Horror Actressing: Anna Massey in "Peeping Tom" (1960)

by Jason Adams

The adage goes that curiosity kills the cat, but in Michael Powell's 1960 shocker Peeping Tom it's only half true -- curiosity kills one while saving the other. Mark, the deranged killer camera-man at the film's heart (played with shy finesse by Karlheinz Böhm), finds Helen (Anna Massey) by perching on her windowsill and peering in at her birthday party -- she's his downstairs neighbor and full of life as irrepressible as her vast array of bright monochromatic dresses. They seem an odd match from the start but Helen can't seem to get Mark off her mind -- there's something curious about that upstairs man, and she's going to find out if it... well you know.

Is Helen film's very first Final Girl? 

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First images from the surely misbegotten remake of "Rebecca"

by Nathaniel R

Armie Hammer and Lily James as Mr and Mrs de Winter

Netflix has released the first four images from their remake of Hitchcock's Rebecca which begins streaming on October 21st ---  Excuse us, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. People will be quick to note that it's less sacrilegious to adapt the novel than the 1940 best Picture winner. Now, we understand that remakes are not automatically "bad," but there are numerous reasons why remaking Hitchcock films, of all things, is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. For one, auteurs that get adjectives named ever them are inimitable and so you lose the distinct personality. For another, Hitchcock movies have (mostly) aged terrifically well; there's a reason people still watch a wide swath of them and so many are still easily available to the public, referenced in so many modern movies, and an intrinsic part of culture...

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Horror Actressing: Greta Gerwig in "The House of the Devil"

by Jason Adams

When I wrote up last week's entry in our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series, about the latest greatest entry in what I dubbed the "Horror Movie Funny Friend Hall of Fame," I didn't intend to make a series-within-series out of it... even though I did name-check several other favorite performances that fit within this kind of role, up to and including today's entry. I didn't intend it but why fight it when today is the great Greta Gerwig's birthday, and her work in Ti West's 2009 low-key Satanic Panic shocker The House of the Devil is one of its finest examples...

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Horror Actressing: Marissa Anita in "Impetigore"

by Jason Adams

Impetigore's Tara Basro (L) as "Maya" and Marissa Anita (R) as "Dini"

The concept of the "Funny Best Friend" is nothing new, but I always tend to think of the role in the context of the Romantic Comedy. Think Laura San Giacomo in Pretty Woman, who gets to be so hysterically vulgar and dumb, all the better to make Julia Roberts seem in turn like the classy and smart one. That's what these roles are there in the script for -- these Falstaffian sidekicks, who throw our lead characters' highs and lows into contrast.

But Horror Films have a storied history with these roles as well and this week Shudder premiered one of the best I've seen in awhile -- Marissa Anita playing "Dini" in Indonesian director Joko Anwar's latest fright flick Impetigore. You can drop Anita right down alongside Rose McGowan in Scream, Greta Gerwig in House of the Devil, Paula Prentiss in The Stepford Wives -- she's that terrific.

We meet Dini right at the start...

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The many faces of Hannibal Lecter

by Cláudio Alves

1991's The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, thus becoming the only horror movie to ever conquer that much-coveted prize. Still, overall, the film seems to owe more to the crime thriller, the police procedural and investigative manhunt than it does to the horror genre. However, one element plunges it right into the depths of cinematic nightmares. It's a character so malevolent that it often feels larger than life, like a primordial evil closer to the divine than to the human. We're talking about the monster that tops the AFI's greatest movie villains list, the role that earned Anthony Hopkins his Oscar and made us never look at Fava beans the same way ever again – Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecter…

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