Horror Costuming: The Skin I Live In

In October, we'll be celebrating the excellence of costume design in horror cinema.

by Cláudio Alves

Pedro Almodóvar's 19th feature harkens back to a time two decades earlier when the Spanish director was one of European cinema's most shameless provocateurs, an enfant terrible willing to rub the face of polite society in utter tastelessness, jolly amorality, and lustful perversity. Adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a sordid tale that mixes melodrama with horror, handsome mad scientists and beautiful Frankenstein monsters. More than anything, as its title suggests, this is a film about skin and the places people inhabit…

Click to read more ...

Horror Actressing: Kim Ok-bin in "Thirst" (2009)

by Jason Adams

What's funny looking back on Kim Ok-bin's work in Park Chan-wook's 2009 vampire film Thirst for the first time in a decade is just how brief her character Tae-ju's time as a bloodsucker actually is in the movie. Over the past ten years my memory had turned Thirst into the "Tae-ju Supernatural Vampire Olympics" -- she had opened her maw and swallowed the whole movie whole. And yet in actuality Tae-ju doesn't get turned into a vampire until the last half hour of an over-two-hour film -- her character is there, very much there, but Song Kang-ho's conflicted priest Sang-hyun is the main course. Until he isn't.

Kim is just so damn good that I think any of us would be excused for having handed her the stage. Even before she's turned, as the saying goes, she's already nibbled down the film's edges until it's become Her Shaped...

Click to read more ...

Horror Actressing: Gwyneth Paltrow in "Se7en"

by Jason Adams

The glimmers of hope that shine through the dank squalor of David Fincher's serial-killer masterpiece Se7en, which is turning 25 today, are so few and far between that we find ourselves clinging to them like life-rafts bobbing down a turbulent sewage drain. One of the library's security guards says, "We got culture coming out of our ass," and then they do, as the gentle strings of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Air Suite No. 3 In D Major" fill the golden-hued dungeon where Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) does his dark research. Similarly Brad Pitt's Detective Mills finds some peace at home playing with his beautiful lively puppies, all locked into a small room lined with newspapers where the dogs do their own important business. Happiness looks like it smells bad!

This nameless city is torrential rain and moldy wallpaper most of the time -- when it's not simply carved-up bodies rising to the surface -- and so Gwyneth Paltrow, ever-chic and resolutely blonde as sunshine, she stands out the first second we see her, coming as she does nuzzled up against Brad Pitt's wall of themselves golden abs. Now this, this right here...

Click to read more ...

Horror Actressing: Mia Wasikowska in "Stoker"

Out this Friday the cast of Antonio Campos' new Netflix film The Devil All the Time is so ridiculously stacked with young actors of note -- Tom Holland! Robert Pattinson! Riley Keough! -- that it was inevitable one of them would be left under-served by the material, and I'm sad to report the worst off in this respect is by my estimation the best actor in the whole cast, one Mia Wasikowska. She gets less than five minutes of screen-time, none of which save her final moments give her much of anything to do, all while we know good and well dagnabit that Miss Mia can do anything!

So for today's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series let's look back at Mia doing something. Something plenty worthy of her talents. In Park Chan-wook's deliriously under-appreciated 2013 coming-of-age thriller Stoker, specifically.

Mia plays India, who's celebrating her 18th birthday as the film opens...

Click to read more ...

Horror Actressing: Jena Malone in "The Ruins"

by Jason Adams

I've talked a lot in my "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series about the ritualized magic that can be summoned on-screen when an actor can get across genuine fear to an audience, but I've talked less about that emotion's trickier parasitic twin -- when an actress is called upon to display weakness. Fear in the context of a horror movie is acceptable -- we show up to these films to live through our fears vicariously; to ride on the Final Girl's coattails through the thorny weeds of nighttime terrors and to triumph over them, standing tall in the dawn.

But weakness, weakness is a slap in the face. A character that makes the wrong decisions over and over again, one who doesn't seem capable in the moment of learning from them, well who wants to watch that? These characters make us angry, sometimes viscerally so -- think of the long standing sneers that've met Shelley Duvall's Wendy Torrance in The Shining or Judith O'Dea's Barbra in Night of the Living Dead. Queens the both, and yet their trembling lips and wet noses inspire such vitriol from so many. Well you can and should definitely add to the whimpering, simpering heap of queens Jena Malone's Amy in Carter Smith's 2008 "When Plants Attack!" film The Ruins.

Amy just can't seem to catch a break...

Click to read more ...