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Scream Is Not a Parody. It’s the Moment the Genre Turned Around and Looked at You.
The phone rings. Casey Becker answers. She is making popcorn. She is alone. The caller is friendly, flirtatious. He wants to talk about movies. “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Casey plays along. She likes horror. She knows horror. She has seen Halloween. She is, in every recognizable way, a horror movie audience member: she has…
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The Fantasy in Pan’s Labyrinth Is Not an Escape. It’s the Resistance.
Everyone asks the wrong question about Pan’s Labyrinth. The question everyone asks is: is the fantasy real? Does Ofelia actually descend into a labyrinth beneath the earth? Does she actually meet a faun with curling horns and insect-eaten wood for skin? Does she actually face a toad inside a fig tree and a pale eyeless…
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The Overlook Doesn’t Haunt Jack Torrance. It Promotes Him.
Here is the scene that tells you everything. Jack Torrance stands in the Gold Room. It is a ballroom in the Overlook Hotel, empty all winter, and a moment ago it was dark and abandoned and Jack was alone. Now it is full. The bar is stocked. A bartender named Lloyd stands behind it, polite,…
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The Silence of the Lambs Is Not a Thriller. It’s a Seduction.
The content discusses the complex themes of perception and intimacy in “The Silence of the Lambs.” It highlights how Hannibal Lecter sees Clarice Starling as a complete human, contrasting with the institutional perceptions she faces. The seductive aspect of being truly seen by another, even a monster, is emphasized as both powerful and unsettling, exploring…
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Psycho Doesn’t Scare You. It Recruits You.
You need to understand what Alfred Hitchcock did. He didn’t make a horror film. He didn’t make a thriller. He didn’t make a mystery, though there is a mystery in it, or a character study, though it contains one of the most studied characters in American cinema. What he made was an experiment. A controlled,…