Slow Burn - vo.rs

Session 9: Asbestos, Silence, and the Empty Asylum

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a particular horror in being told to hurry inside a building that wants you to slow down. Session 9, Brad Anderson’s 2001 film, is built almost entirely from that tension. Five men in hazmat suits have a week to strip the asbestos from a vast abandoned mental hospital. They are behind schedule, underbid, over-caffeinated, and the walls around them are lousy with a century of other people’s suffering. Nobody is sure whether the thing pulling the crew apart is the place, the money, or something one of them carried in through the door.

Elevated Horror and the Backlash Against the Slow Burn

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Somewhere around 2015 a new phrase started appearing in reviews, and it caused more argument than any film it was attached to. “Elevated horror.” The term arrived to describe a wave of slow, dread-soaked, formally ambitious genre pictures — Robert Eggers’s The Witch, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and soon the twin peaks of Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar — many of them distributed by A24, whose logo became shorthand for a certain kind of tasteful terror. And the moment the phrase caught on, a counter-army mobilised to hate it, because “elevated” carries an unmistakable insult in its tailcoat: elevated above what, exactly?

Audition: Miike's Hour of Romance Before the Wire

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The most quoted thing about Audition is the sound, and if you have seen it you already heard it in your head reading that sentence — a bright, chirping, almost cheerful syllable repeated as a woman goes to work with a length of wire. Takashi Miike’s 1999 film has been filed for a quarter of a century under “extreme cinema”, shorthand for the final twenty minutes, and the filing does the film a quiet violence. Because the horror of Audition is not the wire. The horror is the hour of tenderness Miike builds before it, so carefully and so sincerely that the audience falls for the same trap the protagonist does.