Welcome Aboard Flight 407: Where Your Safety Is Not Our Priority If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “You know what horror needs? More legroom and a beverage cart,” then congratulations—Dark Flight is your movie. Directed by Issara Nadee, this 2012 Thai horror film takes the familiar panic of being stuck on a plane and adds … Read More ““Dark Flight” (2012): Fasten Your Seatbelts—It’s Going to Be a Dead Ride” »
Welcome to the Rabbit Hole, Population: You Christopher MacBride’s The Conspiracy is the kind of movie that makes you check your Wi-Fi for surveillance signals and wonder whether the guy delivering your pizza might actually be part of a centuries-old death cult. It’s a found-footage thriller about two documentarians who accidentally trip over the global … Read More ““The Conspiracy” (2012): Trust No One, Especially the Guy With the Bull Mask” »
The Sermon on the Mount Goes Off the Rails Let’s get one thing straight: Children of Sorrow is not your average horror flick. It’s not here to scare you with jump cuts, hauntings, or ghouls in bad makeup. It’s here to stare deep into your eyes and whisper, “Join us,” until you’re questioning your own … Read More ““Children of Sorrow” (2012): The Feel-Good Cult Movie of the Year (If You Hate Yourself)” »
Daddy Issues, but Make It Horror Jennifer Lynch’s Chained isn’t the kind of movie you recommend to friends so much as you quietly slip it to them with a warning and a half-smile—“Watch this, but, you know… maybe don’t eat first.” It’s an unflinching, psychologically twisted father-son story that replaces baseball games and fishing trips … Read More ““Chained” (2012): A Serial Killer Drama That’s Disturbingly Good for You” »
A Cocoon of Confusion There’s a fine line between “art house horror” and “accidental camp.” The Butterfly Room doesn’t so much walk that line as faceplant across it, clutching a net and shouting, “Look, symbolism!” Directed by Jonathan Zarantonello, this Italian-American thriller imagines itself as a gothic meditation on motherhood, aging, and repression—but what it … Read More ““The Butterfly Room” (2012): Fluttering Into Madness, Then Crashing Into a Wall” »
Once Upon a Time in Mediocrity There are bad horror movies, and then there’s Bunshinsaba (笔仙)—a movie that makes you wish the ghost would crawl out of the screen and put you out of your misery. Directed by Ahn Byeong-ki, the man behind the original Korean Bunshinsaba (which, incidentally, was actually scary), this 2012 Chinese … Read More ““Bunshinsaba” (2012): A Horror Film That’s Scary for All the Wrong Reasons” »
In the Beginning, There Was Regret Some movies are so bad they’re good. Bloody Bloody Bible Camp isn’t one of those movies. It’s so bad it feels like divine punishment for something you did in a past life. Directed by Vito Trabucco—whose name sounds like a rejected Goodfellas character—the film tries to mix slasher horror … Read More ““Bloody Bloody Bible Camp” (2012): Thou Shalt Not Watch This Twice” »
The Most Dangerous Game: Female Friendship “Black Rock” begins like a therapy session that accidentally turns into Deliverance. Three women reunite on a remote island to rekindle their friendship, bury old grudges, and maybe find a time capsule. Instead, they find trauma, revenge, and the world’s worst camping trip. Directed by Katie Aselton and written … Read More ““Black Rock” (2012): Girls’ Trip Gone Feral” »
The Golden Age, Brought to You by PlayStation 2 Kentaro Miura’s Berserk is a brutal, operatic masterpiece—a saga of ambition, betrayal, and enough trauma to fill a psychiatrist’s entire career. So naturally, someone thought, “Let’s condense that sprawling epic into three CGI movies that look like cutscenes from a 2006 Xbox demo disc.” Enter Berserk: … Read More ““Berserk: The Golden Age Arc” (2012–2013): A Medieval Tragedy Rendered in Plastic” »
A Found Footage Freakshow That Actually Has a Brain When you hear found footage horror, you probably picture shaky cameras, hyperventilating twenty-somethings, and someone screaming, “What was that?!” while filming their own death. But Barry Levinson—yes, Rain Man Barry Levinson—looked at this genre and said, “What if it was actually smart?” The Bay is his … Read More ““The Bay” (2012): When Mother Nature Files for Divorce” »