horror

Scenes from a Screenwriter’s Marriage

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We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.

Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.

The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.

You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.

-Brandon Ledet

Urban Legend (1998)

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The 1998 college-campus horror Urban Legend resides at the crossroads of two major 1990s cultural projects, both involving the legacy of Wes Craven. First & foremost, it’s a post-Scream third wave slasher, coasting on a deluge of self-aware meta horrors starring young, hot teen actors who are conscious they are in a horror movie and provide live commentary on the tropes of the genre as they’re systematically killed. In this case, the famous-at-the-time teenyboppers in question (Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, etc.) attempt to guess the next patterned kill of a serial murderer who’s recreating long-debunked urban legends rather than recreating famous movie scenes—like in Scream—but the effect is the same. The secondary project of Urban Legend was part of a larger 1990s effort to reclaim the public reputation of Robert Englund as more than just the creep who played Freddy Kreuger, presenting him instead as a kind of effete academic. His late-80s turn as the Phantom of the Opera transported his Freddy Kreuger persona to the more refined cultural space of a period-piece opera house.  He later turned up as himself in Craven’s proto-Scream meta slasher A New Nightmare, appearing out of Kreuger drag as a thoughtful, classically trained actor haunted by the grotesqueries he was typecast as post-Elm Street fame. In Urban Legend, Englund’s past professional triumphs as Freddy Kreuger still linger in the audience’s mind as his character is floated as the most obvious suspect in the serial-killer investigations, but he’s quickly cleared of guilt and presented as something much more respectable: a bespectacled, leather-patched college professor and the leading expert in his field, which conveniently happens to be urban legends.

Of course, the only reason to return to Urban Legend all these decades past its expiration date is to pinpoint what, exactly, is the most 1990s-specific detail about it. There are plenty of late-90s time capsule contributions competing for that honor: frustrations with dial-up internet connections tying up a shared phone line, Joshua Jackson’s frosted-tips Peroxide hairdo, a meta joke at the expense of Jackson’s Dawson’s Creek fame, “Goth 4 Goth” campus hookup message boards, needle drops from Stabbing Westward and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. When I saw the film was screening on a Monday evening down the street from my house, I didn’t attend in hopes that it would hold up as a wrongly dismissed 90s classic, à la The Rage, The Craft, or Cherry Falls. I attended out of nostalgia for the film’s value as a retro Blockbuster Video rental, watched alone on my bedroom VCR when I was old enough to crave teenage transgressions but too young to experience them first-hand. It was a pleasant time to return to, if not only to reminisce about a moment when teen slashers were slickly produced, hot commodities. Every exterior scene involves a completely unnecessary crane shot, and every nighttime slashing sequence is set during a music video-style thunderstorm for atmospheric effect, flaunting money most modern slashers couldn’t afford to scrape together. The only embarrassing thing about the movie, really, is watching the adults in the room have to play archetypes for mouthbreathing teens’ entertainment: Brad Dourif as a creepy gas station attendant, Loretta Devine as a Coffy-obsessed campus cop and, of course, Robert Englund as a learned professor of the macabre.

As for the urban-legends-obsessed serial killer conceit, even the teenage victims point out that the premise is “a bit of a stretch.” There are a few obvious go-to urban legends that map well to the teen slasher format. There’s the classic “The call’s coming from inside the house” story of the babysitter being killed by a home invader, restaged here in a frat house much like how the foundational 70s slasher Black Christmas restaged it in a sorority house. The first kill involves an axe murderer hiding in the backseat of a woman’s car, played for ironic humor as she sings along to the “Turn around” refrain of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” painfully off-key. The killer’s motivation being a disastrous prank version of the “flashing headlights gang initiation” legend is similarly effective. Three or four clever kills are not enough to fill the 100-minute runtime, though, which inspires the movie to reach for urban legends that don’t fully map to the genre. In the most egregious example, one character is force-fed a combo of Pop Rocks & Drano in a violent escalation of the schoolyard myth that combining Pop Rocks & soda will explode your stomach. Otherwise, things get exceedingly silly when the legends are updated with modern twists, like switching phone calls for online chatrooms or creating new teen slang in which victims-to-be each share their “favorite U.L.” at the campus coffee shop. With the gnarly exception of a microwaved dog, the violence of the film is never especially gruesome, but it does find plenty of novelty in its post-Scream meta slasher premise. It’s a wonder there were any legends left for its two less-remembered sequels; it seems like this one ran through all the standards.

If you want a smart, level-headed version of this movie, you’re much better off revisiting the 1992 classic Candyman, which starts with a grad student recording a broad range of urban legends before settling on one specific, hyperlocal one that destroys her life. The modern folklore academia of Urban Legend is much broader, and it only serves two cynical purposes: cashing in on the popularity of Scream and making Robert Englund appear intellectual. A couple decades later, the only cultural significance the movie has gained is as a reminder that Jared Leto was once passable as a normal, functional human being, albeit a strikingly pretty one. Everything else is pure late-90s nostalgia, the cinematic equivalent of binging Stabbing Westward & Cherry Poppin’ Daddies music videos on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Fade to Black (1980)

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“Why don’t you live in the real world with the rest of us?”
“No thanks.”

During the opening credits of the early-80s horror curio Fade to Black, our serial killer anti-hero Eric Binfold (Dennis Christopher) is mumbling to himself about Bogart & books, likely in reference to the Howard Hawks noir The Big Sleep. He’s then revealed to be lounging in his underwear, studying local TV broadcast & repertory theatre listings in the newspaper to plan out his week. His bedroom is wallpapered with movie posters for violent genre films like Don’t Bother to Knock, Frenzy, and White Heat. His first kill, halfway into the film, is pushing his wheelchair-using adoptive aunt down their apartment stairs, inspired by an infamously vicious murder in Kiss of Death. He is later depicted masturbating to a Marilyn Monroe poster while wearing a Nosferatu t-shirt. He changes his name from Eric Binfold to Cody Jarrett in honor of James Cagney’s performance in White Heat, reflecting the way he deals with his mommy issues by violently lashing out against the world. Eric Binfold is living my exact life and watching the exact same movies I am, except that he’s a sociopathic murderer, and it scares me.

Fade to Black is an uncomfortably prescient film about how anyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate. It makes visual allusions to early slashers like Psycho & Halloween to help guide the audience with genre-template guardrails, but the horror classic it most closely resembles is Willard. All Eric Binfold wants to do is be left alone to watch his movies, but he keeps being hassled by family, coworkers, and bullies who interrupt his hobby. Like how Willard eventually exacts revenge on the world by weaponizing his own hobby of training rats, Eric snaps and goes on a killing spree using The Movies as his weapon of choice. He dresses as vampires, cowboys, and classic-noir gangsters, hunting anyone who belittles his favorite pastime of sitting alone in the dark, watching a glowing screen. Dennis Christopher gives an intensely nervous performance in the role, calling into question why Willard got the Crispin Glover remake treatment instead of this one. He’s also, of course, a prototypical incel – not committing his first murder until he’s stood up by an Australian flirt who happens to vaguely resemble Marilyn Monroe. What a dweeb; I hate that he’s so relatable.

The real horror here is the isolation & frustration of dedicating every waking thought to the antisocial pursuit of Watching Movies. It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, but given the choice between “escapist trash” and the cruel mundanity of the real world, it’s a relatively attractive one. The trick when “going to the movies a lot” is “your thing” is to remember how to talk & relate to other people in the hours you inevitably have to spend outside the theater. You can’t just fire off movie trivia at normal, functional human beings and consider the exchange Polite Conversation. Universal’s Famous Monsters aren’t famous to everyone; you have to recognize that you are the town freak, not the local genius, and adjust your behavior accordingly. When Eric’s killing spree spirals fully out of control and he takes the Marilyn impersonator hostage at gunpoint, the taboo he can’t wait to break is touching a movie theater screen with his hands, something that wouldn’t register as a blasphemous transgression to most. He’s an avatar for Cinephile Brain Rot at its most rotten, another reminder to periodically step outside the cinema and touch some grass.

-Brandon Ledet

The Monkey (2025)

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I was looking forward to The Monkey with great anticipation. Longlegs was one of my favorite movies of last year, and although I’m colder on The Blackcoat’s Daughter than Brandon is, I’m mostly positive about Osgood Perkins’s overall body of work, so it’s unfortunate that The Monkey didn’t live up to my expectations. Extrapolated from a Stephen King short story about a toy monkey who visits unexplained and supernatural death whenever he clangs his cymbals together, Perkins has reworked the story into one about twin brothers (Christian Convery in the past and Theo James in the present) who find among their long-disappeared father’s belongings a “like life” toy organ grinder monkey. All too quickly, they learn that winding the monkey up by turning its key sets in motion its little drum routine (the cymbal monkey is now under copyright to Disney, for Toy Story reasons), and when it plays its final drumbeat, someone dies. When their mother dies as a result of the monkey’s machinations, they resolve to get rid of it by throwing it down an abandoned well, only for it to resurface twenty-five years later and start to kill the innocent again. 

There’s a lot to like here. This is the first of Perkins’s works to fully commit to being funny for most of its run time, and when it is funny, it’s hilarious. The deaths here are as comically over the top as they come, and not without a bit of Final Destination-esque Rube Goldbergian overdesign that lends them even more humor. The death of Sarah Levy’s character Aunt Ida is a particularly gratuitous one, as she first falls through the basement stairs and gets a face full of fishing hooks for her trouble; but after she painstakingly removes the tackle and sanitizes the wounds with rubbing alcohol, she accidentally lights her face on fire, which sends her running screaming into the night and impaling her head on the real estate post outside of her house. It’s slapstick horror comedy at its best, and when the film focuses on comedic violence, it shines. A woman dives into a swimming pool that has been electrified by a fallen air conditioning unit and, instead of simply being shocked or fried by the current, completely explodes like a water balloon full of human viscera; Uncle Chip gets reduced to little more than ground meat when he’s trampled to death in his sleeping bed by a stampede while out camping. And it’s a delight! 

What doesn’t work and what ends up dragging the film down is the semblance of narrative consistency that it tries to maintain. Adult Hal (the nerdy one) is now divorced and working in a supermarket, and he only sees his son once a year on the kid’s birthday. Upon arriving at the home of his ex-wife’s much more successful new husband, parenthood advice author Ted (Elijah Wood), he learns that Ted plans to adopt Hal’s son Petey (Colin O’Brien) outright, and Hal will lose all custody and visitation rites. His attempts to give his son one last fond memory by taking him to a horror theme park go awry when he learns of the death of his Aunt Ida, who took the boys in as children when their mother (Tatiana Maslany) was killed by the monkey. Believing that the monkey has returned, he goes back to the home and tries to find the monkey so that he can keep it out of the hands of anyone who would use it maliciously, and hilarity ensues as people continue to die—gloriously and gorily—all around him, while he works to keep his son safe from what he believes to be the family’s curse. Elsewhere, Adult Bill (who was the worst kind of piece of shit as a kid) is up to his own schemes, which include seeking the monkey through his own means, including a longstanding reward on the thing, which is claimed by local punk Ricky (Rohan Campbell), who develops his own fascination with the object. 

This is a film that’s front-loaded with all of the best parts, as its opening, set in 1999, follows Bill and Hal as kids and their relationship with their single mother. In the prologue, we learn that their father (Adam Scott) had attempted to return the monkey to a pawn shop, only for the monkey to start its drumbeat, with disastrous results. He does see a flamethrower in the store, however, and uses it on the monkey; this is the last that we see of him, and when the kids ask about their father, their mother reveals that he literally went out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never returned. The relationship between the boys and their mother is a fun one, and while Theo James is a fine enough actor, he cannot help but be unfavorably compared to Maslany, who imbues every one of her Act I scenes with enough charisma, charm, and comedic timing to fill most films. She’s a delight here, especially playing off of Convery, who effectively conveys two very different boys who happened to have shared a womb. Even with a general lack of comedic violence in that opening, there’s still a warmth and a charm that Maslany brings to life (her constant reference to Annie the babysitter as “Babysitter Annie” as if that were her full name is particularly cute). Young Bill is effective as an unrepentant bully who makes Hal’s life hell at home and in school, as he shares embarrassing details about Hal with a gaggle of mean girls that leads to them stealing his pants and pelting him with bananas (because of the monkey). 

Once we move into the present day, things get off to a pretty strong start. I mentioned Aunt Ida’s ignominious death above, and it turns out that the monkey is currently working overtime as the residents of his old hometown are dropping left and right in horrible accidents: real estate agents blown to bolognese bits by poorly maintained firearms, guys falling victim to their own lawn mowers (a possible reference to King’s Maximum Overdrive, as the film is peppered with others, like the fact that Babysitter Annie’s full name is Annie Wilkes), that sort of thing. Where the whole thing falls apart is when it attempts to be sincere, or (more charitably) when its mockery of sincerity is insufficiently dissimilar from the real thing. The relationship between Hal and Petey is one that we have very little investment in, as it’s clear that Hal is all but completely absent from his son’s life, and although it’s made clear that Ted is a strange man, there’s no reason to think that this change in the legal structure of Petey’s family will have much of an impact on him (or Hal) at all. Hal’s constant monologued fears about the potential for the monkey to be a curse on his bloodline didn’t stop him from getting married and having a son in the first place, and that even further precludes us from thinking that he cares about Petey all that much. I’m even less invested in the relationship between the estranged adults Bill and Hal, especially as the more antagonistic of the pair is played much more broadly than the other; it should be either campier or reined in a bit to better match Hal’s energy. Even if the film is trying to mock these relationships, the way that it attempts to rationalize and figure out rules for how the monkey works ground everything to a halt for me, after I was riding pretty high on the comedy of the first half. It’s not that the back half is without its fun moments. An earlier reference to skydiving weddings pays off hilariously and gruesomely in the climax, and the last minute before the credits roll provides another fun payoff that feels like something out of the VHS horror comedy era, and I got a kick out of both. It’s just too uneven and the back half too dull to live up to my expectations. When it’s funny, it’s wickedly funny, but when it’s not, it drags. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Video Violence (1987)

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I wonder how true film snobs feel about the current moment in restoration & distribution. In past decades, Janus Films & The Criterion Collection were the standard-bearers for cinephilic home media, putting a heavy emphasis on getting classic art films into customers’ living rooms before they were lost to time. Nowadays, that effort has been overrun by a gang of boutique distribution labels that produce high-gloss prints of low-class genre schlock, best represented by Vinegar Syndrome’s dozens of genre-specific sublabels and its pornographic sister company Mélusine. Instead of collecting the cleanest scans possible of masterworks by the likes of Bresson, Godard, and Buñuel, modern cinephiles spend hundreds of dollars hunting down pristine copies of bargain-bin martial arts novelties, shot-on-video slashers, and vintage narrative pornos. I am not complaining. Personally, I love that there’s a Blu-ray company that specializes in every disreputable subgenre you can name, catering to an increasingly niche clientele of antisocial freaks (myself included), but I also imagine there’s a silent class of classic film snobs out there distraught by the sordid state of things.

To see some of that old-fashioned film snobbery in action, I recommend returning to its roots in retro video store culture, as represented in the 1987 cult curio Video Violence. It’s a shot-on-video horror film about a video store owner who’s disgusted with his gorehound clientele, directed by a real-life video store clerk who was disgusted with his gorehound clientele. For classic film snobs, it’s a cathartic screed against the scumbag schlock gobblers who overrepresent low-brow genre trash in the all-important Film Canon of great works. For the horror nerds  actually likely to watch it, it’s the filmic equivalent of getting smacked on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. For the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between those polar extremes, it’s a documentary relic of 80s video store culture, with lengthy explanations of video-return drop boxes, membership cards, late fees, and the democratizing nature of the display shelf (wherein when a customer requests “that chainsaw movie” they’re handed a copy of Pieces, not the more obvious Tobe Hooper classic). At a time when retro hipster video stores like L.A.’s Vidiots (or, locally, Future Shock) are making headlines and Alex Ross Perry is constructing feature-length essay films entirely out of video store representation in pre-existing films (Videoheaven), that temporal snapshot of 80s video stores in their prime is just as essential as documenting the film nerd-culture bickering that terrorized their aisles.

Gary Schwartz stars as director Gary Cohen’s onscreen surrogate, a disgruntled cinephile who used to program art cinema in an New York City repertory theater and now finds himself renting out video tapes to local yokels with no discerning taste. He’s trapped in small-town America, where everyone is an anti-social loner with a VCR, frustrated that his customers would rather watch cheap-o horror movies or “the occasional triple X’r” in the privacy of their own homes than chat about “the Woody Allen or a classic Abbot & Costello” with the knowledgeable store clerk. Hosting a podcast would have fixed him. Instead, he grows increasingly disgusted with the mouthbreathing ghouls he peddles tapes to, especially once they start returning home-made tapes to the store instead of the professional movies they rented. Several mysterious blank tapes land on the poor movie buff’s counter, which he soon discovers are real-life snuff films made by the gorehound townies, torturing & dismembering outsiders who don’t fit in with the local culture. Of course, he foolishly investigates these horrific deaths on a vigilante mission and eventually becomes a videotaped victim himself, with his humble video store ultimately run as a co-op by the bloodthirsty freaks who used to come to him for their gore flicks before they started making their own.

The only thing Video Violence hates more than its audience is itself. While describing the mysterious snuff tapes to his incredulous wife, our video-store-clerk-in-peril explains that he knows the violence in them is real because it’s all shot on video, likening the production values of that format to soap operas & TV commercials, not a proper film. Its most hateful “fuck you” to its audience is a scene in which a customer asks whether a horror film titled Blood Cult is rated R for violence or for nudity, since she’s only willing to show it to her young children if there’s no nudity. So, when the staged snuff footage then lingers on grotesque shot-on-video violence—like a human arm being processed by a deli slicer or a basement sadist giving his screaming stab victim a bloody kiss—it feels like being potty trained by having your face shoved into your own piss. You can absolutely feel the difference between this self-hating, “Is this what you sick fucks want?” approach to video gore vs. the more self-indulgent, guilty-pleasure gore of Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, which delivers the same goods with introspection rather than revulsion. Video Violence is a movie made by a classic cinephile who’s disgusted with what’s been done to his artform of choice, and I imagine that sentiment is still lurking out there somewhere in the ether now that the vintage-schlock lunatics are running the boutique-label asylum.

-Brandon Ledet

Heart Eyes (2025)

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Christopher Landon has his heart set on reviving the slasher, and he only has one plan on how to pull that off. In Happy Death Day, Landon combined the slasher with the time-loop Groundhog’s Day comedy, hoping to bring some novelty to a horror template that’s been stale since at least the late 1990s. In Freaky, he combined the slasher with the 80s body-swap comedy, and now, as a producer & writer on the latest slasher-mashup Heart Eyes, he has repeated the gimmick by combining the slasher with the mainstream romcom. All of these novelty mashups have a killer logline premise and a few amusing individual gags, but they’re not doing much to revive the slasher on its own merits. If anything, by comparing & merging the slasher with other genres decades beyond their own respective expiration dates, Landon is making a dispiriting admission that it is an effectively dead medium. It’s like improvising a full meal out of several incongruent, insufficient portions of leftovers before they get tossed out or mold in the fridge. Sure, it’s filling, but it’s also desperate and ultimately unsatisfying.

To be specific, Heart Eyes combines the early 2000s third-wave slasher with the 2010s straight-to-Netflix romcom, inadvertently calling attention to how long both genres have been culturally dormant (and how dire of a state they were in when they were most recently relevant). The romcom plot at its center is purposefully tropey as a They Came Together-style parody of the genre, complete with verbal references to decades-old relics like Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Olivia Holt (doing her best Kate Hudson) stars as an over-worked, under-compensated marketing professional whose latest, failed ad campaign has put her job in jeopardy. Mason Gooding (doing his best Ryan Phillippe) co-stars as the hotshot ad agency hunk who’s threatening to take over her job but, wouldn’t you know it, they end up falling for each other despite the professional conflict. Of course, this swooning reverie is broken when a masked maniac who only kills lovers—only on Valentine’s Day—interrupts their meet cute with meaty cuts, hunting the unlikely couple during their first after-hours business meeting together while they desperately insist that it is not a date.

If there’s any thematic justification for this clunky genre mashup, it’s based in a cynicism against modern romance, as annually escalated by the cultural Valentine’s Day ritual. Heart Eyes ties its slasher-romance premise to a longer violent-romantic literary tradition, citing Romeo & Juliet, Bonnie & Clyde, and Jack & Rose as iconic couples who meet a violent end in their respective stories. In practice, though, its only real commentary on the nature of romance is mired in current, derisive assessments of love in the internet age, as typified by social media envy, dating apps, incels, kinks, throuples, etc. It’s a rallying cry for anyone frustrated with the state of modern romance, offering ironic, gory counterprogramming for people who groan at the very mention of Valentine’s Day, an emblem of a great societal failure. Thankfully, the mascot of that counterprogramming is at least well designed: a leather-hooded figure with glowing hearts for eyes and a full arsenal of deadly weapons, including some Cupid arrows for the sake of holiday-specific branding. The reveal of that mysterious killer’s identity is a bit of a letdown, but the mask is memorably distinct and the kills are memorably brutal, which is more than most rote slashers deliver.

Speaking of romantic traditions, the Valentine’s Day slasher is a subgenre with its own history of unrated gems, namely Valentine & My Bloody Valentine. If Heart Eyes has a permanent place in the greater horror canon, it’s as a novelty to be watched on that specific holiday, the way dedicated horror nerds plan their calendar around titles like April Fool’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Christmas, and New Year’s Evil. That seasonal context is much more forgiving to its charms than the context of Christopher Landon’s career project of saving the slasher through an ongoing series of genre mashups. As a blending of the slasher and the romcom, Heart Eyes feels disappointingly out of date and insincere, especially when compared to more conceptually thorough mashups like last year’s slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature. So much of the modern slasher’s current state is defined by nostalgia for past successes, with recent revivals of Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Slumber Party Massacre being typical examples (along with broader pastiches like Ti West’s X trilogy). Tying that revival to other long-stale genres like the romcom and the body-swap comedy doesn’t exactly imply progress or innovation; it’s a lateral move at best.

-Brandon Ledet

Dark Match (2025)

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Very early on in the first year of Swampflix, I reviewed a bad-on-purpose horror comedy called WolfCop, about a werewolf who’s “half man, half wolf, and all cop”. I remember having fun with the absurd novelty of that film’s premise and throwback 80s aesthetic, but I also remember finding the plot-heavy journey to those pleasures to be frustratingly tedious. A decade later, not much has changed. WolfCop director Lowell Dean has a new straight-to-Shudder horror film called Dark Match that repeats all the exact highs and lows of his werewolf-cop movie, except now mapped to the milieu of 1980s regional pro wrestling circuits. Infinity Pool & Possessor cinematographer Karim Hussain makes great use of Dark Match‘s late-80s setting by submerging its hyperviolent pro wrestling matches under a thick layer of VHS haze, often shooting its actors in uncomfortable, drunken close-ups like an unexperienced videographer operating the era’s bulky cameras for the very first time. The story also works its way up to a fun, bloody bar-napkin premise once it lures its minor pro wrestling promotion out to a backwoods cult compound for untelevised death matches, which turn out to be a Satanic ritual involving novelty weapons themed to Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. The problem is that it’s a long, trudging journey to the over-the-top joys of that core premise, repeating all of the sins and virtues of WolfCop along the way.

If there’s anything that’s improved about Lowell Dean’s high-premise genre exercises in the past decade, it’s in Dark Match‘s tonal progression towards sincerity. Wrestling hall-of-famer Chris Jericho hams it up as the rural cult leader who’s engineered the death matches that liven up the third act, but he’s mostly included as a prop. Aisha Issa stars as our POV wrestler, Miss Behave, who’s the most talented grappler on her promotion’s roster but has to play heel due to the small-town racism of the venues they entertain. A stunted career spent putting over bubbly blonde white women leaves the Trinidadian cynic in an eternally rotten mood, which makes her sharply aware of the sour vibes at the Satanic cult’s pro wrestling sleepaway camp long before the death matches’ decapitations & disembowelings. The resulting tension falls somewhere between a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Get Out and a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Green Room, paling in comparison to either overt reference point. Thankfully, the four killer wrestling bouts at the center of the film liven things up with some true, gruesome novelty, and the sincerity of Miss Behave’s journey to that violent escalation prevent it from devolving into winking, smug irony. Unfortunately, those matches make up less than a third of the total runtime, and the remaining scenes of sincere drama are effectively dead air.

For a much more efficient, satisfying version of what Dark Match is going for, check out the 2011 novelty horror Monster Brawl, which simulates a feature-length pro wrestling Pay-Per-View where all of the combatants are Famous Monster archetypes: a werewolf, a mummy, a zombie, a Frankenstein, etc. However, please keep in mind that everyone I recommend that movie to absolutely hates it. Dark Match only truly comes alive during its gore-gimmicked pro wrestling bouts, having obvious fun with the visual textures of vintage TV broadcasts of the sport (despite the implications of its title). Monster Brawl maintains kayfabe for its entire runtime, never breaking from its TV broadcast premise for jags of dramatic tedium. That fully committed format leaves a lot more room for supernaturally violent in-ring action, which is the only reason an audience would stream one of these novelty horrors in the first place. Given that Monster Brawl is loved by seemingly no one but me, maybe it doesn’t matter that Dark Match falls short of its fully-fleshed-out ideal. Maybe all that matters is that, like Lowell Dean, I’m still wasting my time on disposable trivialities like this ten years since our last passing moment together. Regardless of whether the movies that bond us are any good, we are brothers in schlock.

-Brandon Ledet

Companion (2025)

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It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Tomie (1998)

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A few months ago, we talked about the 2000 live action Junji Ito adaptation of Uzumaki on the podcast. This month, my most frequent arthouse viewing companion wanted to take over calendar duties for our outings, and he expressed immediate interest in Tomie, based on a particular line in the blurb calling it a “peculiar tale of an evil high school femme fatale whose kiss drives men to madness.” The “kiss” element is perhaps overstated there, but this is nonetheless a creepy little feature that I enjoyed quite a lot, and is a much more accessible film than Uzumaki was. 

Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura) is a young photography student living with her boyfriend Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano), a chef at a local restaurant. She’s also undergoing regressive hypnotherapy under the care of Dr. Hosono (Yoriko Douguchi) to uncover what really happened to her during a recent period of total amnesia. She gets an update from her landlord that there’s a new tenant in the apartment beneath hers, a recent high school graduate named Kenichi (Kenji Mizuhashi). Although she does not meet her new neighbor, we get to see that he is raising a decapitated head as a baby, which very quickly transforms into a child, then a teenager under his care. This is Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno), who is not so much a young woman as she is some kind of evil entity, as we learn from Detective Harada (Tomorowo Taguchi), who comes to Dr. Hosono with a seemingly impossible story. As it turns out, he’s looking for Tsukiko, as she and another young girl named Tomie were classmates and best friends, before their entire class broke out in a rash of murders and suicides, with Tomie ultimately being decapitated. However, upon further investigation, he has found a series of such events that have been happening for over a century, all centering around a woman with the name Tomie Kawakami, her seduction of a man with a wife or girlfriend, and an outbreak of madness and violence that ends with Tomie’s death. He has come to believe that there is a supernatural element at play, and that learning the truth about what happened during the period that Tsukiko cannot remember holds the key to solving the mystery. 

As we watched Uzumaki so recently, it’s difficult not to view this film in conversation with that one, especially as they were also released in such close proximity to one another. Uzumaki is an artifact of early digital filmmaking, with sickly green color correction, Further, that film’s narrative demand for repeated spiral imagery also required the use of computer-generated imagery which was not up to the task at hand. Although Tomie also centers around people being driven mad and acting out violently, the impetus is merely the presence of a wraithlike woman, which makes for a much easier transition into live action presentation. We don’t see Tomie’s face until long after the film’s midpoint. Instead, we see her from the back, her face completely hidden by her hair, or in silhouette. There are no distractingly bad CGI tornadoes or hair spirals here to detract from the horror that the film is trying to convey, and Tomie remains a frightening presence throughout as a result. She lingers in doorways, she glides down the street in pursuit of a victim, and our lack of an impression of her makes this all the more interesting. She enters (or re-enters, rather) Tsukiko’s life through her extended circle, first by having her caretaker move into the downstairs apartment sight unseen, then by getting a job at the restaurant where Yuuichi works, where her (still invisible to the audience) beauty causes the manager and Yuuichi’s co-workers to start to compete for her affection, with disastrous results. Even Tsukiko’s landlord eventually falls under Tomie’s spell, attacking her when she enters the flat below hers and discovers the dead body of one of her friends. Eventually, the two are reunited, and their true history is revealed. 

Apparently, this film kicked off a franchise that includes eight more movies about Tomie, continuing the story from where it ends here (Tomie: Replay, was even released on a double bill with Uzumaki). This was fairly common practice for J-Horror of the time; just take a look at how many sequels there were to Ju-on and Ringu, both of which were released in the same year as Tomie. There’s not much information about those films online, certainly not enough for me to make a judgment about whether they’re worth checking out. I’m sure that there’s value in continuing to adapt the rest of the manga on which they are based, but this is a perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it. We learn in the backstory that Tsukiko spread pictures of Tomie around school with “monster girl” written on them, and she has recurring dreams about this photograph that portend a dark reunion between the two girls in the near future, as well as a connection that’s more consequential than it initially appears. 

When it comes to effective screen boogeymen, Tomie herself is a standout as well. For much of the film, we see very little of her. In the first scene of the film, she’s just a head in a plastic bag, a singular eye peering out of it (which became the film’s iconic poster image), and then we see nothing of her face for a long time. Even in the scene where Detective Harada visits Dr. Hosono, he shows her a picture of the class of students that Tsukiko, Tenichi, and Tomie were in, but Tomie’s face is scratched out, as if the precise nature of her evil prevents her image from being recreated. When she gets work at the restaurant where Tsukiko’s boyfriend works, there’s a distinct contrast between the malice the audience feels radiating from her and the effect that her face, which remains in shadow, has on the men around her. It’s effective, and the reveal that she looks like a normal girl—a pretty girl, certainly, but no more so than any of the other women cast in the film—but one with an otherworldly oddness. This did start to come apart a little at the end, however, as I prefer her unassuming soft-spokenness over whatever was happening at the end when she was trying to feed Tsukiko live roaches. It moves from deft and subtle to a little too vibey, and the shift moves too quickly to fully work. 

Still, this is a perfectly fun late-90s J-horror movie. It reminded me of others from about this same time. In particular, the hypnotherapy plot reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure released just the year prior. The conversation between the two films was further solidified by this movie’s violence largely emerging from people being mesmerized (although this time it’s by a demon). There’s also something very The Thing about the way that Tomie is an unslayable enemy who, even when reduced to nothing more than a head, will regrow like a starfish to restart a cycle of violence. Definitely worth the watch if you can find it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond