HMWYBS: Repulsion (1965)

Not with a bang but with a whisper. That's the way Hit Me With Your Best Shot season ends this year. We didn't want to let our signature craft-loving series go... so we extended by a few random spaced-out episodes but as it turns out this series needs the weekly check-list reminder to keep the party hopping. So next season we'll return to our March-August madness only.

Happily, whispering feels appropriate when it comes to our final film this season: Repulsion (1965) in which Catherine Deneuve barely speaks because there's probably no room in her brain for words what with sex filling every metaphoric or literal (if you will) crack.

What would Roman Polanski make of the virginal Final Girl trope that took over the horror genre about a dozen years after his masterful trilogy of horror flicks wherein people lose their marbles (and possibly souls) in apartment buildings? (More...)

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Women's Pictures - Jennifer Kent's The Babadook

Happy early Halloween, everyone!

In the comments section of last week's post on A Girl Walked Home Alone At Night, a brief but lively discussion sprung up over whether folks prefer the Iranian-American vampire flick, or Jennifer Kent's inaugural feature film, The Babadook. Rather than pit the two films against each other, let's just take a moment to appreciate the fact that in 2014, we got two really good, buzzed-about horror films from two new female directors. This, as much as any other reason, is why I hope 2014 will be remembered in the future as one of those Great Years of Film.

Anyway, it could be argued that whether you prefer A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or The Babadook is partially determined by whether you prefer indie swagger to conventional horror. But to call the film "conventional" would be to sell The Babadook incredibly short. At first glance, The Babadook looks like a stylish example of a supernatural thriller, but the genre tropes hide a dangerous film about the subconscious strife between parent and child. [More...]

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Queer Horror Night: You're Killing Me

Manuel here to talk about a new entry in that ever-growing queer horror genre, just in time for Halloween!

What if you were so steeped in irony that, when a random (but totally hot) stranger creeps up to you, admits to stalking you and having killed his ex-boyfriend you think it’s the funniest thing in the world, because, like, who even says things like that?

“Well, he’s not scary. He’s gorgeous! He just has a weird sense of humor…”

That’s the premise behind Jim Hansen and Jeffery Self’s You’re Killing Me, a horror comedy playing at NewFest just in time for Halloween.

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Women's Pictures - Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Let's be honest: as of 2014, the vampire sucked. Over its 150+ year history, the vampire has evolved from the exotic, erotic monster of Le Fanu's Carmilla and Stoker's Dracula, to Lugosi's low budget lothario, to the dangerously sexy rebels of The Lost Boys, to the brooding romantics of Anne Rice and Joss Whedon, to the defanged teenage fantasies of American preteen girls.While I don't begrudge girls their sexual fantasies, the fact remains that the vampire, in its current glittery form, is a far cry from the symbol of sexuality and otherness that it had been at its inception. With notable exceptions like Thirst and Let the Right One In, vampires have spent the last 30 years getting weaker, whiter, more often male, and very American. With A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian American writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour is here to change all that.

It's difficult to define A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night as just one movie: it's a vampire flick, a spaghetti western, a love story, a feminist fantasy, and an allegory about Iran. The plot is fairly simple to describe: a young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) living in a corrupt city in Iran (known only as Bad City) falls in love with The Girl (Sheila Vand), a streetwalking vampire who preys on drugdealers and beggars. But don't dismiss this as a weak narrative film.

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Q&A: Sexy Vampires & Dolled-Up Monsters

For this week's Q&A we asked for questions that would get us in the Halloween spirit. So let's talk sexual vampires, scary monsters, queer horror, and unsettling auteurs.

Let's jump right in to nine creepy spooky occasionally queer questions, shall we? 

Ryan T: What are your favorite vampire performances onscreen, film and TV?

The glut of bad vampire movies over the past couple of decades may have killed my former passion for bloodsuckers but nothing can kill the love of great acting so this must be answered. With due respect to the Lugosis, Schrecks and Lees who pioneered, let's fast forward to contemporary-ish cinema and television after the jump...

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