Horror Costuming: Us

by Cláudio Alves

Many a great horror movie gained its place of honor in film culture partly due to its images of evil. There's Hannibal Lecter muzzled like a mad dog, Leatherface in a taxidermized mask, Dracula's sharp tuxedo, and other such sartorial miracles of materialized malevolence. Jordan Peele's Us adds another unforgettable sight to this gallery of rogues. With their red jumpsuits and golden shears, the Tethered are one of cinema's newest and most complex monstrosities, as memorable as they are frightening…

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Horror Costuming: Suspiria

A special miniseries for Halloween by Cláudio Alves

Costume sketches by Giulia Piersanti

As cinephiles, we're often too quick to condemn the idea of the remake. But remakes can often be illuminating. A good remake is a conversation made of echoes refracted through cinema and cultural history and time, as valuable, in its own way, as the original picture.

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria is perhaps the supreme example of this. Instead of replicating Dario Argento's 1977 post-Giallo masterpiece, Guadagnino and his team have created an entirely new work that further explores themes only glanced at in the first movie. Even its look is excitingly different, autumnal and chilly where the previous film was carnivalesque and hot-blooded. One could write about the perfection of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cinematography or Inbal Weinberg's scenography, but, today, you're invited to reflect on the work of costume designer Giulia Piersanti…

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Review: "Deerskin" on HBO

by Cláudio Alves

Fashion kills in one of Quentin Dupieux's latest absurdist comedies, the loony nightmare that is Deerskin. After blessing moviegoers with the nonsensical sight of a homicidal tire in Rubber, the French director has now imbued a fringed jacket with the power to unravel the human mind and precipitate its wearers into paroxysms of murderous madness. Jean Dujardin's Georges is the victim of such demonic influence, though, at the start, he, like all things in Deerskin, appears unnervingly mundane…

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Review: "Possessor" is a true provocation

by Tony Ruggio

A worm-infested apple doesn’t fall far from a rotting tree. In only his second feature film, baby Brandon Cronenberg proves he’s everything his father David was in his heyday: stylish, provocative, and interested in more than the gore and sleazy depravity that often grab headlines, although he’s clearly interested in those as well. Set in an alternate techno-horror 2008 of corporate espionage, where agents like Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) use brain-implant technology to “possess” other human beings for carrying out assassinations, Possessor is possibly the most graphic film made since Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Here it’s not so much what happens, but how it happens, how it’s framed on screen via some truly horrific and terrific practical effects.

When we meet Tasya, she’s at the top of her game yet beginning to slip. As Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character puts it, “the older you get, the harder it gets”...

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Horror Costuming: Stoker

by Cláudio Alves

We carry part of our parents with us at all times. Whether through the body their genetics defined, or the mind molded and perchance scarred by their influence, their absence, their love, we are made in their image. Some might rejoice in that intrinsic truth, others resent it. Park Chan-wook's only English-language feature, Stoker, understands this with caustic assuredness. From its opening salvos, the script and images call attention to matters of blood and descendence, materializing the familial bonds through costume design…

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