Movies in the Horror/Thriller genre

Maxxxine has the ideas. It has the style. It has Mia Goth. But somewhere along the way, writer/director Ti West lost the story. And, when it comes down to it, a movie can have a lot of nice flourishes and a great performance but if the narrative i...

Kudos to Darren Aronofsky for having the courage to make this film. Kudos to Paramount Pictures for having the guts to open this wide rather than burying it or hiding it as a VOD release. It’s too bad it doesn’t work.With mother!, Aronofs...

"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This [is] one of them." That iconic closing line from the TV series Naked City is one of the things I thought of at the beginning of Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing, which shows an art deco versio...

Every once in a while, someone gets the bright idea of making an apocalyptic horror film. The Omen series is probably the best-known example of this sub-genre, but it's not the only one. Now, The Prophecy, with its tale of warring angels and lost...

Psycho Killer is all about misdirection. It starts out as one thing and ends up someplace completely different. The first scene, a shot through the front windshield of a speeding car, offers up a grim aesthetic that is only amplified through the e...

The Purge: Election Year represents writer/director James DeMonaco’s attempt to squeeze one more movie out of a premise that has run dry. The first movie of the series offered little more than The Concept - an alternate universe tale that took ...

My review of John Krasinski’s 2018 A Quiet Place called the movie “a superb exercise in understated terror that puts to shame ‘horror’ films that rely on jump scares and cheap theatrics.” It was one of the best films of the year and ...

The most interesting aspect of Resurrection comes from guessing how insane the main character is and whether anything she’s seeing is real. Still, those are primarily intellectual curiosities and I’m not sure how well they gel in feature lengt...

For about 50 minutes, Silent House represents one of the most intense, unsettling horror movies I have recently viewed. This is Halloween territory, where the tension is so thick as to be almost unbearable. It's the kind of experience hard-core hor...

It’s very difficult to kill a slasher film franchise. The existence of Spiral is proof that, no matter how many times you put down a series like this, it keeps coming back for more. The original Saw reached theaters in 2004 and, as I wrote i...