Horror Actressing: Eva Green in "Dark Shadows"

by Jason Adams

I don't think before today that I've written of a terrific performance trapped inside a truly terrible movie for our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series. (No Frankenhooker is actually a terrific movie, don't you dare.) But we do what we have to in order to bow down to a stellar queen like Eva Green here on the occasion of her 40th birthday, and unfortunately for me that meant suffering through for a second time Tim Burton's 2012 big-screen flop of a reboot of the Dark Shadows television soap opera. Oh the exquisite agony, but she really is that good...

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Horror Actressing: Isabelle Adjani in "Possession" (1981)

by Jason Adams

The dissolution of a marriage rendered palpable, ectoplasmic -- Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult freak-out slash Cannes winner Possession was birthed mid-divorce from the director, and the labor pains are writ like arterial sprays across its every frame. It's Bergman via Jodorowsky; Scenes From a Marriage on a severe acid trip. The screen's awash in Evil Dead amounts of gunk, puss, a sparkling rainbow of ejaculatory fluids -- several squishy mattresses and one murder scene contingent on barfing later his star Isabelle Adjani takes to the hallway of a West Berlin subway station and acts so much that her insides literally come spilling out of her ears. 

Possession is, it must be said, a lot...

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The New Classics: It Follows

By Michael Cusumano

Scene: Explaining The Rules
Every movie with a supernatural horror needs the 'rules' scene. The one where we lay out for the hero exactly what it is they’re up against and why they are in deep, deep trouble. These scenes require the film to strike a tricky balance. You want enough info so we can get a firm grasp on the dynamic, without getting bogged down in minutiae. Share the tape in seven days or die. Got it! Too much and you end up like the heroes of Inception, shouting explanations at each other well into the film’s second hour. Not enough and the threat ends up too vague to be scary. Pennywise the Clown can do anything at any time, and kill kids sometimes but not others based on nothing. Whatever. 

The best modern example of this scene, the one that hits the balance exactly right, is the post-coital explanation scene from David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015)...

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Horror Actressing: Marcia Gay Harden in "The Mist"

by Jason Adams

If you've ever been a big fan of a book that's been turned into a movie then you have probably known the eyebrow-singeing sensation of a book character getting cast by an actor that seems so correct, so perfect for the role, that it astonishes. Think of Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, or of Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter in the admittedly ill-fated Golden Compass movie -- these actors were already the faces you were picturing when you read the book, and seeing the movie get it right this way, it's always a buzz.

I both did and did not experience this sensation when Frank Darabont hired Marcia Gay Harden to play the character of Christian super-bitch Mrs. Carmody in his 2007 adaptation of my all-time favorite Stephen King story, The Mist.

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Over & Overs: Young Frankenstein (1974)

by Ginny O'Keefe

When you’re blue and you don’t know where to go to 
Why don’t you go where passion sits
PUTTINNNONDAREEEEEEEEEZ

In these dark times we are living in, it’s good to have a little escapism. Even if it only lasts an hour and forty-six minutes. And nothing puts a larger smile on my face quite like Mel Brooks’ classic horror-parody, Young Frankenstein. I watched this movie with my family on a skit trip when I was eight years old, not knowing what I was getting into...

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