Bone Deep

The only thing I can assure those who haven't seen House is that this post will not  prepare you for the film because that's literally impossible. But I'm here to tell you this bonkers piece of cinema is an absolute must-see for pretty much everybody. 

Because religion doesn't play a huge part in my life, it's easy to think the entire concept of religious horror would flop for me and I'd never want to spend time on it. But that's not the case. The genre can  miss for me...but only if it uses religious alignment as a shorthand for morality.

For me, the mark of an acting performance is if I genuinely cannot imagine a single other performer doing as well.

In this post, I'm going to start talking about one of my very favorite horror projects in the space today, which hasn't yet concluded as of writing, but has knocked the first two of its three films out of the park. Ti West's (and, as of Pearl , also Mia Goth's) X  film trilogy. 

Skinamarink  is one of those horror films which, when described on paper, may not seem like a film that would scare a lot of people. For many, it simply doesn' t, and yet it's the scariest thing many others have ever seen.

As I've already discussed, the final girl (a concept codified in Carol Clover's analytical text  Men, Women, and Chainsaws ) is the archetypal female lead and survivor of a slasher movie. 

[DISCLAIMER: This was written before the announcement of Melissa Barrera's firing from Scream VI and co-star Jenna Ortega's official announcement of departure the day after. These events disgust and disappoint me and stain my outlook for the franchise significantly, so when you hear me talk about the films being a pretty clean, strong string, that's all coming from when they had been. VI does not promise to be a viable project due to these events and if a film is made under these circumstances, I still won't support it.] Scream might be the best long series in horror film history.

In an age of horror movies which has seen impressive forays into arthouse directions and allegorical social metaphors (movies which I often adore), it can be nice to enjoy a horror story that's not so stylistically lofty or tonally alienating and is focused primarily on an intriguing weird scenario.