Bradford Louryk

Insidious (2010)

Insidious (2010)

When the movie came out, it was a bit of a sensation. It was a real genre juggernaut. I remember the poster, and being annoyed by the poster. “Insidious is.” I -S, Is in red in the middle of the title. I remember seeing the trailer. Boy, did they make liberal use of that “Insidious is.” Fashioning it into the marketing tagline to beat all marketing taglines, “Insidious is… insidious.” Which in fact, it kind of is, because it has a way of insidiously making you feel like maybe you've seen it before. And that might give you a false sense of security or complacency, until it expertly subverts or exceeds your expectations, terrifying you. But its claws are sharp and getting sharper, and they get under your skin. Because it is a little self-referential and it's a lot genre-referential.

House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Starting around 1929, America experienced this fascination with the idea of voodoo. And in July of 1932, a little pre-code film directed by Victor Halperin and starring Bela Lugosi, fresh from the grave as Dracula in the 1931 classic, was released to fairly boffo box office business and mostly mixed to negative critical assessment. This film is notable for a couple of reasons. Bela Lugosi plays a character with perhaps my favorite name in the history of cinema, “Murder Legendre.” With its scant 69-minute run time, it has the distinction of being the first full-length zombie picture ever made. About 60 years later, its title would be appropriated by one Robert Bartleh Cummings when he named his heavy metal band White Zombie. And of course, his nom de guerre in that band would be Rob Zombie.

House (1977)

House (1977)

This is the kind of movie that you might dream about making when you're eight or nine and have figured out that movies don't just happen, but they're made. Before you have any kind of regard or understanding of act structure or traditional storytelling. It’s a radical descent through stratum after stratum of artificiality that consistently left me wondering at every turn whether what I was seeing was real. Is it real to the characters or are these young fabulists taking me on constant detours through their own subjective experiences and imaginations?

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

In total, in the sum of its parts, Bride of Frankenstein pits the sacred against the profane. It shows us both the ridiculous and the sublime, sometimes in the same frame. The prototype of the Hollywood monster is entranced by the strains of Ave Maria played by a blind man on his violin. By another who is afflicted, the mute creature is taught to speak, and from thence to express his fundamental, elemental desires. And in the last reel, we see those desires satisfied in deleterious ways when they are unreciprocated. Because, as Dr. Pretorius explains, the human heart is more complex than any other part of the body.

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

Frankly, it's not hard to see the similarities between the two, between Rosemary's Baby and The Mephisto Waltz, or at least the imprint of one on the other. We've got this educated passing for sophisticated, sufficiently urbane couple, and they're drawn in by a pair of Satanists of indeterminate age, and then they get involved in magic that benefits the Satanists more than the sweet young couple. So it's a little bit Faustian, but it's got jazz hands.

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Vincent Price in the role of Edward Sheridan Lionheart is going to chew the scenery so boldly and so vividly in the kinds of important theatrical roles he always wanted to play, but felt his stature and reputation in horror cinema kept out of his reach. Luckily for Vincent Price, and by extension for us, Lionheart's final season was a survey of some of the biggest and juiciest roles in Shakespeare's canon. The Shakespeare plays contained in Theatre of Blood were more likely than not chosen for the inventiveness with which characters are dispatched than for the significance of the plays themselves, but Price does get to wrap his mouth around monologues from Hamlet, Richard III, Shylock, and on and on.

Frankenstein's Army (2013)

Frankenstein's Army (2013)

The gruesome discoveries that the recon team stumble upon: are they simply the horrors of war? Or are they somehow something even sicker? How is there artillery damage to a church in this region, wherever we are, when there have been no soldiers deployed here? Why is there a giant pile of immolated nuns? And why is there a churchyard that's just punched open with empty graves? And to return to the idea of watching the full-frame without distraction, I think this is especially important, because the director utilizes it in very complete, imaginative, and surprising ways that you might not be able to appreciate if you're not giving his composition your full attention.

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