Quasi-expressionistic with deep love emerging from melancholy; stuffed paws running across thistles, sun finally cutting the grey. This is such a deeply special film, one that Disney only seems to make accidentally, one that understands the ache in aging and the guilt in letting go. We complicate and we excuse ourselves from joy and we forget time doesn't pause. I know I do and I know I have been.
Friendships are quickly becoming memory and I feel so lost in…
Fog drifting across shadow-cutting trees, flashy color highlighting home-paranoia, and a blinking glow emanating from the ghostly undead. Bava's form across the three stories drip with mood and consequence; misdeeds are punished with the supernatural and the deadly. Monsters—human or otherwise—haunting the night-thick grounds and stalking saturated hallways.
I quite like the attention to its own structure, with Karloff as host and character, a storyteller and a revealer of artifice. There's something wonderfully playful in the film's final reveal, that horror is spooky but also fun, and its creation is magically inventive.
The Dark whispering across decades, promising it'll eventually eat the little light left; a trauma carving imploding emotions across generations, dwelling in the shadows briefly lit by blinking stop lights and chilled by autumn air. Zombie's (masterful) Halloween films linger in the immediate rot of spilled blood and vanquished dreams, while Green's cries for the years lost to unexplainable ache. It's remarkable that this works so well as a singularly unnerving staring contest with the abyss while also continuing Carpenter's…
I recall reading a set visit that described this film as "Whiplash in space," and I couldn't disagree more. Rather than self-improvement as an imploding addiction, this is grief as an eclipse, blocking light and swallowing your world in dark. Chazelle's direction isn't manic and destructive, but claustrophobic and sad; sequences are volcanic in intensity to be sure, although, I think loneliness dominates.
The stars a nightlight against a backdrop of inarticulable agony. The world can just be too painful.…
