Horror Actressing: Florence Pugh in "Midsommar"

by Jason Adams

There is a lot of bodily violence seen on-screen in Ari Aster's Midsommar -- a certain mallet comes to mind. But nowhere at any point did I wince harder than I did during a scene simply involving two people having a conversation in a college dormitory. I often reference the moment that the little ghoul girl crawls through the television screen in Ringu as being the apex of cinematic revulsion for me -- that I very nearly crawled backwards up and over my seat the first time I saw that. Midsommar's dorm scene dropped the same sensation, just emotionally...

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Horror Actressing: Rebecca Ferguson in "Doctor Sleep"

by Jason Adams

(As the year marches towards its conclusion we're using our weekly "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to take a look at the best of what the genre's given us in the past 12 months, actress-wise. Here's our latest fave 0f 2019.) It's an exciting time to watch Rebecca Ferguson on-screen -- you still get the feeling of discovery every time she shows up, like we haven't got an inkling still of what she's capable of tapping into. She's reminding me of Andrea Riseborough in that way...

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Horror Actressing: Sofia Boutella in "Climax"

by Jason Adams

Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 freak-out flick Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, has spent the past couple of decades being rediscovered as a major work of art -- Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes and the Cesars that year but the film was nearly chopped in half for its U.S. release (from 126 minutes down to 81) making an already cryptic and eccentric story totally incomprehensible. In short it bombed, and critics here in the US sneered. Still one has the feeling that the film's become a foundational text nowadays, and this year's Gaspar Noé movie Climax, with its gloriously unhinged central performance from Sofia Boutella, feels like Adjani's LSD-soaked descendant.

A professional dancer before becoming an actress it's only natural that Boutella would nail the physical requirements necessary to play Selva, the lead figure in Climax's troupe of overripe boogie-woogers who get more than they bargained for from the homemade sangria served at their snow-bound after-party...

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Horror Actressing: Fatma Mohamed in "In Fabric"

by Jason Adams

Dunno who's noticed but Twenty-Nineteen is making its last lap before it leaps, and so the time for taking stock of What Was is nigh now -- that is to say for the next several weeks of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series I'm going to be looking back at my favorite female performances from horror films that I saw this past year. And what better way to start this project than with a film I saw at the start of the year when I reviewed it for Tribeca, one that's only now just being released, hitting screens on December 6th.

I speak of Peter Strickland's In Fabric, a bifurcated anthology-of-sorts that's strung together via one possessed red dress that ruins the lives of all those who come into contact with it...

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Horror Actressing: Kirsten Dunst in "Interview With the Vampire"

by Jason Adams

All of the best moments in Interview With the Vampire belong to the eleven-year-old. Re-watching the film now here on its 25th anniversary there's a lot to like (Tom Cruise allows himself to be camp in ways that he usually is but this time purposefully, and Neil Jordan floods everything with opulent blood-red atmosphere) and there's a lot to hate (it's a slog and Brad Pitt is awful) but there's really only one thing to love, and that thing is Kirsten Dunst every single second she's on-screen as the immortal vampire trapped in a little girl's perpetual curls.

The story goes that Dunst was the first girl that they auditioned for the role of "Claudia" but that she auditioned twice -- her agent supposedly told her she was terrible the first time through and forced her back into the room to do it all over again. "How avant-garde," indeed. Still that gambit worked, and one of our greatest actresses got her start by slashing up multiple nannies and kissing Brad Pitt on the mouth -- an experience Dunst maintains was "gross," speaking for exactly zero other people aged eleven to one hundred and eleven...

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