Horror Actressing: Rita Macedo in "The Curse of the Crying Woman" (1963)

by Jason Adams

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone! For this week's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series we're tackling the five-century-old Mexican folk-tale of "La Llorona" aka "The Weeping Woman," who's become perhaps the most iconic of all their legends and whose terrifying presence has graced the screen at least a dozen times, up to and including last year's middling Blumhouse production (part of their ever expanding and worsening Conjuring Universe) titled The Curse of la Llorona. 

We will not be talking that most recent version though, because despite perfectly acceptable screaming from a slumming Linda Cardellini (an actress I very much like)...

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National Pet Week: "Sam" from I Am Legend

Team Experience is celebrating pets at the movies (and in our homes) this week. Here's Tony Ruggio...

With my third family dog growing up "Sydney"

I’ve always been a dog person. Some of my first memories are of rolling in the carpet at three years-old next to our first pekingese bruiser Gin Gin. His death at the hands of a roaming pack of stray dogs in our neighborhood was my first real brush with tragedy and emotional trauma. Two more family dogs would come and go over the next twenty-five years, each one’s passing more devastating than the last. 

It’s no surprise then that I would take to the tale of a man and his dog in 2007’s I Am Legend, or its inevitable conclusion. The movie itself is a flawed slice-of-apocalyptic-life blockbuster, a one-man show for Will Smith wherein he and German Shepherd Samantha roam a desolate New York City...  

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The New Classics: Living Deliciously in "The Witch"

Hey everyone. Michael Cusumano here, excited to be back for a second season of The New Classics (and not just because publishing one of these every Tuesday will help me tell the weeks apart!) Each which we annoint one the best of the 21st century by discussing a single scene. 

Scene: Living Deliciously
The ending of Robert Eggers’ The Witch certainly feels like a happy ending. How could it not, with that final thrilling image of a cackling Thomasin rising nude into the moonlight, embracing her place in Black Phillip’s coven? She has shed her fanatically repressed biological family like she shed her blood-splattered “shift” at Black Phillip’s whispered command, and now she’s off to see the world and taste butter by the churnful. Liberation!

But at what cost?

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Eight Random Streaming Recommendations

We're aware that we've been talking about the Criterion Channel a lot in these here parts but we recognize not all of you are subscribers (yet). So here are eight random suggestions of things to watch on streaming services if you're scrolling zombie-like through your endless quantity-not-quality options.

There's good undiscovered stuff if you know where to look!

Okay, ready? Here are 8 things we like available now...

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Horror Actressing: Sadie Frost in "Bram Stoker's Dracula"

by Jason Adams

Are you wearing the dress or is the dress wearing you? That is the question, the one every fashionista asks -- it's not just comfort but confidence; the former might assist with the latter but if you've got enough of the latter you can overcome any obstacle, good taste be damned. Like how exactly does one give a performance for the ages encased inside a neck ruffle that could be captured on the cameras of satellites orbiting the Earth? Don't ask me, ask Sadie Frost, who yanked those satellites out of the skies and stared 'em down into submission with her take on the character of "Lucy" in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 re-imagining of the classic vampire tale.

Nobody save Gary Oldman with his prosthetics parade was asked to do more inside of Eiko Ishioka's Oscar-winning kabuki-inspired outfits than Frost was...

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