Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 film Woman in the Dunes, adapted from the novel by Kobo Abe, is fascinating and disturbing. The film’s protagonist is a man trapped by villagers, in a dilapidated house at the bottom of a sand pit; the ...

When Martin Scorsese brought Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom back from its longtime purgatory, the word on the street was that it was a piece of transgressive cinema from an acclaimed director, *before* Psycho, which caught a lot of hell it didn’t deserve, and largely ended its ...

Someday someone will make the definitive documentary about the making of The Terminator (1984). Until then we’ll have the periodic cast and crew interviews. Until then we’ll have their stories. On this special episode of the Diabolique Webcast, Jean-Paul Ouellette, ...

Earlier this year, when Shout Factory announced their Blu-ray release of John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned, I can’t say I was enthusiastic about the news. It mostly served to remind me how much I wanted to like the film ...

The Tenant isn’t the first film I think of when the name Roman Polanski is mentioned. The director’s 1976 film strikes me more as a curiosity. Does its central character, Trelkovsky, out of all the characters in Polanski’s films, most ...

Mulholland Drive is perhaps a unique sort of puzzle—one that’s different upon every deconstruction. Conversationally you can take the film apart and put it back together and maybe you’ll come up with an entirely different theory as to what’s truly ...

While I was putting together my ballot for the best films and performances of the year for the Boston Online Film Critics Association, I of course couldn’t help trying as best I could to consider the best horror films of ...

The Brood entertains the notion that psychotherapy can be dangerous. It doesn’t merely result in a changing of one’s mind, it can also result in a changing of one’s body—disturbingly so. And woe be the therapist who messes around with ...

From a technical strand-point, Brian de Palma’s 1980 psychological thriller Dressed to Kill is top notch. His fascination with the techniques of filmmaking makes the film a treasure trove for cinephiles. The film has its detractors, of course, but fans ...

Time has been good to Escape from New York. From the cinema netherworld of the early 80s, John Carpenter’s dystopian adventure prospered on home-video, spawned a sequel, and has been emblemized by cinephiles as an avatar of eighties cool. Being ...