Are your fans allowed to say, in our best Oliver Twist voices (not the boring Oliver Twist voices), "More, please?" I'm curious what you love so about this film. I finally saw it this winter amidst my newfound respect for Virginia Madsen, and I liked the film a lot without totally going there with it. Just curious.
I can't say I've ever found it especially frightening. But for starters the formal seductiveness of the movie – it has one of my favourite opening credit sequences in anything, and that Philip Glass score, not all that typically for Philip Glass scores, is a work of genius – draws me back to it again and again. My favourite horror movie is The Shining, which you can expect to find very highly placed indeed on this list, and I think what links these two films is a circularity of conception – a sense of being trapped inside an eternally renewable loop about two people (or in The Shining's case, a man and a building) who belong together, and who time, death and (here) social prejudice can't separate. I've always liked the daring of the race-horror idea: the movie has the balls to admit that a place like Cabrini Green is a locus of dread for middle-class white people, and literalises that dread as an urban myth of disturbing (and disturbingly romantic, specifically sexual) power. For more still, I direct you to a terrific Walter Chaw review over at Film Freak Central, which nails the movie's transgressive agenda and makes good points about Clive Barker, probably the most interesting horror writer I know.
All in all, a tour de force for Bernard Rose, whose ivansxtc. nearly made the cut here too - I think the man has talent coming out of his ears.
2 comments:
Are your fans allowed to say, in our best Oliver Twist voices (not the boring Oliver Twist voices), "More, please?" I'm curious what you love so about this film. I finally saw it this winter amidst my newfound respect for Virginia Madsen, and I liked the film a lot without totally going there with it. Just curious.
I can't say I've ever found it especially frightening. But for starters the formal seductiveness of the movie – it has one of my favourite opening credit sequences in anything, and that Philip Glass score, not all that typically for Philip Glass scores, is a work of genius – draws me back to it again and again. My favourite horror movie is The Shining, which you can expect to find very highly placed indeed on this list, and I think what links these two films is a circularity of conception – a sense of being trapped inside an eternally renewable loop about two people (or in The Shining's case, a man and a building) who belong together, and who time, death and (here) social prejudice can't separate. I've always liked the daring of the race-horror idea: the movie has the balls to admit that a place like Cabrini Green is a locus of dread for middle-class white people, and literalises that dread as an urban myth of disturbing (and disturbingly romantic, specifically sexual) power. For more still, I direct you to a terrific Walter Chaw review over at Film Freak Central, which nails the movie's transgressive agenda and makes good points about Clive Barker, probably the most interesting horror writer I know.
All in all, a tour de force for Bernard Rose, whose ivansxtc. nearly made the cut here too - I think the man has talent coming out of his ears.
Do keep probing me on these!
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