Yeah, I can't imagine why Sidney wouldn't want to be in the play where people in robes and masks try to stab her, can you?

What's admirable, and easy to overlook, about the Scream series is that it flips the standard slasher franchise formula on its head. Instead of each film following a different group of victims being menaced by the same killer, we have the same characters facing a different killer each time. Being able to grow and mature…

I feel like I grew up a little bit with this viewing--or maybe it's just proof I'm getting more cynical--because this was my first time seeing Scream as anything less than a perfect film. I've watched it, conservatively, ten times by now, and this one felt less like a collapse into a comfy chair and more like a reunion with an old friend, facing the inevitability of having a lot less in common than you used to.

One thing I…

The film that opened my eyes to Tobe Hooper's brilliance was neither The Texas Chain Saw Massacre nor Poltergeist (though I had previously seen both) but rather Toolbox Murders. I was 18 years old, living with my parents and unemployed, having withdrawn from college after a disastrous first semester. It was the beginning of a four-year spiral of depression, isolation and substance abuse: the darkest period of my life thus far.

I rented Toolbox Murders from my local Hollywood Video…

God bless Mike Flanagan. Hush was, as I suspected, more of an experiment/trifle than a sincere piece of work, and now he's back with another gem that deals in true auteuristic style with his pet obsessions: how we process grief and loss, the unseen forces that surround us, how the past infects the present. And it's impeccably made; somebody needs to grab whoever directed Annabelle and say. "THIS is how you make a horror film set in the '60s!"

In…