Category Archives: Fright Club

A celebration of horror movies with updates on our monthly Fright Club film series at the Gateway Film Center.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Temptation in Horror Movies

Leave a comment

Temptation is a big, big topic in horror. All sin begins with temptation and all horror begins with sin. But we narrowed down the list of our favorites so we didn’t focus exclusively on one kind of temptation. Which means we had to leave LOADS of movies out, including Nosferatu, The Lure, and Def by Temptation. But hopefully we made up for it with variety!

5. The Untamed (2016)

Sexual frustration leads to a lot of bad choices, but sexual satisfaction may be the real monster in Amat Escalante’s wild scifi/horror flick.

Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) is one of the sexually frustrated. Veronica (Simone Bucio) is not. Angel (Jesus Meza) is making bad choices. But there was this meteor, and it landed out by this isolated farm. What if the answer to all their problems is there?

Taking direct inspiration from Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, Escalante reframes the taboo-defying frenzy of unbridled sexuality. Where Zulawski’s surreal, antiseptic environment suggested absurdism, Escalante grounds the fantasy in profoundly ordinary and relatable human drama. The result is horrifying.

4. Jennifer’s Body (2009)

The central premise in this succubus horror: Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them. Better still, lure them to an isolated area and eat them, leaving their carcasses for the crows. This is the surprisingly catchy idea behind this coal-black horror comedy.

In for another surprise? Megan Fox’s performance is spot-on as the high school hottie turned demon. Director Karyn Kusama’s film showcases the actress’s most famous assets, but also mines for comic timing and talent other directors apparently overlooked.

Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the best friend, replete with homely girl glasses and Jan Brady hairstyle, balances Fox’s smolder, and both performers animate Diablo Cody’s screenplay with authority. They take the Snaps conceit and expand it – adolescence sucks for all girls, not just the outcasts.

3. The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Who tempted us first? It was that clever snake. And who better to turn Bram Stoker’s abysmal novel The Lair of the White Worm into a blasphemous, hedonistic blast than Ken Russell?

Hugh Grant’s unibrow! Amanda Donohoe’s serpentine strap on! Peter Capaldi’s impenetrable accent! It’s all here, with as much subtlety as you might expect from Russell. Campy fun from the opening credits (that font!), this one’s a hoot!

2. The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Al Pacino is subtle as ever as the devil himself, here to tempt Keanu Reeves with power. Though carnal temptation does make a number of visits, it’s greed and ambition that drive this film.

Is this Taylor Hackford vehicle a campy act of excess? It is! Gloriously, absolutely ridiculously so! The acting is over-the-top, though Reeves is characteristically cardboard. But both Charlize Theron and Connie Nielsen are exceptional and the wretched excess is a kind of joy.

1. Raw (2016)

In a very obvious way, Raw is a metaphor for what can and often does happen to a sheltered girl when she leaves home for college. But as writer/director Julia Ducournau looks at those temptations and the excesses committed on the cusp of adulthood, she creates opportunities to explore and comment on so many upsetting realities, and does so with absolute fidelity to her core metaphor. She immediately joins the ranks of Jennifer Kent (Babadook) and Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) – all recent, first time horror filmmakers whose premier features predict boundless talent.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Parenting Disasters in Horror

Leave a comment

There are loads of bad parents in horror. Jack Torrence is no doll. Margaret White’s a bit much. In bad parent horror, we empathize with the offspring. But there’s something perhaps more unsettling when you empathize with the parents who are genuinely trying but something—sometimes just one bad decision—ends in unspeakable disaster. It’s those dumbasses that we salute today!

And thanks again to FeedSpot for including us on their latest list of Best Horror Podcasts! FeedSpot is an RSS Reader that lets you follow your favorite podcasts alongside blogs and news in one place. https://podcast.feedspot.com/midwest_horror_podcasts/

5. Splice (2009)

This creature feature Frankenstein mad science mash up goes places you may not expect. Director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) investigates science as commerce, the maternal instinct or lack thereof, sexual politics, nature and nurture and more in this body horror.

The wtf! of it all works because of the undeniable talent of its leads, Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody. What they’re doing in this is hard to know, but they elevate a B-horror script to something weirdly compelling. Polley’s big eyed, emotionless performance offers a fascinating conundrum that makes every wild turn make sense. Sort of.

4. Antichrist (2009)

Lars von Trier’s foray into horror follows a couple down a deep and dark rabbit hole of grief. Von Trier’s films have often fixated on punishing viewers and female protagonists alike, but in this film the nameless woman (played fearlessly by Charlotte Gainsbourg) wields most of the punishment – whether upon her mate (Willem Dafoe) or herself.

Consumed by grief, a mother allows her husband—also grieving—to become her psychotherapist as they retreat to their isolated cabin deep in the woods where they will try to overcome the horror of losing their only child.

They won’t succeed.

3. Speak No Evil (2022)

Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil, a terribly polite tale of Danes and Dutchmen that veers slowly but relentlessly toward something sinister. Speak No Evil quickly becomes a sociological experiment that questions our tendency to act against our own instincts, side with the cool kids, and lose who we are.

Tafdrup’s script, co-written with Mads Tafdrup, is sneaky in the way it treads on social anxiety, etiquette, politeness. You see how easily gaslighting alters the trajectory of a conversation, the course of action. Speak No Evil is a grim trip, but there is no question that it’s well made.

2. Mother! (2017)

Between writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s disorienting camera and his cast’s impeccable performances, he ratchets up tension in a way that is beyond uncomfortable. This is all clearly leading somewhere very wrong and the film develops the atmosphere of a nightmare quickly, descending further and further with each scene.

Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer are indescribably brilliant. Like most of the filmmaker’s work, mother! will not be for everyone. But if you’re up for an allegorical descent into hell, meticulously crafted and deftly told, and if you like your metaphors heavy and your climaxes absurd, this mother! is for you.

1. Coffee Table (2022)

On Shudder, Prime, Tubi, AMC+

A remarkably well written script fleshed out by a stunning ensemble becomes utter torture as you want so badly for some other outcome. Co-writer/director Caye Casas ties threads, builds anxiety, plunges the depths of “what’s the worst that could happen?” and leaves you shaken.

David Pareja and Estefania de los Santos craft indelible, believable, beautifully flawed characters so convincing that their experience becomes painful for you. Casas salts the wounds with dark comedy, but the tenderness and tragedy collaborate toward something far more crushingly human.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Curiosity Shop Horror

Leave a comment

Doesn’t matter if it’s an antique store, new age beads and crystals shop, magic store or plain out curiosity shop, if it ain’t S-Mart, don’t trust its wares. We dive into our favorite shopping mishaps and wishes gone wrong!

5. Needful Things (1993)

Satan is from Ohio. That’s one of the drollest, funniest lines in Fraser C. Heston’s Stephen King adaptation. Max von Sydow is Leland Gaunt, and like many a ghoul before him, Gaunt has moved into a fictional King town (Castle Rock, the most famous this time) to open a little shop. Antiques. Curiosities. Cheap, but each purchase requires a little favor and exacts a specific cost.

What King does with W. W. Jacobs’s infamous Monkey’s Paw concept is proliferate. There’s no wish, but there is a trick, and soon everybody has an item, pulls a trick, and the town descends into chaos. It’s the Salem’s Lot effect, except with malicious mischief instead of vampirism. The film is cheeky fun elevated immeasurably by an amazing cast. Ed Harris, Amanda Plummer, Bonnie Bedelia, and J.T. Walsh join von Sydow in a slight but fun effort.

4. Gremlins (1984)

Joe Dante’s picture book madness toes the line between gorgeous, family-friendly Christmas film and bloodthirsty creature feature mayhem. Gremlins follows a sweet hearted fuckup of a dad (Hoyt Axton), who buys a cuddly little pet for his grown son who still lives at home (Zach Galligan). Tiny Kingston Falls, PA will never be the same.

Gremlins is iconic. The soundstage beauty of the town, the snow, the little downtown and the sitcom staging of the family home carnage are so specific and so perfect. Dante mixes and matches every type of family comfort media with a shockingly high body count, and the mom (Frances Lee McCain) is a total badass. Plus, the story about the dead dad in the chimney? Brutal! Nobody blends horror and cinematic nostalgia better than Joe Dante.

3. Oddity (2024)

Carolyn Bracken is Darcy, twin sister of the recently slain Dani (also Bracken). Darcy is a little touched—she still runs the curiosity/antique shop her mother left her and still holds on to the giant wooden man a witch gave her parents for their wedding. Darcy is also blind, so when she arrives at her brother-in-law’s home—the very spot where Dani came to her bloody end—Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new live-in girlfriend (Caroline Menton) don’t know how to politely ask her to leave. And to take her giant wooden friend with her.

Writer/director Damian McCarthy hands this tapestry of folklore and soap opera to a nimble cast and a gifted cinematographer. Together this team casts a spell too fun to break.

2. Obsession (2026)

Obsession is a film about consent.

Filmmaker Curry Barker writes the “deadly wish” fable as well. Sad by Bear (Michael Johnston) can’t bring himself to confess his feelings for coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). He’s so desperate after one cringy missed chance that he breaks open a One Wish Willow he’d purchased as a joke and—without reading any of the warnings printed all over the box—wishes that she would love him more than anyone else on earth.

And she does.

The themes Barker mines are incredibly of-the-moment. Bear wants what he wants, but he wants it to be true. It isn’t, but that’s not good enough. Make it be true. But you can’t make something be true if it isn’t true, no matter how sad the boy is who wants it. Male entitlement masquerading as loneliness leads to violently self-centered behavior. Barker’s story, however jump-scary or genre friendly it becomes, never forgets this central, relevant concept.

1. The Monkey (2025)

Why is it that so many kids’ toys are creepy? Not that you should call The Monkey a toy. You should not, ever. Because this windup organ grinder monkey, with its red eyes and horrifyingly realistic teeth, is more of a furry, murder happy nightmare.

The film itself is a match made in horror heaven. Osgood Perkins (Longlegs, Gretel & Hansel, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) adapts and directs the short story by Stephen King about sibling rivalry and the unpredictability of death.

Perkins surrounds deliberately low energy leads with bizarre, colorful characters—even more colorful when they catch fire, explode, are disemboweled, etcetera. The film is laced with wonderful bursts of Final Destination-like bloodletting, as the Monkey’s executions are carried out via Rube Goldberg chain reactions that quickly become fun to anticipate.

Yes, fun. And funny.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Budding Physicians

Leave a comment

I don’t think these people are board certified! Really, a lot of harm can be done by medical hobbyists. Whether you’re still studying, gave up studying, or just really like sewing stuff together, that doesn’t make you a doctor.

Here are our five favorite horror movies where the one doing the surgery is almost certainly not licensed.

5. Tusk (2014)

The basic idea for this film came from one of writer/director Kevin Smith’s actual podcasts. He found online a letter from a man seeking a lodger, and read it aloud and mocked the man. But somewhere in all that, Smith found the story of a man losing his humanity.

Tusk is a comic riff on The Human Centipede. It’s also an insightful kind of stress dream, so close to home for Smith that, even with all its utter ludicrousness, it feels almost confessional.

The film’s greatest strength is a hypnotic performance by Michael Parks as the old seafarer with nefarious motives. He’s magnificent, and co-star Justin Long’s work is strongest when the two share the screen.

There is no film quite like Tusk, certainly not in Smith’s arsenal, which, I suppose, means this is not a traditional Kevin Smith Movie. And yet, there’s more Smith in this film than in anything else he’s made.

4. Re-animator (1985)

Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator reinvigorated the Frankenstein storyline in a decade glutted with vampire films. Based, as so many fantasy/horror films are, on the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator boasts a good mix of comedy and horror, some highly subversive ideas, and one really outstanding villain.

Jeffrey Combs, with his intense gaze and pout, his ability to mix comic timing with epic self righteousness without turning to caricature, carries the film beginning to end. His Dr. Herbert West has developed a day-glo serum that reanimates dead tissue, but a minor foul up with his experimentations – some might call it murder – sees him taking his studies to the New England medical school Miskatonic University. There he rents a room and basement laboratory from handsome med student Dan Caine (Bruce Abbott).

They’re not just evil scientists. They’re also really bad doctors.

Re-Animator is fresh. It’s funny and shocking, and though most performances are flat at best, those that are strong more than make up for it. First-time director Gordon’s effort is superb. He glories in the macabre fun of his scenes, pushing envelopes and dumping gallons of blood and gore. He balances anxiety with comedy, mines scenes for all they have to give, and takes you places you haven’t been.

3. American Mary (2012)

Jen and Sylvia Soska have written and directed a smart, twisted tale of cosmetic surgery – both elective and involuntary.

Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) stars as med student Mary Mason, a bright and eerily dedicated future surgeon who’s having some trouble paying the bills. She falls in with an unusual crowd, develops some skills, and becomes a person you don’t want to piss off.

The Soskas’ screenplay is as savvy as they come, clean and unpretentious but informed by gender politics and changing paradigms. They also prove skilled at drawing strong performances across the board. Isabelle is masterful, performing without judgment and creating a multi-dimensional central figure. Antonio Cupo also impresses as the unexpectedly layered yet certainly creepy strip club owner.

Were it not for all those amputations and mutilations, this wouldn’t be a horror film at all. It’s a bit like a noir turned inside out, where we share the point of view of the raven-haired dame who’s nothin’ but trouble. It’s a unique and refreshing approach that pays off.

2. Excision (2012)

Outcast Pauline (a very committed AnnaLynne McCord) is a budding surgeon. She’s not much of a student, actually, but she does have an affinity for anatomy. Especially blood. Pauline really, really likes blood.

Her sister – the favorite, for good reasons, truth be told – is slowly dying. And somewhere in Pauline’s odyssey to lose her virginity, inspire her mother’s love and do the right thing, she always seems to do the wrongest possible thing.

Writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. takes an unusual course with this coming-of-age horror. I’m not sure we’ve seen it handled quite like this before, although to be fair, it’s definitely in keeping with the peculiar and beautifully realized character he and McCord have created.

1. Eyes of My Mother (2016)

Francisca’s mother had been an eye surgeon back in Portugal.

“We used to do dissections together. She always hoped I’d be a surgeon one day.”

Though Mom appears only in Act 1 of writer/director Nicolas Pesce’s modern horror masterpiece Eyes of My Mother, her presence echoes throughout the lonely farmhouse Francesca rarely leaves.

Yes, the skills her mother imparted coupled with the trauma Francesca faced bleeds together to create a character whose splintered psyche keeps her from seeing that she’s taking some extreme measures to cure her lonliness.

This is one of the most beautifully filmed horror movies ever made, and as impeccable as the cinematography, the sound is even more important and magnificent. Together with restrained performances and jarring images, Eyes of My Mother is a film that sticks around even after it’s gone. Like a mom.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Teenage Vampires in Horror Movies

Leave a comment

Those teenage years can be beastly! A lot of vampire movies channel the alienation, hormones, angst and general misbehavior into a cautionary tale about teeth. Here are some of our favorites.

5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

Back in ’92, Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens played vampires (thank you!) bent on draining a California town. But one superficial mean girl at the local high school happens to be the Chosen One, the Slayer, or so says Donald Sutherland, and it generally seems like a fine idea to listen to him. Kristy Swanson then flirts with Luke Perry while training to stake some bloodsuckers.

Swanson is joined by Ben Affleck and Hilary Swank as vacuous teens in a highly dated but no less fun horror comedy. Reubens was a huge inspiration for our own short film Drunkula. Plus, anytime you crown Rutger Hauer prom king, you can count us in.

4. The Lost Boys (1987)

Out and proud Hollywood director Joel Schumacher spins a yarn of Santa Carla, a town with a perpetual coastal carnival and the nation’s highest murder rate. A roving band of cycle-riding vampires haunts the carnival and accounts for the carnage, until Diane Weist moves her family to town. While hottie Michael (Jason Patric) is being seduced into the demon brethren, younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) teams up with local goofballs the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to stake all bloodsuckers.

Michael’s a recent high school grad, and the coven of vampires seems to also be allegedly the same roundabout age. Certainly Sam and the Frog Brothers would be high school age, although none of them turn. (Spoiler!)

What’s most fun about this movie is how gloriously gay it is, from the “will he or won’t he” chemistry between Michael and David to Sam’s Rob Lowe poster to the grinding sax man, Schumacher’s film finds sexuality in the vampire tale that swings.

3. Fright Night (1985)

Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.

Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.

Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.

2. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020)

Making an unnervingly assured feature film debut, writer/director Jonathan Cuartas commingles The Transfiguration’s image of lonely, awkward adolescence with Relic’s horror of familial obligation to create a heartbreaking new vampire tale.

Many things are left unsaid (including the word “vampire’), and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To confines itself to the daily drudgery of three siblings. Dwight (Patrick Fugit) longs to break these family chains, but sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) holds him tight with shame, love, and obligation to little brother, the afflicted Thomas (Owen Campbell).

What could easily have become its own figurative image of the masculine longing for freedom mines far deeper concerns. Cuartas weaves loneliness into that freedom, tainting the concept of independence with a terrifying, even dangerous isolation that leaves you with no one to talk to and no way to get away from yourself.

1. The Transfiguration (2016)

Milo likes vampire movies.

So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.

Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.

O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu.  Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Skeletons in the Closet, 2026

Leave a comment

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! The time when we celebrate the bad horror lurking in Oscar nominees’ closets. Because we have a lot of return nominees, we have some overlap with earlier years. But there is also fresh blood…

5. Amy Madigan, Antlers (2021)

Scott Cooper reimagines the Wendigo legend to lead us through a dour metaphor full of familiar genre tropes and leave us with a brutal, great-looking, well-acted lecture.

Antlers is not a terrible film. But it has at least one incredibly stupid scene, and that scene stars the otherwise incredible Amy Madigan. She plays a school principal who stops at a student’s home to check on him and then–in a film that otherwise mainly avoids those “what a stupid decision” horror cliches—makes every stupid decision an educated professional could make. There is nothing believable about one step of it, however hard the talented veteran tries. It it so dumb that our friends Tyrone and Vernell abandoned the good characters and joined “Team Creature.”

4. Renate Reinsve: Dark Woods II/Villmark Asylum (2015)

Pål Øie followed up his surprise hit Villmark – a cabin in the woods horror – with this odd sequel set in the high hills above those woods, where an old hospital used after WWII is being prepared for destruction.

Øie lifts most of his story from Brad Anderson’s far superior Session 9, mixing in some Nazi style experimentation and creatures. It’s not a terrible movie, and characteristically, Renate Reinsve, gives a strong performance. There are some real scares, too, and the cast on the whole is solid. The mythology makes little to no sense, the leaps in logic are impressive, and in the end, it’s not memorable outside the early career work of one of the most talented actors working today.

3. Stellan Skarsgård: Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Skarsgård’s made his fair share of horror. We considered both of his Exorcist movies for this list, but since they’re basically the same movie, which too choose?

Deep Blue Sea is a fun B-movie creature feature. It’s mindless, violent, action packed, and Skarsgård gets one of the most ludicrous deaths in horror.

2. Benicio del Toro: The Wolfman (2010)

We had such hopes for this one when it came out. That cast! Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt!

Good God, was it awful. If you can look past the idea that Hopkins and Del Toro could be father and son, look past the insipid plot, look past Hopkins’s hamminess or del Toro’s disinterest, you cannot look past the heinous FX. But Blunt handles herself really, really well.

1.  Leonardo DiCaprio: Critters 3 (1991)

Long before Django Unchained, Titanic, or even What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, a barely pubescent Leo DiCaprio donned a day-glow t-shirt and a pre-teen scowl to battle Gremlin rip-offs in Critters 3.

They are furry, toothy, ravenous beasts from outer space and, until episode 3, they were content to terrify rural folk. But now they’re in the big city, and (in a clear rip off of the not-quite-as-terrible film Troll), they are pillaging a single apartment building and terrifying all those trapped inside. It’s a comedy, really, the kind with farting furballs and dunderheaded people. Which is to say, one that’s not particularly funny.

Serving up the same derivative comedy/horror pap you can find in one out of every three films made that decade, Critters 3 has a lot of hair in scrunchies, oversized blouses belted over colorful leggings, stereotypes, and actors on their careers’ last legs. And Leonardo DiCaprio, which will forever be the only reason this movie was released to DVD.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Heartbroken Horror

Leave a comment

We’re looking at heartbreak in horror for Valentine’s Day! Not unrequited love turned to stalkerism, because that’s been done to death and it’s not romantic. But the heartbreak and longing of love and loneliness. And blood.

5. The Fly (1986)

It was not just David Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that madeThe Fly fly. It was the performance he drew from Jeff Goldblum.

Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.

He and Geena Davis make the perfect pair, with their matching height and mullets, and their onscreen chemistry does give the film a level of human drama traditionally lacking from the Cronenberg canon. You root for Seth, and your heart breaks for him too.

4. Candyman (1992)

Has it really been Helen all along? Was she once, long ago, Daniel Robitaille’s forbidden lover? The reason for his suffering and murder?

Tony Todd makes Candyman a seductive, heartbroken phantasm with no choice but to shed blood to continue to exist. When he whispers to Helen, “Be my victim,” how could she say no?

3. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart mined Stoker’s text for as much romance and heartbreak as they could find, and if it wasn’t there, they made it up. The Count pines for his tragically lost love, crossing oceans of time for her. That, of course, leaves poor Jonathan heartbroken. But wait, there’s more! Because Lucy chooses Arthur, leaving Quincy and Dr. Jack both heartbroken, and then breaks Arthur’s heart with her own tragic death.

Coppola’s is the hottest, most gorgeous and heartbroken version of the ancient bloodsucker’s story you’re likely to find.

2. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro is a big ol’ softy. In many ways, that’s what makes Frankenstein a perfect property for him. His heart has always been with the monster, so why not tell the most heartbreaking and terrifying monster story?

Oscar Isaac is a marvel of angry arrogance made humble. As his creature, the long and limby Jacob Elordi offers a monster who’s more sensitive son than wounded manchild. The creature’s heartbreaking relationship with the eternally misunderstood Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is so full of tenderness and longing that the inevitable heartbreak crushes.

You don’t wander into a Guillermo del Toro film expecting less anything than glorious excess—another reason why Frankenstein and he were meant for one another.

1. May (2002)

Oh, May. Oh, Angela Bettis. No one – not even Sissy Spacek – captured the crushing awkwardness of trying to fit in when you are, deep down, cripplingly odd as well as Bettis.

Her May aches for a friend. Maybe even a lover? She has some heartbreaking trouble finding that in Adam (Jeremy Sisto) and Polly (Anna Faris – brilliant). But if you can’t find a friend, you might just have to make one.

Bettis’s performance is all awkward pauses, embarrassing gestures and longing. It’s beautiful, tender, sweet and – eventually – forgivably bloody. We love May.

Fright Club

Fright Club: New Latino Horror

Leave a comment

The last decade has seen an explosion in Spanish language horror—so many incredible options that we went fuzzy math for this list and still had to leave off some incredible movies, including Amigo, Veronica, The Platform, Terrified, Luz: The Flower of Evil, La Llorona, Huesera: The Bone Woman, and The Untamed. So, make sure you check every one of those out, but first, you should peruse the films that did make our list.

Thanks as always to a great crowd at Gateway Film Center!

6. El Conde (2023, Chile)

On Netflix
Pablo Larraín has a particular gift for poetic historical retellings grounded in a singular woman’s perspective: Spencer, Jackie. But his passion for the political history of his native Chile rings through most of his films, including Naruda and No. But did we see a vampire movie coming?

El Conde reimagines Augusto Pinochet as a vampire weary of his many years on earth and ready to leave his bickering family in squalor and finally die – until the church sends a vampire slayer after him. What follows is a near-slapstick political satire, sort of The Death of Stalin meets What We Do in the Shadows.

Every moment’s a delight, and a late-film reveal is a cynical and biting reward for a gloriously spent couple of hours.

5. Tigers Are Not Afraid (2019, Mexico)

On Shudder, Prime and AMC+

Lopez’s fable of children and war brandishes the same themes as Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, but grounds the magic with a rugged street style.

Tigers follows Estrella, a child studying fairy tales—or, she was until her school is temporarily closed due to the stray bullets that make it unsafe for students. As Estrella and her classmates hide beneath desks to avoid gunfire, her teacher hands her three broken pieces of chalk and tells her these are her three wishes.

But wishes never turn out the way you want them to.

4. Piggy (2022, Spain)

On Hulu, HBO Max, Prime, AMC+

Mean girls are a fixture in cinema, from Mean Girls to Carrie, Heathers to Jawbreaker to Napoleon Dynamite and countless others. Why is that? It’s because we like to see mean girls taken down.

Writer/director Carlota Pereda wants to challenge that base instinct. But first, she is going to make you hate Maca (Claudia Salas), Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Claudia (Irene Ferreiro). In one tiny Spanish town, the three girls make Sara’s (Laura Galán, remarkable) life utterly miserable. Like worse than Carrie White’s.

The filmmaker complicates every trope, all the one-dimensional victim/hero/villain ideas this genre and others feast on. Redemption doesn’t come easily to anyone. Pereda also seamlessly blends themes and ideas from across the genre, upending expectations but never skimping on brutal, visceral horror.

3. The Coffee Table (2022, Spain)

On Shudder, Prime, Tubi, AMC+

A remarkably well written script fleshed out by a stunning ensemble becomes utter torture as you want so badly for some other outcome. Co-writer/director Caye Casas ties threads, builds anxiety, plunges the depths of “what’s the worst that could happen?” and leaves you shaken.

David Pareja and Estefania de los Santos craft indelible, believable, beautifully flawed characters so convincing that their experience becomes painful for you. Casas salts the wounds with dark comedy, but the tenderness and tragedy collaborate toward something far more crushingly human.

2.  The Wolf House (2018, Chile)

On Prime, Tubi, Plex, Fawesome

Another Chilean horror, so you’re safe in assuming it has something to do with Pinochet. This breathtaking, incredibly creepy stop motion animated wonder tells of a true cult, Colonia Dignidad. One of its inhabitants escapes into the woods, has a near-miss catastrophe with a wolf, and hides in an abandoned house.

Directors/animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña pull you into Maria’s dreamlike world, as her thoughts and reality blend before your eyes. Sets are painted, built, melted, and destroyed on the screen as Maria’s thoughts and the dangers she faces come and go. It’s an eerily beautiful and unforgettable fairy tale rooted in reality.

1. When Evil Lurks (2023, Argentina)

On Shudder, Hulu, Max, AMC+, Prime

Just when you thought no one could do anything fresh with a possession movie, Terrified filmmaker Demián Rugna surprises you. When Evil Lurks does sometimes feel familiar, its road trip to hell detouring through The Crazies, among others. But Rugna’s take on all the familiar elements feels new, in that you cannot and would not want to predict where he’s headed.

This is a magnificently written piece of horror, and Rugna’s expansive direction gives it an otherworldly yet dirty, earthy presence.

The inexplicable ugliness – this particularly foul presence of evil – is handled with enough distance, enough elegance to make the film almost beautiful, regardless of the truly awful nature of the footage. And Rugna never lets up. Each passing minute is more difficult than the last, to the very last, which is an absolute knife to the heart.