Tag: horror movies
A Hamlet for Our Age of Racial Reckoning
In 2018, Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, where I advise Shakespeare productions, introduced me to the theater director Kenny Leon. He was hoping to persuade Kenny to direct something for Shakespeare in the Park, and asked me to talk with him. I’m a professor with no acting or directing experience, but I am good at cutting four-hour plays down to size, can explain to actors the difference between thee and you, and have written extensively about Shakespeare’s
David Cronenberg’s Dreams and Nightmares
David Cronenberg’s breakout film, “Shivers,” was both a success story and a scourge for the Canadian film industry. Released in 1975, it told the tale of a parasite that spreads through a Montreal high-rise, turning residents into sex-crazed zombies. The movie cost a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and brought in some five million, making it the highest-grossing film Canada had ever put out. Alas, it was not to everyone’s taste. Cronenberg gave his outrageous sci-fi premise a queasy sociological
‘The Ring’ Is a Modern Horror Classic
The 2002 horror film The Ring can be summarized in a delightfully analog fashion: After finding a VHS tape and receiving a phone call, a local newspaper reporter searches library archives to solve a mystery. As John Mulaney would say, that is a very old-fashioned sentence.
But while audiences today have little to fear from a ghost that travels by VHS and kills by landline, the terrors in Gore Verbinski’s modern classic are oddly resonant. The threat at the center
‘Candyman,’ Horror, and the Cinema of Black Pain
At one point in the long-awaited new film Candyman, billed as a “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 cult horror flick by the same name, a character is heading toward an inevitable confrontation with the monster. We’ve seen this moment a thousand times. The character knows now that evil is afoot. She knows that it’s of a supernatural variety. Blood has been shed. Her every step is measured and cautious. We can hear the creaking. We are tensed, ready