Storytelling wouldn’t be anything without technology, and neither would genre; horror itself is so shaped and defined by the ways that we tell it, make it, and create it. From viral videotapes to mysterious records that contain bewitching spells, the technology filmmakers and artists use says as much about them, about horror, and about creation itself as the stories themselves. Urban legends spread through word of mouth in a marginalized community in one film, and are hidden from the public by the government despite heavy filmic evidence in another. These films are great horror movies, sure; but they’re also about the horror genre and how technology impacts how we interact, engage, and are shaped by those stories, technology more broadly, and the ongoing conversation between horror, technology and audiences.
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Eyes Of Laura Mars
- 1978 Movie
- 2.2/5
A fashion photographer (Faye Dunaway) begins seeing horrific murders when she looks through the lensfinder of her camera, her shoot setups beginning eerily to look a lot like the slayings she's been hallucinating. An American take on the giallo, Kershner's chilling look at sex, violence, and photography is saturated in 1970s style and consumerist obsession.23Eyes Of Laura Mars 1978 Movie •2.2/5Neo noir mystery-thriller film starring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee...A fashion photographer (Faye Dunaway) begins seeing horrific murders when she looks through the lensfinder of her camera, her shoot setups beginning eerily to look a lot like the slayings she's been hallucinating. An American take on the giallo, Kershner's chilling look at sex, violence, and photography is saturated in 1970s style and consumerist obsession.
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The Lords Of Salem
- 2013 Movie
- 2.7/5
Though well known with a stellar career as a psychobilly metal musician, Rob Zombie’s love of exploitation and horror cinema has shaped his own turns as an auteur, his grimy and graphic films like House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects directly in conversation with a subgenre of filmmaking that thrived in drive-ins and run down movie houses. In The Lords of Salem, he and collaborator/muse/partner Sherri Moon Zombie, as a recovering addict local radio DJ in Salem who receives a strange record by a band called The Lords, redirect their focus to examine how technology, music, and horror are ever in a Devilish dance macabre. With hallucinatory imagery and disturbing sound design, The Lords of Salem casts an unforgettable spell.
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New Nightmare
- 1994 Movie
- 3.3/5
By the early 1990s, horror master Wes Craven had already been behind the creation of legendary genre works such as The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left, and, of course, he was father of Freddy Krueger, the grotesque, (sometimes snarky) razor gloved dream demon from the wildly successful A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Being the target of campaigns against violence in movies throughout the ‘80s, and realizing that his Nightmare franchise had gone astray (after leaving involvement with the series, they were seven films in and Freddy was more of a wise-cracking figure than one of fear), Craven took a reboot into his own hands. Bringing Freddy into the real world as the production of a new Nightmare movie begins, the original Final Girl from the film, Heather Lagenkamp (as herself) begins wonder about the longterm impact of the films on her psyche, and on that of her child, just as a series of mysterious murders begins popping up around Los Angeles. Laying out the blueprint for the meta meditation on horror, society, genre, cinema history, and satire that he would continue to explore in Scream in a couple of years, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is the ultimate testament to horror cinema as both psychological trap… and escape.
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Perfect Blue
- 1998 Movie
- 4.2/5
Codifying much of the look and language of popular fandom today, Satoshi Kon’s anime classic imagines a world where pop stars and actors, like the film’s Mima Kirigoe, can be demanded to change at their audience’s will. Leaving the J-pop group that made her famous, her gradual ascent into acting fame is not only tarnished by someone stalking her every move, but also by the unbearable pressure of perfection, one that rears its head around every corner in a technological society that is evolving at a breakneck pace. A heavy influence on Darren Aronofsky (he even licensed the film to recreate a shot for hi film Requiem for a Dream, and Black Swan is a direct descendant), Kon plunges the viewer in a vision of technology as a means to create closer proximity to our idols that is both of our past but also of our future in horrifying ways.
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Grindhouse
- 2007 Movie
- 3.4/5
The shared love of exploitation movies, B movies, and other trash treasures can be found in the DNA throughout all of Robert Rodriguz (Spy Kids, From Dusk Till Dawn) and Quentin Tarantino’s (Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds) careers. In 2007, they embarked on a project, while also enlisting the help of fellow trash lovers Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, and Eli Roth, to bring back the kind of dirty, lurid, vulgar movies they loved as a kid and that they would watch on video. Taking its name from the slang term these movie houses and drive in theatres were called (from the way the reels would just grind through projector after projector), the two created a bizarre and brilliant memory project, a real double feature with their own versions, odes, and idealizations of glorious B-movies: Rodriguez with his zombie apocalypse extravaganza Planet Terror, starring Rose McGowan as a stripper with a machine gun leg; and Tarantino’s Death Proof, a slasher movie where the killer uses a souped up muscle car to take out his victims, with Kurt Russell as psychotic Stuntman Mike. A thrillingly entertaining experiment in nostalgia, each film featuring favorite tropes and cliches and riddled with scratches and film damage, Grindhouse relishes in the beauty of cinematic vulgarity.
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Scream 3
- 2000 Movie
- 3.7/5
Wes Craven’s Scream revitalized the slasher genre in unexpected ways by challenging, satirizing, and critiquing the very genre it adored, deconstructing its tropes and archetypes, while reveling in its authentic scares. Its followup continued to poke and prod at the genre’s impulses, but it wasn’t really until its third entry, heavily reworked from original screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s original pitch for a threequel, it made good on the franchise’s promise to connect the dots between the history of horror and its greater legacy in society and culture. Production of yet another Stab movie is interrupted when its cast gets killed off one by one; but the murders aren’t only connected to Sidney’s (Neve Campbell) never-ending traumatic life, but to a deeper history of abuse and horror lurking in the shadows of Hollywood. Though much maligned and considered the weakest entry in the Scream series, Scream 3 innovatively considers what happens when personal trauma has spun off into public entertainment for all to watch.
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Funny Games
- 2008 Movie
- 3.7/5
The premise of Funny Games US is somewhat unusual: A shot for shot remake of his 1997 Austrian home invasion thriller Funny Games, filmmaker Michael Haneke takes note just how different trying to recreate the same thing can be. With Naomi Watts and Tim Roth playing the unfortunate affluent homeowners, and Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the young, socio/psychopathic invaders, Haneke both creates a harrowing vision of violation and terror, as horrific games are played, as well as experiment in uncanniness. How does our relationship to film and culture change when the same things get remade over and over again? What’s the same and what’s different about them? And how does that shape our relationship to the technology that’s used to craft it and, ultimately, engage with it? At first a simple, albeit extremely disturbing portrait of a family in distress, each disquieting moment reveals more and more as it gets under your skin.
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The Ring
- 2002 Movie
- 4/5
You know the drill; after you see the disturbing videotape, you receive a call with a young girl’s voice on the line telling you that you will die in seven days. A remake of the J-horror sensation Ringu, Verbinski and star Naomi Watts transport the film to drizzly Seattle; caught between wanting to care for her son and finding out the mystery of the videotape that seems to have been behind the death of her niece, she must, after watching the tape, race against the clock as the days close in. Steeped in darkness and unsettling imagery, The Ring’s fixation on technology that can be a platform for image viewing and its spread nearly prophecizes our now contemporary use of the term “viral”.
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The Bay
- 2012 Movie
- 3.4/5
Films like The Blair Witch Project (1999) helped found footage horror explode, with their documentary realism and growing awareness of how tools of self-documentation were becoming more and more popular amongst the public. Over a decade after Blair Witch’s success, found footage was at risk of becoming old hat; but director Barry Levinson gives it a fresh look, taking into account the myriad ways in which we surveil and are surveilled. Framed around an expose by the US government, the film uses a plethora of sources for footage as opposed to one person to document the fall of seaside town in Maryland that’s overtaken by flesh eating pods. It’s as creepy in its visual effects as it is in its indictment of how the tools to record our every movement can be exploited by the government that promises to protect us.
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Candyman
- 1992 Movie
- 3.7/5
Our most enduring urban legends are wrapped in fear and terror, but speak more presciently to social ills and political inequity. That’s the thesis for a grad student (Virginia Madsen) who decides to explore the depths of the “Candyman” legend that circulates in the Black-dominated Cabrini-Green housing projects in Chicago; but her search may come up with more than she bargained for. Adapted loosely from a Clive Barker short story, Candyman drips with horror, suspense, and eroticism, a complicated and contradictory examination of the racialized, politicized nature of storytelling itself, why urban legends live or die, and who gets to tell those stories. Featuring a masterful performance from Tony Todd as the eponymous ghost; just don’t say his name five times in the mirror.
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One Hour Photo
- 2002 Movie
- 3.8/5
Disposable cameras, Polaroids, and other kinds of film photography have been making a comeback in the last few years; back when it was the defacto way to keep memories, you might become friendly with your photo technician at your local store or pharmacy. Someone like Sy (Robin Williams), who has no family, no partner, no one but the life he looks at as he develops your film. In One Hour Photo, an absolutely chilling Williams, playing against type, plays a man obsessed with someone else’s life and family and, in the process, reminds us that even photographs can lie.476One Hour Photo 2002 Movie •3.8/5Psychological thriller film written and directed by Mark Romanek and...Disposable cameras, Polaroids, and other kinds of film photography have been making a comeback in the last few years; back when it was the defacto way to keep memories, you might become friendly with your photo technician at your local store or pharmacy. Someone like Sy (Robin Williams), who has no family, no partner, no one but the life he looks at as he develops your film. In One Hour Photo, an absolutely chilling Williams, playing against type, plays a man obsessed with someone else’s life and family and, in the process, reminds us that even photographs can lie.
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The Cabin In The Woods
- 2012 Movie
- 4.1/5
The slut, the jock, the stoner, the nerd, the virginal Final Girl: they’re horror archetypes that stand the test of time, blank spaces audiences can project onto and delight in their destruction and death. Perhaps there’s something at work there, with the familiar, tireless setup? Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods proved that Scream wasn’t the only smart-allecky movie on the block that could subversively deconstruct the genre while having a blast. With sharp wit and a flair for the spectacle in horror, Cabin tries to unlock why we love watching scary movies so much.3.9KThe Cabin In The Woods 2012 Movie •4.1/5Horror comedy film directed by Drew Goddard in his directorial debut,...The slut, the jock, the stoner, the nerd, the virginal Final Girl: they’re horror archetypes that stand the test of time, blank spaces audiences can project onto and delight in their destruction and death. Perhaps there’s something at work there, with the familiar, tireless setup? Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods proved that Scream wasn’t the only smart-allecky movie on the block that could subversively deconstruct the genre while having a blast. With sharp wit and a flair for the spectacle in horror, Cabin tries to unlock why we love watching scary movies so much.
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Unfriended: Dark Web
- 2018 Movie
- 2.9/5
Movies on desktops, from the first Unfriended (2014) to Searching (2018), point to the possible future of storytelling and technology, their immersion into how we use digital technology in our everyday lives and in our most mundane moments revealing an acute understanding of the role and evolution of those tools. Easily refashioned as a platform to explore horror, Unfriended: Dark Web returns to a MacOS desktop on a stolen laptop; as friends convene for a Skype session, they find hidden deep in the folders on the computer hundreds of horrific videos. Every click, every half-typed message, and every tone of the Skype call is ready to be manipulated. A nightmare of the modern digital age, Unfriended: Dark Web prods at what we give up to live our lives online.
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