Horror Actressing: Sigourney Weaver in "Copycat"

by Jason Adams

Something I look forward to every single year, Film at Lincoln Center's annual week-long "Scary Movies" series, is hitting here in New York this forthcoming weekend -- check out the entire stellar run of films at this link here. While I'm most excited for Ari Aster's "Director's Cut" of Midsommar, which runs half an hour longer than the one we saw in theaters, they're mixing up showings of brand new flicks and old under-screened classics in ways that really set my toes to tingle. 

In that vein I was tempted to use this week's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to talk about a performance not very many people have seen yet -- that of Maeve Higgins in Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman's horror-comedy Extra Ordinary, which I saw this past month thanks to the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal (here's my review) and which is screening this weekend at FLC. Maeve, in her first leading lady role, absolutely shines. 

But we'll save that for when the very funny movie gets a proper release. Especially since FLC is also screening Jon Amiel's terrifically under-valued 1995 serial killer flick Copycat, starring two of our great actresses, Holly Hunter and today's focus-of-post, Sigourney effing Weaver...

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Great Moments in Horror Actressing

by Jason Adams

It's hard not to walk out of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood without Sharon Tate on your mind. Whether it's because you thought the film needed more of what Margot Robbie was serving or if like me it's because you thought what Robbie did serve was A+ First Class stuff, the specter of that real woman, rightfully, lords over the entire experience. Sharon Tate only got to make six films before she was murdered, and two of them were horror films -- not an unlikely statistic for any young beautiful actress, but one that's linked itself arm in arm with Tate's fate nonetheless. 

I've never seen her 1967 British occult flick Eye of the Devil, which had her playing a witch opposite David Niven and Deborah Kerr. But I've seen her other horror flick of that same year, Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, more times than I can count, and it's Tate's under-valued performance that I always think of when I think of the film. She's barely in it but she walks away with it -- a pale fire piled in soap bubbles and snow...

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Great Moments in Horror Actressing

by Jason Adams

We had intended to use this week's edition of our new "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror with an ode to Margot Kidder's performance... but then we re-watched The Amityville Horror, and it is so very much worse than we remembered. Not scary, tedious, with cardboard performances; a mere shadow of that decade's many better horror films. I have no idea how it became a hit, and I felt actively bad for Margot while re-watching it.

So in order to make it up to the actress, let's take a look instead at the crown jewel in her horror crown (give or take a Sisters), her hilarious work five years earlier as the deliciously crusty co-ed Barb in Bob Clark's slasher Black Christmas...

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White Zombie (1932)

 

Have you ever seen any of the early Bela Lugosi movies? Audiences must have been really freaked out by his eyes because the movies kept pushing that stare as the ultimate in horror (Dracula had arrived the year before). White Zombie was the first feature film about zombies, a genre now so common you forget that there had to be a first. The film, now celebrating its 87th birthday, is streaming on Amazon Prime and since it's only 66 minutes long we decided to zip right through yesterday... 

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YNMS: "It: Chapter Two"

by Jason Adams

Slip into your yellow rain-slickers and come play with me down in the gutter, as the final trailer for director Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two arrived last week and we're taking a belated gander. While I preferred the shorter teaser that primarily focused in on a single creepy scene with Jessica Chastain, (taking over the role of Beverly from the terrific Sophia Lillis) and an old lady who's clearly not the old lady she seems to be, this full trailer delivers plenty of the pitch-black shocks we expect from these hard R-rated sojourns into what some consider Stephen King's most terrifying tale...

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