A corpse drifts to the bottom of a river in The Night of the Hunter Chris Forrester considers the powerful legacy of 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, a nightmare-fueled noir with far-reaching iconography and themes. There are films you can almost see without seeing. Famous images, lines of dialogue, and plot points from films… Read more »
Still from Bram Stoker’s Dracula Chris Forrester bites into the cinematic history of the world’s most famous vampire and how filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola transformed the story into an operatic, dazzling epic like none other. When I wrote last month about remakes, one film that consistently crossed my mind was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 1992),… Read more »
A new Marion Crane for a new Psycho Using examples from such luminaries as William Friedkin and Steven Soderbergh, Chris Forrester discusses three different kinds of remakes and what their filmmaking approaches bring to the table. IU Cinema’s series Re:Made parses the nature of the remake by screening pairs of films — inspiring originals and… Read more »
Peeping Tom‘s killer admires his handiwork from the comfort of his darkroom Chris Forrester considers the act of looking and how it’s intertwined with filmmaking in the proto-slasher Peeping Tom. Spoilers ahead! Nighttime in London. An eye opens. A man prowls the streets. Concealed beneath the folds of his coat is a camera, and as… Read more »
Nicole Kidman slumbers next to a symbol of her husband’s infidelity in Eyes Wide Shut Chris Forrester discusses Stanley Kubrick’s final film and how its yuletide setting deepens its interrogations of sexuality, masculinity, and marriage. Of all the great cinephile debates (what is and isn’t a masterpiece, who are the great filmmakers, which Godfather movie… Read more »
The killer strikes in Black Christmas (Clark, 1974) Chris Forrester argues for the importance of Black Christmas to the slasher genre. In the annals of horror history lurk a great many unsung classics, films beloved by cinephiles and/or horror fanatics but for a slew of reasons — often relating to their content and the genre’s… Read more »