A labyrinth, a ghost story, a memory, a failed adaptation, a psychological exploration, a cabin fever story, whatever you call it, The Shining is certainly a masterpiece in the horror genre and may well be one of the most analyzed and interpreted films of all time. It likely sits with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) as the two most academically discussed films in the horror genre, with academics analyzing everything from it representing the horrors of the Holocaust to it being…
I’m scared to close my eyes. I’m scared to open them. We are going to die out here.
Thanks to Second Sight, I was able to watch the festival cut for this one reconstructed from the original Hi8 tapes and 16mm film. If you weren’t aware, the footage was transferred to 35mm for theaters but that 35mm footage is what got retransferred for home release. Until the Second Sight’s reconstruction, nobody ever went back to the original masters to digitize…
While some of the dialogue and special effects don’t quite reach the quality that I was expecting, Disclosure Day carries a lot of thematic weight, has an excellent opening that throws you into the story right away, and has a bonkers ending.
Join us next week on the Mind Your Movies Podcast for my full thoughts!
Watched for the IMDb Top 250 episode of the Mind Your Movies Podcast.
It’s interesting to me that we both picked movies that do not overlap with the Letterboxd list, and that we picked one movie that we both hated and one that we both loved. I’ve seen this one before, but it’s been a hot minute. I love it. It’s full of tension, intrigue, horror, and just excellent filmmaking. You can watch this 100 times, and 100 people could…
Backrooms is a surreal experience of liminal spaces, body horror, and some found footage mixed in. It’s an extremely competent feature debut from a clearly very thoughtful and skilled young director. The titular Backrooms can represent the failing attempts to navigate trauma, grief, or even the internet, but it seems like just as many paths are possible in the backrooms themselves, there are equally many interpretations of it. It was a blast to see how much this and Obsession have filled theaters these past few weeks, and I’m glad to have been able to talk about this one on the Mind Your Movies Podcast!
Very excited to cover this one on the Mind Your Movies Podcast next week!
Obsession, largely due to the leading performances and atmospheric und uncanny horror, is the scariest movie I’ve seen in theaters in a very long time. This one will linger with me. Terrifying. An absolutely terrifying story of abuse, manipulation, control, the removal of free will, and the consequences of absolutism and stripping away autonomy.
