Tag: Horror

‘The Lighthouse’ is a mesmerizing visual feast…and a rudderless waste of time

Jeff Mitchell

“The Lighthouse” – Robert Eggers’ follow-up to his eerie, creepy horror film “The Witch” (2015) (4/4 stars) is an equally eerie, creepy drama about two weathered men watching over a lonely lighthouse. There’s little doubt that this visual feast sets a disturbing tone, as “The Lighthouse” has an Ingmar Bergman-“Hour of the Wolf”-thing working greatly in its favor.  Filmed entirely in black and white and almost exclusively with a 1:1 aspect ratio (or very close to it), Eggers delivers a horrible sense of doom on a teeny, tiny island near…

31 Scary Movies: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

Jeff Mitchell

“Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) – When a movie begins and ends with a soft lullaby, and the film’s title features the word, baby, one might guess “Rosemary’s Baby” is a warm family film about a young couple’s journey into parenthood. Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is a gentle, soft-spoken 20-something from Omaha – and living in New York City with her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) – but director Roman Polanski’s horror masterpiece is anything but a light-hearted affair. This brooding and twisted mystery burns slowly while carefully peeling away the facade along the way.  Curiously,…

‘Annihilation’ horrifically demolishes old boundaries

Jeff Mitchell

“Annihilation” – Nobody. Nobody comes back. Nobody comes back after entering The Shimmer. Actually one person does come back, and now, Lena (Natalie Portman), a doctor – who also spent seven years in the United States Army – feels compelled to enter it.  In doing so, she takes movie audiences on a sometimes beautiful, but mostly a deeply unsettling, nightmarish journey in writer/director Alex Garland’s (“Ex Machina” (2014)) visionary science fiction stunner. The Shimmer is a bizarre phenomenon, a growing permeable force field, created by a meteor that landed near an…