ZooScope

Tag: Horror

  • Enemy. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. E1 Films. 2013.

    Warning – Pictures of Spiders, if you hate spiders, stop reading now! Final Warning! The final scene of Enemy is the culmination of the spider motif that runs throughout the movie. Adam/Anthony has spent the whole film trying to resolve the two sides of himself, the cheat who only cares about himself and the man who tries…

  • 28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2002.

    You wouldn’t expect one of British cinema’s most poignant and idyllic moments to lie in the centre of a post-apocalyptic horror film, yet it does. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later cuts in the melancholy scene at its centre, with four wild horses providing respite for the film’s central four characters by subverting the film’s primary genre…

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Do you want a second chance, Cole?” In other words – Do you want your body experimented upon to benefit our research again, Cole? The film cuts to a scene where Cole is injected and pinned to the time machine… or rather, torture machine. Cole never gets to answer the question – he has no…

  • Frozen. Dir. Adam Green. Anchor Bay Films. 2010.

    Adam Green’s dramatic thriller Frozen features the return of the wolf to terrorise three friends who become stranded on a ski lift in a New England ski resort. The wolf’s homecoming becomes symbolic, in light of Robin Wood’s definition of the horror film monster, of the ‘deadly return of all that a culture both represses and oppresses’[i].…

  • Gone Girl. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox. 2014.

    Stereotypically, cats are represented as sly, sexy, intelligent, manipulative and mysterious creatures, and all of these characteristics are embodied in Gone Girl’s (dir. David Fincher, 2014) complex anti-heroine Amy Dunne. In order to understand Amy’s immensely complicated character, who only exists in flashbacks during the film’s opening scene, the film projects Amy’s character onto her husband Nick’s…

  • Black Swan. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2010.

    The movie Black Swan could be assigned to a psychological horror movie that was directed by Aronofsky and released in 2010. The film deals with the main protagonist Nina who is a promising ballet-dancer but at the same time very childish, shy and submissive. To be chosen for the lead role of “Swan Lake”, she…

  • Black Swan. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2010.

    Black Swan – Dir. Darren Aronofsky – 2010: When you watch certain movies over and over again, they are most probably good. When you have the urge to rewatch a movie right after seeing it for the first time, it is most certainly to be a masterpiece. Such masterpiece was created by Darren Aronofsky in…

  • White Dog. Dir. Samuel Fuller. Paramount Pictures. 1982.

    Sam Fuller’s final Hollywood film, White Dog (1982), is based on Romain Gary’s 1970 ‘nonfiction’ novel of the same name and tells the story of aspiring actress Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), who after accidentally hitting and injuring him with her car, adopts a seemingly lovable white German shepherd. The plot is complicated when, after two…

  • The Witch. Dir. Robert Eggers. A24. 2015.

    Robert Eggers’s 2015 independent horror film The Witch encounters human-animal relations in reference to a manmade issue – religion and the occult. I argue that such a representation of humans living alongside animals in the context of a restricted, puritanical environment of their own making exists because of how the characters decide to build their own isolation.…

  • Gremlins. Dir. Joe Dante. Warner Bros.. 1984.

    An inventor of dubious talent visits Chinatown trying to find his son a Christmas present, where he is sold a strange fluffy creature; a Mogwai. The creature comes with three rules: do not expose it to bright light, do not get it wet, and do not feed it after midnight. Within due time however, all…