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula, and knew exactly how funny and how sad it was to be doing this now. That opening tells you the whole film in ninety seconds. It is a horror picture that loves horror, mocks horror, and grieves for it, all at once, and it was made by a first-time director who understood the genre better than most people who had been working in it for decades.

Sam Raimi: From the Cabin to the Multiplex

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:00:00 +0000

There is a shot that recurs across Sam Raimi’s whole filmography, and once you notice it you cannot stop seeing it. The camera stops being an observer and becomes a predator. It skims low over the ground, tears through a forest, bursts through a window, races at a screaming face — a point of view that belongs to no character, only to a malevolent force with a body of its own. Raimi built a forty-year career on the belief that the camera is not furniture. It is a performer, and it can act.

Rubber: The Killer-Tyre Film About Watching Films

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Pitch Rubber (2010) in one sentence and it sounds like a dare you’d lose money on: a discarded car tyre comes to life in the California desert, discovers it can make things explode by force of will, and goes on a killing spree. That’s true, and it’s not remotely the whole film. Quentin Dupieux — better known to a certain crowd as the electronic musician Mr. Oizo — made the killer-tyre premise the bait for something considerably stranger: a feature-length essay on why audiences watch, disguised as the dumbest B-movie imaginable. It runs about eighty-two minutes and it is one of the few genuinely successful meta-horror comedies of its century.