Quote:
Audition is Takashi Miike’s neo-Darwinian exercise in terror, playing out like a comfy companion piece to Shall We Dance? before evolving into a torturous freakshow not unlike Baise-moi. Miike devilishly sets up a discordant relationship between commerce and affection when a filmmaker, Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), uses an audition as a way of finding love. His cohort, Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura), is concerned with the slump in the motion picture industry and advises Aoyama that only the fittest will survive: His deceased wife’s replacement should be good but not necessarily talented. (For him, only good girls can be good wives while only talented girls can shoot a movie.) The audition is then seen as a bridge between fantasy and reality—a successful experiment (or so it seems), for Asami (Eihi Shiina) appears to embody Aoyama’s every ideal.Read More »
Horror
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Takashi Miike – Ôdishon AKA Audition [+Commentary] (1999)
1991-2000DramaHorrorJapanTakashi Miike -
F.W. Murnau – Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
1921-1930F.W. MurnauGermanyHorrorQuote:
Based illegally on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, F. W. Murnau’s film is undeniably the best and probably the most faithful of the myriad of films based on the novel. Naively, the film’s producers attempted to circumvent the author’s estate’s copyright by changing the names and central location of the film. London became Wisborg, Count Dracula is called Graf Orlock, Jonathan Harker became Hutter and his wife Mina was named Ellen, and so on. Ironically, in all prints struck over the last few decades, the names (apart from the location, for obvious reasons) have reverted to the originals of Stoker’s novel. Made on a tiny budget by Praha-Film, as the first of an ambitious slate of occult films, an overzealous spending on promotion sent the film rapidly into debt, limiting its distribution potential. Add to this, a tenacious perseverance on the part of Stoker’s wife Florence to protect her copyright (who almost saw to the destruction of all prints of the film when the original negative was destroyed after a court decision). Read More » -
Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead – The Endless (2017)
2011-2020HorrorJustin Benson and Aaron MoorheadThrillerUSAQuote:
This mind-bending thriller follows two brothers who receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn’t as young men, they’re forced to reconsider the cult’s beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult.Read More » -
Roy William Neill – Black Moon (1934)
1931-1940HorrorRoy William NeillThrillerUSA
Plot Synopsis
A white woman returns to the native island where she was raised with her young daughter and her husband’s secretary. In her youth, she was indoctrinated into the ways of voodoo and her returns sparks off a new wave of voodoo ritual and human sacrifices.Review from BlackHorrorMovies.com:
In the 1930s and 1940s, it seems like nothing scared white America like being outnumbered by Negroes. An endless stream of African jungle adventure films came out exploiting that fear, as did a number of voodoo tales — Black Moon being one of the earliest. Unlike predecessor White Zombie and successor I Walked with a Zombie, Black Moon details a white woman’s encounter with voodoo without dragging in those precocious living dead. This well-made but obscure flick takes place on the fictional Caribbean isle of San Christopher, the birthplace of said white woman, Juanita Perez Lane (Dorothy Burgess).Read More »
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Emily Hagins – Pathogen (2006)
2001-2010Emily HaginsHorrorUSAQuote:
A terrible (synthetically created) bacteria is accidentally released into the Austin community’s water supply, and the unsuspecting citizens ingest the bacteria. Which causes them to become zombies. It’s not a completely original idea, but Emily has some original ways of telling her zombie story…A lot of people at age twelve never finish anything they start, unless it’s at school and they have to do the work to get that all important letter grade. As far back at age 10, Austin, Texas native Emily Hagins put together a script about a toxin that gets into the water and starts to turn everyone into zombies. And not only did she write it, she also went out and made it at the age of twelve. The film then premiered to a sold out crowd at the Alamo Drafthouse. Meet Emily Hagins, a new face in the world of filmmaking.Read More »
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Walerian Borowczyk – Docteur Jekyll et les femmes AKA The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981)
1981-1990EroticaFranceHorrorWalerian Borowczyk
The film takes place before, during and immediately after the engagement party of Dr.Henry Jekyll and Miss Fanny Osborne, attended by numerous highly respectable guests (a general, a doctor, a priest, a lawyer), the last of which informs the company that a child has been murdered in the street outside. While the others watch a young dancer perform, Dr.Jekyll instructs the lawyer to alter his will, leaving everything to a certain Mr.Hyde. Shortly afterwards, the dancer is found murdered, and the guests realise that one of their number must be a maniac with a prodigious sexual appetite… Read More »
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Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas – As Boas Maneiras AKA Good Manners (2017)
2011-2020BrazilDramaHorrorJuliana RojasMarco Dutra
Clara, a lonely nurse from the outskirts of São Paulo, is hired by mysterious and wealthy Ana as the nanny for her unborn child. The two women develop a strong bond, but a fateful night changes their plans.
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Jörg Buttgereit – Nekromantik (1987)
1981-1990CultGermanyHorrorJörg ButtgereitQuote:
The controversial horror film that shocked the world in 1987, when it was banned in Germany, censored in Japan and simultaneously became a huge underground hit in the US (now long out of print.)
Nekromantik tells the story of Rob (Daktari Lorenz) who works at a street-cleaning Agency, and visits roadside accidents to clean up the scene. Incidentally Rob collects the body parts and shares them with his girlfriend Betty (Beatrice M.) When Rob presents a complete corpse taken out of a swamp, their undying love reaches its peak, but soon after Betty gets a more liking towards the corpse and leaves Rob, which takes him to the sick end of his destruction.Read More »
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Fred Tan – Li gui chan shen AKA Split Of The Spirit (1987)
1981-1990Fred TanHorrorTaiwanThrillerThe ghost of a murdered woman possesses a dancer’s body in order to exact vengeance on her killer.
Light Industry wrote:
A rarity unearthed from Harvard’s vaults, Fred Tan’s Split of the Spirit is a macabre tale of supernatural possession, necromantic battles, and the vengeful phantom of a woman scorned. In Tan’s stylish neo-noir thriller, a renowned female choreographer becomes overtaken by the specter of a murdered woman, who forces her to enact revenge upon the men who have wronged her. After a string of gruesome slayings, the film culminates in a searing conflagration, an allegorical avant-garde dance finale, and ultimately an Orphic journey to the afterworld and back. Tan worked as an assistant director to King Hu and made only three features before his death at age thirty-five; placing the forces of ancient sorcery in contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong, he deploys an ominous synth soundtrack and an expressive, haunting mise-en-scène to bring primeval frights into the modern world.Read More »





