1940sPan's Labyrinth (2006) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Del Toro built two worlds with identical rules and let a child move between them, and the fascist captain is more frightening than anything in the labyrinth. It…
1970sJaws (1975) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The mechanical shark did not work, the schedule ran three times over, and the failure produced the technique. Spielberg was twenty-seven and had to build suspense out of everything…
2000sI Am Legend (2007) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The first hour is one of the best depictions of solitude ever filmed. Then the ending inverts the meaning of the book it is named after, and…
1980sAmerican Psycho (2000) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mary Harron read a novel everybody called unfilmable and found the comedy in it. Made for seven million dollars, mostly in Toronto, and it is far funnier and…
2010sWorld War Z (2013) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A great book turned into a competent chase film with the structure removed first. The Jerusalem sequence is worth the ticket and nothing else is.
1980sLeviathan (1989) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. An underwater Alien with a good cast and a wrecked Soviet ship. One of three deep-sea monster films released in 1989, and the middle one.
2000sGhost Ship (2002) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A salvage crew boards a liner missing since 1962. The first twenty seconds are among the best in modern horror and the remaining eighty minutes cannot follow them.
2010sMortal is what a superhero origin story looks like when the director comes from Norwegian horror cinema instead of from American comic book adaptation. Both films treat supernatural material as if it were happening in a country that has actual…
Fiction WritingTwenty horror films for people who believe they do not like horror. Almost none are gore, most contain no monster worth the name, and several are among the best films ever made in any genre. Ranked gentlest to hardest so…
Fiction WritingTwo hat-tips decades apart, a mission and a gardener’s plaque, and the question they share. What keeps somebody in a place after they have every reason to leave it. I do not know. Cal Rourke thinks he does.
Fiction WritingI went back to repair an earlier book and found a full novel inside it. The question underneath is what it takes for an ordinary person to become a killer, and the answer is logic applied to a premise that…
1990sGuillermo del Toro reroutes the vampire myth through a clockwork device in his startling 1993 debut. The fascination with antique machinery.
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