Is it Horror?

Is it Horror? | Red Dawn (1984)

Is it Horror? | Red Dawn (1984)

Even when contextualized as the product of a gung-ho America juiced by patriotic fervor, some aspects of Red Dawn have not aged well. The film’s take on masculinity is so potent, you can practically smell the testosterone (yes, Virginia, it smells like victory). After they bag a deer, Matt and Jed encourage their buddy Robert (C. Thomas Howell) to drink its blood so he can feel its “spirit” and be “a real hunter.” The group handles their newfound weapons with astonishing ease, as if they’ve been firing bazookas since birth. Following the death of friends and loved ones, the young men are told to resist crying and turn their emotions to anger. It’s a wonder they don’t don animal skins and go full-on Lord of the Flies.

Is it Horror? | Sarah Kane's "Blasted" (1995)

Is it Horror? | Sarah Kane's "Blasted" (1995)

BLASTED is not an easy watch. The play’s 1995 world premiere, at London’s Royal Court Theatre, was met with outright derision. The Daily Mail called it “a disgusting feast of filth.” The Independent likened the experience of watching the play to “having your face rammed in an overflowing ashtray for starters, then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.”

Is it Horror? | Society of the Snow (2023) and The Impossible (2012)

Is it Horror? | Society of the Snow (2023) and The Impossible (2012)

It’s impossible to overstate the popularity of disaster films in the mid-to-late-1970s. The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974), The Hindenburg (1975), Black Sunday (1977), the Airport series (1970, 1975, 1977, 1979) and others were huge box office draws, with star-studded casts: Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Dean Martin, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, James Stewart, Gene Hackman, Jacqueline Bisset, Steve McQueen, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Olivia de Havilland — all showed up to have their worlds rocked.

Is it Horror? | The Zone of Interest (2023)

Is it Horror? | The Zone of Interest (2023)

It was with no small amount of excitement that I anticipated Glazer’s latest, ten years on from Under the Skin. The Zone of Interest is a German-language film set in Poland during World War II, as far from the sun-drenched Cockney mafia of Sexy Beast as you can get, and miles removed from the austere Manhattan winterscape of Birth. But that’s fitting for Glazer, whose work regularly defies categorization. After casting Natasha Romanoff as a man-devouring extraterrestrial prowling the streets of Glasgow, an adaptation of Martin Amis’ 2014 “zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological” best-seller seems as logical a move as any.

Is it Horror? | Scream (1996)

Is it Horror? | Scream (1996)

Not having really ‘discovered’ horror until my later years, which is to say, the latter half of the 2010s, I completely missed the phenomenon that was Scream, which is just as well, because its references would have flown over my head and landed somewhere in the midst of my high-brow culture intake of the time. Having consumed considerably more genre content since, thanks in large part to this podcast, I was finally in the proper headspace to watch Wes Craven’s 1996 blockbuster.

Is it Horror? | The Curse (2023)

Is it Horror? | The Curse (2023)

One of the more memorable scenes in 2004's The Incredibles (still the best Pixar film, sorry folks) occurs at the very end, when a supervillain called The Underminer (voiced by John Ratzenberger) drills his way out of the ground, sparking a supercharged Parr family team-up. The Underminer may be vanquished, but he pops up again at the beginning of The Incredibles 2, bombs, robot hands, and vacuum machine intact — proving, yet again, that you can’t keep a good Underminer down.

Is it Horror? | Music Edition

Is it Horror? | Music Edition

I don’t recall the first time I heard “Third,” but I know I was genuinely excited about it. Portishead — Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley, and Geoff Barrow — is not a prolific band. Their first album, Dummy, was released in 1994; their second, the eponymous Portishead, in 1997. Third didn’t arrive for another eleven years. Appropriately, it reflects a mature band reaching out, expanding its sound, layering new styles on top of their spooky, trip-hop instrumentation. No song on Third had a greater impact on me than “Threads.”