ZooScope

Category: Genre: Horror

  • Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021

    Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021

    Like a lamb to the slaughter, the slow-burn, absurd surrealness of A24’s Lamb (2021) leads the audience to an end that blends both chilling twists and heartbreaking loss as the complications that are inevitable with blurring binaries between human-animal relations come to fruition. In a playful, sardonic reconfiguration of oppositions between captivity and freedom, wildness…

  • The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Orion Pictures. 1991.

    Alongside terrific and terrifying characters such as Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, there is another sinister dramatis persona evoked in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs – that of the ‘Death’s Head Hawk-Moth’ and Buffalo Bill’s relation to them. It is unsurprising that the moth in this scene invokes dread in Clarice and the audience,…

  • Okja. Dir. Bong Joon-ho. Netflix. 2017

    Okja. Dir. Bong Joon-ho. Netflix. 2017

    There are two kinds of pigs that make an appearance in Okja; genetically modified super-pigs and greedy, corporate capitalist pigs. The slaughterhouse scene forces the viewer to dispel any false idealism surrounding the reality of the meat industry, an explicit criticism of how human exceptionalist thinking blended with modern ‘capitalist delirium’ [1] has ruined the…

  • Arachnophobia, Dir. Frank Marshall, Hollywood Pictures, Franklin Entertainment, 1990.

    In one of the most suspenseful scenes in Arachnophobia, a young woman goes for a shower in the bathroom but is ambushed by one of the spider offspring in a tense cat-and-mouse sequence. Intended as an obvious play on the shower trope in horror films – where a conventionally attractive woman is stalked and attacked…

  • Come and See. Dir. Elem Klimov. Belarusfilm.1985.

    Life Elem Klimov’s 1985 pernicious masterpiece Come and See leaves viewers in a state of abject horror. The film depicts the atrocities commited by the Nazi regime in Byelorussia during the Second World War, following Florya on his path from innocence to experience. The cow is introduced to us halfway through the narrative working as…

  • The Platform (El Hoyo). Dir. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. Festival Films & Netflix. 2019

    In the twisted dystopian science fiction movie “The Platform,” inmates of a vertically piled up prison, with two inmates on each floor, fight for bare survival due to the lack of food for the entire population. An extensive buffet of the finest hearty and sweet food travels, from top to bottom through the middle of…

  • Crimson Peak. Dir. Guillermo Del Toro. Legendary. 2015.

    “It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all” Guillermo Del Toro’s gothic romance Crimson Peak is a carefully designed visual masterpiece that centres around American heiress Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring author who becomes romantically involved with English baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) when he visits New York seeking investment…

  • The Craft. Dir. Andrew Fleming. Columbia Pictures. 1996.

    ‘Big animals steal from little ones’ – Bonnie Harper (Neve Campbell) The Craft (1996) epitomises the intensity of teenage female friendships, and how quickly and violently these bonds can be broken. This kind of teenage sisterhood and its potential for moments of both great beauty and disaster is played out through the use of animals…

  • Tusk. Dir. Kevin Smith. Smodcast Pictures. 2014

    The film opens with Wallace and Teddy who host a popular podcast where they discuss viral videos and interview internet celebrities. Wallace travels to Canada to interview someone, however upon arrival it is clear they have committed suicide. Annoyed he flew to Canada for nothing, he stumbles across a letter in a pub’s bathroom stall…

  • The Craft. Dir. Andrew Fleming. Columbia Pictures. 1996.

    The Craft is a 1996 supernatural teen horror film, in which animals feature heavily as a representation of the otherness felt by four teenage girls who possess extraordinary powers. The film presents witchcraft and magic as something that is inextricable from nature and animals, in line with Neo-Pagan traditions. This scene is particularly striking, as…