Horror

Alien: Romulus: Razed by Wolves

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson in Alien: Romulus

The first Alien was a very scary movie, but it also spawned a franchise that was unusually fearless in terms of reinvention. Made seven years apart, Ridley Scott’s singular original and James Cameron’s pluralized sequel share a few commonalities (Sigourney Weaver, those snarling xenomorphs), but they’re dramatically different in terms of tone and style; one is a gritty, claustrophobic creature feature, while the other is a boisterous, kinetic action extravaganza. David Fincher’s Alien 3 isn’t nearly as good as either of its predecessors, but it earns points for its despairing atmosphere and its defiant refusal to just replay the hits.

But the longer a series runs, the harder it is for each new installment to distinguish itself. Alien: Romulus, which is either the seventh or ninth episode (depending on whether you count its crossovers with the Predator pictures) of outer-space screaming, is a modestly diverting blockbuster, featuring some decent character work and a few scenes of nerve-jangling suspense. But it lacks a true identity or personality, instead feebly mirroring the first Alien (and the underrated Resurrection). The only thing scarier than a monster bursting from your chest, it seems, is the prospect of nudging this franchise in a new direction. Read More

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Longlegs: Into the Spider-Curse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Maika Monroe in Longlegs

It’s fashionable to judge horror movies based on how scary they are. It’s a fair albeit reductive question; if comedies are supposed to make you laugh and tearjerkers are designed to make you cry, then a good fright flick should presumably make you catch your breath and clutch your armrests. By this measure, Longlegs, the fourth feature from writer-director Osgood Perkins, is moderately successful; it’s a thoroughly unsettling experience, even if it’s unlikely to have you covering your eyes in abject terror. But in terms of cinematic construction—its building of mood, its manufacture of tension, its rattling spookiness—Longlegs is a small-scale triumph. This may not be the scariest modern horror movie ever made, but it is surely one of the creepiest.

Conceptually speaking, this is nothing new for Perkins, whose prior pictures—the re-titled Blackcoat’s Daughter (changed from February), the annoyingly titled I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and the gender-flip-titled Gretel & Hansel—all cultivated an inescapable sense of doom. They felt weird and looked great (Gretel & Hansel made my Best Cinematography ballot in 2020), but they prioritized bone-chilling atmosphere over legible plotting. With Longlegs, Perkins has properly calibrated his nerve-jangling sensibility, locating the proper balance between apprehension and entertainment. He hasn’t curtailed his gift for upsetting his audience—a number of scenes here are deeply disturbing—so much as channeled it into a more propulsive story. He has his cake and taints it too. Read More

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MaXXXine: Body Trouble, But Dressed to Thrill

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Goth in MaXXXine

A sweaty and methodical build-up followed by a burst of spurting fluids—am I describing a horror movie, or a porno? The two genres collide in MaXXXine, though without the satisfactory release you might hope for. Sure, there is a bit of bare flesh on display and a good deal of blood, but surprisingly little in the way of tension or excitement. Sexploitation homages shouldn’t feel this neutered.

MaXXXine supplies enough visual style to make it watchable, but it’s still a disappointment, especially when you consider its genealogy. It’s the third consecutive collaboration between writer-director Ti West and actor Mia Goth, who two years ago gave us X, a snappy slasher that subtly interrogated the puritanical attitudes of the skin-flick ’70s while also delivering some humdinger set pieces. They followed that with Pearl, a cheeky prequel which excavated the origins of X’s geriatric villainess and provided Goth (who co-wrote it) with the monologue of a lifetime. MaXXXine flashes forward to the more recent past, bringing back Goth’s now-titular character from X along with a few tedious plot points. Set in 1985, the action has shifted from the clammy farmland of rural Texas to the glitzy neon of the Hollywood Hills, but the thematic preoccupations are similar to those of X. Once again, West is examining retrograde gender norms surrounding sex and cinema, imagining a lurid universe that blurs the line between on-screen indecency and real-world brutality. Read More

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A Quiet Place, Day One: The City That Never Speaks

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong'o in A Quiet Place: Day One

The special thing about the first Quiet Place movie was that it didn’t do anything special. Sure, John Krasinski’s horror hit was cinematically imaginative, but it worked because it stayed small, applying its merciless technique to the fate of one family enduring the crucible of a sonically fraught apocalypse. In retrospect, it’s somewhat miraculous that A Quiet Place Part II fared as well as it did, given that its mild expansion (new people, new locations) inevitably diluted some of its tension. This nascent franchise will continue churning out additional installments so long as they keep making money, but the commercial imperatives of sequel-building—bigger thrills, grander mythology, general moreness—seem incompatible with the original’s white-knuckle intimacy.

A Quiet Place: Day One, from the writer-director Michael Sarnoski (Krasinski receives a story credit), seems to succumb to this contradiction before improbably evading it. In terms of pure suspense, it is the least successful Quiet Place picture thus far. It is also the most humane. Read More

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The Watchers: What You See Is What You Fret

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Fanning in The Watchers

Think fast: Can you name a movie directed by someone with the surname Shyamalan where a handful of terrified survivors take shelter in primitive surroundings in the forest, bracing for an invasion of unseen monsters? If you guessed The Village, you’d be right, and also wrong. The Watchers, the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, conforms to a similar horror template as that 2004 tentpole, one of the most divisive (and best) pictures directed by her father, M. Night. It’s inevitable, in our era of toxic nepo-baby discourse, that the younger Shyamalan’s work will be measured against that of her sire (who serves as producer here), so there’s something admirable about her steering into the skid and inviting the comparison. In tone and style, The Watchers is a decidedly Shyamalan production, featuring a number of qualities—foreboding atmosphere, stiff dialogue, gripping images, hokey mythology—that inevitably evoke the filmmaker who was once infamously dubbed “the next Spielberg.”

It’s slightly disappointing, if hardly devastating, that The Watchers is a flawed movie, struggling to enliven its spooky premise with the requisite eccentricity or suspense. But it isn’t an ignoble effort, and it establishes Shyamalan as a director with a fine eye. She just isn’t always sure where to aim it. Read More

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