Horror Actressing: Gwyneth Paltrow in "Se7en"

by Jason Adams

The glimmers of hope that shine through the dank squalor of David Fincher's serial-killer masterpiece Se7en, which is turning 25 today, are so few and far between that we find ourselves clinging to them like life-rafts bobbing down a turbulent sewage drain. One of the library's security guards says, "We got culture coming out of our ass," and then they do, as the gentle strings of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Air Suite No. 3 In D Major" fill the golden-hued dungeon where Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) does his dark research. Similarly Brad Pitt's Detective Mills finds some peace at home playing with his beautiful lively puppies, all locked into a small room lined with newspapers where the dogs do their own important business. Happiness looks like it smells bad!

This nameless city is torrential rain and moldy wallpaper most of the time -- when it's not simply carved-up bodies rising to the surface -- and so Gwyneth Paltrow, ever-chic and resolutely blonde as sunshine, she stands out the first second we see her, coming as she does nuzzled up against Brad Pitt's wall of themselves golden abs. Now this, this right here...

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Horror Actressing: Mia Wasikowska in "Stoker"

Out this Friday the cast of Antonio Campos' new Netflix film The Devil All the Time is so ridiculously stacked with young actors of note -- Tom Holland! Robert Pattinson! Riley Keough! -- that it was inevitable one of them would be left under-served by the material, and I'm sad to report the worst off in this respect is by my estimation the best actor in the whole cast, one Mia Wasikowska. She gets less than five minutes of screen-time, none of which save her final moments give her much of anything to do, all while we know good and well dagnabit that Miss Mia can do anything!

So for today's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series let's look back at Mia doing something. Something plenty worthy of her talents. In Park Chan-wook's deliriously under-appreciated 2013 coming-of-age thriller Stoker, specifically.

Mia plays India, who's celebrating her 18th birthday as the film opens...

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Horror Actressing: Jena Malone in "The Ruins"

by Jason Adams

I've talked a lot in my "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series about the ritualized magic that can be summoned on-screen when an actor can get across genuine fear to an audience, but I've talked less about that emotion's trickier parasitic twin -- when an actress is called upon to display weakness. Fear in the context of a horror movie is acceptable -- we show up to these films to live through our fears vicariously; to ride on the Final Girl's coattails through the thorny weeds of nighttime terrors and to triumph over them, standing tall in the dawn.

But weakness, weakness is a slap in the face. A character that makes the wrong decisions over and over again, one who doesn't seem capable in the moment of learning from them, well who wants to watch that? These characters make us angry, sometimes viscerally so -- think of the long standing sneers that've met Shelley Duvall's Wendy Torrance in The Shining or Judith O'Dea's Barbra in Night of the Living Dead. Queens the both, and yet their trembling lips and wet noses inspire such vitriol from so many. Well you can and should definitely add to the whimpering, simpering heap of queens Jena Malone's Amy in Carter Smith's 2008 "When Plants Attack!" film The Ruins.

Amy just can't seem to catch a break...

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Horror Actressing: Barbara Crampton in "Re-Animator"

by Jason Adams

Why's it so hard to put the work of H.P. Lovecraft on the screen? Over 80 years since the writer died it's real weird (an appropriate word in this context) to me that there's never been a truly grand-scale adaptation of his begging-for-just-that work, especially given how timely they do feel here in the 21st century as reality seems to morph into madness. Guillermo Del Toro notoriously tried for a decade to get At the Mountains of Madness off the ground to no avail, but that's the closest Hollywood has as yet come. Before theaters shut down in early 2020 we did get an unofficial HPL turn with Kristen Stewart in Underwater (which I truly dug) and we're now right this minute three episodes into the HBO series Lovecraft Country, which... well I'm waiting to see how that goes. Situating Lovecraft's profound racism against American race relations is hella smart, so I keep hope alive it will find its footing. (This latest episode felt like a tentacle squish in the right direction.)

In my talk there of notable Lovecraft adaptations I purposefully skipped over the hilariously disgusting 80s works of writer-director-madman Stuart Gordon though, in order to bring us to the subject of this week's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series, which is Scream Queen and Horror Icon Barbara Crampton's turn as the "bubble-headed co-ed" Megan in 1985's Re-Animator...

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How Had I Never Seen... "Candyman"?

by Cláudio Alves

The Nia DaCosta-directed, Jordan Peele-produced, Candyman is scheduled to arrive in American theaters later this year. In the meantime, the original Candyman, a 1992 horror classic freely adapted from Clive Barker's The Forbidden, is newly streaming on Netflix. With all that in mind, this seemed like a great time to finally watch that acclaimed nightmare of 90s cinema, a picture I've long heard about and have considered one of my great blind spots as a fan of horror movies.

Despite astronomically high expectations, Candyman did not disappoint…

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