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I really love this movie, it's one of my all-time favorites. I watch a lot of horror movies, but this is one of the few that gave me an honest to goodness wake-up-screaming nightmare after watching it. I don't feel like it's particularly scary, but it's amazingly effective at sustaining a creepy, unsettled mood throughout its runtime.

This article at Offscreen has some interesting historical background on the making of Carnival of Souls, and seems to… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 6:00 PM on July 3, 2014

I thought the close-up on the stained glass was Mary wondering whether it was the ghostly figure who had been chasing her, but I suppose there's no evidence for that one way or another.

Oh, also I really loved the shot of her standing in front of the "enjoy salt-water bathing" poster (ironic!). The model in the poster had a strong resemblance to her, too, although knowing what I do about the production it must have just been a coincidence.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:31 PM on July 8, 2014

About the deer imagery, in the scene where the police chief is returning the dead dog, just before he leaves he looks over at the dog's owner's wife's front yard. At first I thought he was just thinking of stashing the dog there, but did the stuffed deer that he saw when he first walked up there disappear? Or was that actually a live deer and it ran away?

I'm on the fence with this one. I didn't love all the acting in it, but the plot's got me intrigued enough to stick… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:35 PM on June 30, 2014

The guy they depicted running naked was the chief's father (he says this to the lady he tries to return the dog to, IIRC).
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:23 AM on July 2, 2014

I hit my stopping point in this episode. Eyebrows Draper's speech just did not land at all for me, like it sort of had me doubled over with laughter, and I really hate how they made the punky girl technologist into the hot to trot sex object.
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:15 PM on June 30, 2014

I mostly enjoyed this, though I wasn't the least bit scared until the last 20 minutes or so. I did think the last act was very well-done, though, and I liked how the narrative jumped from Kobayashi to Marika and back. tyllwin did a great job above at picking out the J-Horror antecedents to Noroi, and I'd say on the Western side of the house you can trace a lot of its DNA back to the Paranormal Activity movies (the edited nighttime footage of the possessed Marika doing weird… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:39 AM on June 27, 2014

As far as horror-deconstruction movies go, I like the whole "snuff film" subgenre, which tends to be full of indictments on the viewer for wanting to see violence on screen in the first place. The movies themselves tend to be violent and dark as well. There are tons of terrible movies in the genre, like the Nicholas Cage vehicle 8mm, and a handful of good ones, like Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis.

I have to admit that I… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:54 AM on June 19, 2014

They did a great job of ratcheting up the tension while the monster is backstage working the theater, I was half-certain there was going to me some kind of terrible accident. And yeah, that ending was definitely a surprise to me.

I was glad that they didn't show the actual picture of Dorian Gray, too. I suppose they will need to put it on camera at some point, but I'm afraid of being disappointed by the actual painting, and for now just seeing Dorian look at it works really well.
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:45 PM on June 2, 2014

Oh, and I also expected a possible Jekyll and Hyde entree when Dorian made that remark about being someone else, which come to think of it, why would watching a dog kill a bunch of rats have that effect?
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:47 PM on June 2, 2014

I'm pretty sure she doesn't say specifically how she betrayed Mina, but from the "next week on..." bit at the end of this episode it looks as if the next one will spend some time on their back-story. (Usually I skip those, but I forgot to this time.)
posted to FanFare by whir at 9:49 AM on June 3, 2014

I caught up on this late, but about Gaad's Reagan portrait, it was a definite echo of a later shot where Nina is seen right next to a portrait of Lenin as she leaves the embassy.
posted to FanFare by whir at 10:58 PM on May 28, 2014

I think it's pretty clear that Ethan is indeed the werewolf and has been the source of the non-exsanguinated killings around London. Well, I shouldn't say "pretty clear" but that's the direction I anticipate from cues in the story so far.

Apart from this whole thing where wolves think Ethan tastes good, but not good enough to eat, Vanessa makes a comment about how he knows something about curses, and when Sir Malcolm was talking to the inspector they mention… [more]
posted to FanFare by whir at 8:16 PM on May 28, 2014