12/8/2023 0 Comments Simply being loved somnambulist![]() They curiously pry the mask off of the Satanic Princess’ face and a curse is unleashed, as Asa takes possession of a virginal woman in town (Steele again) and sets out to unleash her revenge. 200 years later, two doctors discover the tomb, are attacked by a bat and blood is spilled on her casket. She’s buried alongside her lover in a crypt. In the opening, Princess Asa ( Barbara Steele) is convicted of being a witch and has a bulky and spiky satanic mask nailed onto her face by a massive mallet. Black Sunday begins with a stunning and horrific opening sequence that would get the film banned in the UK for years, although it is nowhere near as violent as Bava’s films would become less than half a decade later. Chris Cabinīefore Mario Bava would direct the earliest identifiable slasher films in Italy, which genre-lovers loving know as giallos, he made this gothic throwback that could easily stand astride the best of Hammer Films’ output of the previous decade. Still, Funny Games is one of the venerable filmmaker’s most exhilarating creations, right up there with Cache, Code Unknown, and The White Ribbon, and though his moral arguments are muddled, the power of his film’s clinical visuals and menacing plot turns cannot be denied. RELATED: Every Michael Haneke Movie, Ranked From Worst to Bestįunny Games is a stunning criticism that hits like a jackhammer at certain moments, but Haneke cops out in one regard, in that he never faces his own place in the making of films that are mainly built on suffering and death. The psychotic boys intermittently address the audience, and even rewind the film at one point, suggesting that the viewers are in on their cruel activities and are, in a way, rooting for them. Two pleasant-seeming psychotics enter the home of an affluent family and put them through a series of near-sickening games in which their lives are constantly on the line. ![]() With this 1997 art-house white-knuckler, Michael Haneke honed his occasionally self-serving indictment of audiences who look toward violence, torture, and death for their entertainments to a fine point. The pairing results in an especially layered possession story that spark chills because you’re genuinely concerned for the characters, not because it’s packed with jump scares. ![]() Not only does Wan manage to make The Conjuring the Perron family’s story, establishing strong connections between characters, a charming family dynamic and then showing how the evil entity could destroy it, but he also perfectly pairs it with the Warrens’ perspective, well representing why they feel the need to help and then also the toll the case takes on them. Almost immediately after Roger ( Ron Livingston), Carolyn ( Lili Taylor) and their five daughters move into a rundown farmhouse, strange things start to happen. Based on one of their real case files, the movie centers on the Perron family. There are a lot of possession movies out there, but James Wan’s approach to bringing one of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s cases to screen in The Conjuring has far more heart and technical expertise than most. It’s a young love that starts at a convenient store (between Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright). But there is still an intimacy in Near Dark. The epically named Severen (a wild Bill Paxton) has blades at the tip of his cowboy boots, an addition that removes the need to bite, and thus removes the intimacy of feasting that most vampires previously engaged with their victims. In the best scene, they pick a bar fight. She puts them in a hybrid of both the neo-Western and the road movie that became popular in the 70s and she also seems to call bullsh*t on eternal love. These were a new breed of terrorizing clans and sorry (not sorry), Lost Boys, but Kathryn Bigelow‘s Near Dark is the best of the 1980s vampire movies. All of those groups run in packs and engage in more dangerous behaviors than the old-fashioned singular vampires of old. And that look gave filmmakers a lot of new angles to play with: gangs, bikers and junkies. Image via De Laurentiis Entertainment GroupĪfter spending the previous decade in sexploitation films, vampires re-emerged in the 80s as postmodern leather-clad punks.
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