Both on his own and as a member of Goblin. Claudio Simonetti has been responsible for some of the most iconic scores in the history of Italian horror cinema. He is probably best known for Goblin’s score for Dario Argento’s Suspiria. The minute you hear the opening of that score, you are immediately transported into Argento’s nightmarish world of witches, death, and ballet.
In 1999, Simonetti formed Daemonia, a heavy mental band that played updated version of his classic horror scores, along with new material. In this video, they perform Suspiria and the end result is a perfect video for Halloween!
“A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again?” — Casares
The first time you see the ghost in The Devil’s Backbone, you’re likely to wonder what he’s going to do to the children. By the end, the more troubling question is what people have already done to him. That change in perspective is the heart of Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 supernatural horror film, a movie that slowly rearranges your sense of where the danger lies. It delivers eerie encounters, hidden secrets, and an isolated setting, but its real achievement is making those familiar ingredients feel emotionally necessary. The haunting isn’t there to interrupt the human story. It’s there to reveal the human story everyone else has found a way to avoid.
Set in 1939, near the end of the Spanish Civil War, the film follows Carlos, played by Fernando Tielve, as he arrives at a remote orphanage. He enters a community that has already established its routines, rivalries, and silences. The other boys know things he doesn’t, while the adults seem reluctant to explain much of anything. Carlos has enough to worry about before he encounters Santi, the ghost of a dead child whose presence suggests that the building holds more than ordinary unhappiness. Del Toro links these sources of anxiety from the beginning. Being haunted is frightening, but so is depending on strangers who control your life without telling you the truth about it.
Carlos makes an effective guide because he’s neither unusually helpless nor conveniently fearless. Tielve lets curiosity, stubbornness, and insecurity coexist without making them seem like separate performance choices. Carlos wants answers, but he also wants to fit in, and those desires don’t always lead him in the same direction. Investigating something strange can bring him attention he doesn’t necessarily want. Standing up for himself can make an already uncertain situation worse. The film respects the practical difficulty of being a child in an unfamiliar place: even when you recognize that something is wrong, you may have very little power to change it.
The orphanage makes that lack of power feel tangible. It’s a refuge, but it’s also a place Carlos hasn’t chosen and can’t simply leave. Del Toro makes its rooms and corridors feel connected to daily life rather than arranged exclusively for scares. Children sleep, argue, and establish little territories within a building that also contains private grief and concealed violence. That mixture matters. The frightening spaces aren’t somewhere separate from ordinary experience; they’re part of the same home. As Carlos learns more, familiar locations take on different meanings. The building doesn’t change, but his understanding of what has happened inside it does.
Visually, the film finds unease without depending entirely on darkness. Dusty daylight and exposed spaces can feel just as uncomfortable as a shadowy passageway. The unexploded bomb in the courtyard captures this approach perfectly. There’s nothing hidden about it. Everyone can see the danger, yet its continued presence has become part of the routine. It’s a striking image because it turns familiarity into something unsettling. Getting used to a threat doesn’t make it safe; sometimes it simply means you’ve stopped expecting anyone to remove it. That idea extends beyond the courtyard and into the orphanage’s relationships, where people tolerate arrangements that remain fragile or harmful.
Santi initially appears to belong to a different category of danger. Unlike the bomb, he’s mysterious, difficult to understand, and impossible to explain through the ordinary rules of the place. His appearance is disturbing, but del Toro gives that disturbance an emotional dimension. The ghost looks wounded rather than merely monstrous. As Carlos pays closer attention, the signs of suffering become harder to separate from the features that make Santi frightening. It’s an impressive balancing act. The film doesn’t need to make him visually comforting to encourage sympathy. Instead, it asks whether an unsettling appearance has prevented everyone from seeing a vulnerable child.
That question gives the haunting its purpose. Santi isn’t simply a supernatural problem that must be removed so the orphanage can return to normal. His presence challenges the idea that its normal life was acceptable to begin with. Something has happened that demands acknowledgment, and continuing without that acknowledgment becomes part of the wrong. This is where the mystery develops a moral dimension without turning into a lecture. Carlos’s discoveries don’t just provide information; they alter his obligations. Once he understands more, looking away is no longer an innocent choice. The ghost becomes frightening partly because he makes avoidance impossible.
The other boys complicate Carlos’s education in whom to fear and whom to trust. Their bullying and competitiveness can be cruel, but del Toro doesn’t flatten them into miniature villains. They’re children negotiating their own uncertain circumstances, sometimes by making someone else feel smaller. Their relationships develop through friction, guarded exchanges, and changing impressions rather than instant friendship. That makes their growing connections more convincing. The film understands that solidarity isn’t automatic just because people share a difficult situation. It has to be built, and building it requires recognizing something beyond your own immediate need to feel secure.
The adults offer even less reliable guidance. Carmen, played by Marisa Paredes, has the authority necessary to keep the orphanage functioning, but that authority doesn’t mean she can control everything happening within it. Professor Casares, played by Federico Luppi, brings gentleness and thoughtfulness, though neither quality guarantees action when action is needed. Both characters have emotional lives that extend beyond their responsibilities to the children. Their disappointments and attachments make them sympathetic, but they also create blind spots. Del Toro is especially good at showing the gap between wanting to protect someone and actually providing protection. Affection matters, but it isn’t a substitute for judgment or courage.
There’s a quiet sadness in those adult relationships that deepens the horror rather than distracting from it. These are people who can recognize beauty, offer tenderness, and understand suffering, yet still hesitate at crucial moments. The film doesn’t treat their limitations with contempt. It allows us to see how exhaustion and longing can narrow a person’s attention. At the same time, the children still have to live with the consequences. That tension keeps the story from becoming too reassuring. Good intentions don’t make an institution safe, and a sympathetic guardian can still fail someone who depends on them.
Jacinto, played by Eduardo Noriega, makes that distinction more brutal. His resentment and self-interest bring an increasingly direct threat into the orphanage. Beside Santi, he creates the film’s clearest reversal: the figure who looks unnatural may deserve compassion, while an ordinary human being can choose extraordinary cruelty. Jacinto is effective, though he’s also where the storytelling becomes less nuanced. As his role sharpens, some of the earlier uncertainty gives way to a more straightforward confrontation. The emotional complications surrounding Carmen and Casares are often more absorbing than his menace. Still, his presence makes the children’s vulnerability impossible to dismiss as merely a product of their imaginations.
The war gives that vulnerability a wider context without overwhelming the intimate story. It shapes the orphanage’s resources, its loyalties, and the uncertain future awaiting everyone inside. Physical distance from the fighting offers no real independence from its consequences. This isn’t a peaceful household suddenly disturbed by a ghost; it’s a precarious refuge whose existing problems become harder to conceal. The historical setting also reinforces the difference between having power and deserving it. The children inherit dangers they didn’t create, while the adults’ decisions determine how much of that danger reaches them. Even private acts of selfishness carry greater weight in a community with so little protection to spare.
What holds these ideas together is del Toro’s empathy, which is more demanding than simple sympathy for the unfortunate. The film asks us to revise our judgments, but it doesn’t suggest that every harmful action can be forgiven once we understand its cause. Santi’s suffering deserves recognition; another person’s resentment doesn’t justify turning others into victims. That distinction keeps the movie emotionally generous without making it morally vague. It encourages careful attention to people who frighten us while remaining clear-eyed about those who exploit the vulnerability of others. The mystery changes how we see the characters, not whether their choices matter.
The film does lose a little of its delicacy as it approaches the ending. Its early strength lies in allowing dread to gather through spaces, relationships, and unanswered questions. Later, the conflicts become more explicit, and the plotting pushes the separate elements into alignment. Some of that uneasy openness gives way to more familiar suspense. For me, the quieter stretches are the most distinctive, especially when a look or an uncomfortable pause communicates more than a dramatic confrontation could. Even so, the emotional investment survives the shift. By then, the children feel too specific and their situation too precarious for the resolution to become merely a matter of mechanics.
What stays with you after The Devil’s Backbone isn’t simply the appearance of its ghost, but the effort required to see him clearly. Del Toro takes a figure we’re prepared to recoil from and makes our changing response the measure of the story’s emotional progress. The film remains chilling because understanding doesn’t erase violence or restore what has been lost. It offers something smaller: the possibility that a person’s suffering will finally be recognized rather than absorbed into another household secret. That’s why its sadness feels earned. The ghost stops being just a frightening interruption and becomes someone whose absence should have mattered all along.
I decided to review one more Donald James Parker film for October. Admittedly, Parker doesn’t have a huge role in 2015’s Love Waits. He plays a band director who offers some kind advice to one of his students, Cheri Martin (Brittany Mann), and tells her not to feel bad for challenging the other members of the band in her quest to move up to first chair. Indeed, there’s very little anger to be found in the band director, and that certainly sets him apart from the fire-and-brimstone characters that Parker usually plays. Parker is—dare I say it?—actually a bit likable in the role.
That said, the film was also directed and written by Parker, and it’s easy to see that his usual anger has been divided amongst several other characters. When the film first started, I was convinced that Cheri’s father was meant to be the film’s villain and that the movie would hopefully end with him being led away in handcuffs. Imagine my surprise when it became clear that Jeff Martin (played by Collin Alexander Brown) was meant to be a sympathetic character. When we first meet Mr. Martin, he’s coming home from work and throwing a fit when he discovers that his 14-year-old daughter has yet to start making dinner. She apologizes for forgetting. “That’s not going to fill my stomach!” he snaps. Later, when he’s again driving home, he catches Cheri out walking with Duke Williams (Hunter Johnson), a boy who is supposedly her own age. (I say supposedly because all of the actors playing the teen characters either look too young or too old.) Mr. Martin orders Cheri to get in his car and then starts yelling at her, freaking out like Terry O’Quinn in The Stepfather. Mr. Martin reminds Cheri that she’s not allowed to leave the house without permission and she’s not allowed to talk to a boy without having an adult present. Again, I assumed Mr. Martin was being set up as a villain, but the film actually treats him like a hero. One of the big problems is that Collin Alexander Brown yells almost all of his lines and comes across as an utter lunatic.
Of course, it’s not just Mr. Martin who orders Cheri around. When Cheri tries to practice her flute, her babysitter (Cheri is fourteen but cannot be left on her own) immediately starts to correct her. A major theme of the film appears to be that Cheri’s job is to follow orders and not complain, even if her father does seem to spend a lot of time yelling at her over the least little thing. Even beyond the adults around her, Cheri has to deal with her school’s resident mean girl, Judy (Haleigh Johnson). At the start of the film, Judy and her friends walk up to Cheri and say, “I hear you’re a virgin, Cheri Martin, and that makes you a loser.” When Cheri asks Judy’s friends if they’ve “done it,” one of them replies, “Duh, I’m nearly fourteen.” Eventually, Judy’s promiscuity leads to her getting her face slashed, and everyone in Cheri’s youth group agrees that, even though they don’t like Cheri, they didn’t want that to happen. “We should visit her in the hospital,” someone says. They don’t so much visit her to offer sympathy as to tell her “I told you so,” and that’s really all Judy needs to hear to change her ways and agree to wear a purity ring.
The message is about resisting peer pressure, and I actually happen to agree with that. You shouldn’t do anything unless you actually want to do it and that’s especially true when it comes to sex. That said, the film’s youth group seems to largely operate under a system of peer pressure, and the film also seems to suggest that things like sex education are actually a conspiracy to turn girls like Cheri into girls like Judy. I didn’t agree with that at all and I actually found the argument to be more than a little offensive, as if women can’t be trusted with the knowledge necessary to make their own decisions. The main thing is that, like all Parker films, Love Waits seems to take place in an alternate universe where 1850s morality is combined with a truly over-the-top bitterness. Also in typical Parker fashion, Love Waits takes a 15-minute story and stretches it out to a punishing two hours.
Every time the members of Cheri’s youth group proclaimed, “We have to do something!,” I found myself wishing someone would say, “No, you don’t.” Whenever a non-religious character was dragged into the school library so the youth group could pray over them, I was reminded of Hank Hill’s famous verdict on his town’s megachurch: “No offense, but your church just keeps coming at you.”
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing SLEDGE HAMMER!, a cop comedy which ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988. The entire series can be found on Prime!
This week, Sledge might be DOA!
Episode 1.12 “Miss of the Spider Woman”
(Dir by Charles Braverman, originally aired on December 20th, 1986)
Sledge has been poisoned!
The poison takes five days to do its work. Unfortunately, Sledge spent four days in a coma. Plus, daylight savings time kicked in. And also, his watch is broken. So, by the time Sledge wakes up, he’s actually only got about four or five hours left to go. While the doctors try to find an antidote, Doreau and Sledge investigate who poisoned him and why.
Actually, the why is easy to explain. It was a mistake! The mysterious Juanita (Eileen Barnett) wanted to poison Sledge’s neighbor but the woman who was hired to “deliver” the poison to Sledge was near-sighted and ended up in the wrong apartment. Whoops! Instead of trying the poison trick again, Juanita just has Sledge’s neighbor shot. It’s all because the neighbor was expecting a package that contained a valuable statue that Juanita wanted.
Through some good old-fashioned, death-fueled police work, Sledge tracks Juanita down to her boat. Juanita gives him what she says is the antidote and then reveals that he actually just drank more poison. Oh, Sledge! At least Sledge is still able to subdue and arrest her. Captain Trunk arrives at the last minute with actual antidote. Sledge survives! Later, he eats a powdered donut that had the fingerprints of a notorious serial killer. Everything’s back to normal!
This was a good take on two classic film noirs, D.O.A. and The Maltese Falcon. David Rasche made me laugh even while I was worrying about Sledge dying. I was happy he survived. The city wouldn’t be the same without him.
“Evil likes children, and children like evil.” — Mirtha
Most possession movies give you something to hold on to: a priest with a plan, a family worth saving, or the reassuring possibility that evil can be sent back where it came from. Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks takes those comforts away and leaves a bunch of frightened people making a terrible situation worse. This 2023 Argentine horror film is less interested in a battle between good and evil than in what happens when ordinary human weakness gives evil room to spread. It’s a vicious, messy, deeply uncomfortable movie, and its most disturbing quality isn’t the gore. It’s how quickly a supposedly sensible decision becomes an irreversible mistake.
The trouble begins in rural Argentina, where brothers Pedro and Jimmy discover a severely deteriorated man whose body is harboring a demonic presence. He’s known as a “rotten,” and dealing with him requires more care than the people nearby are willing to exercise. Alongside a local landowner, the brothers attempt to move him away from their property, treating a supernatural emergency like an unpleasant chore. Naturally, this doesn’t solve anything. Their attempt to put distance between themselves and the danger helps spread it instead. That opening establishes the movie’s central pattern: somebody recognizes a problem, chooses the quickest solution, and creates something much worse. The horror grows out of people trying to regain control without fully understanding what they’re handling.
What makes this setup interesting is that possession isn’t an unbelievable discovery in the world of the film. People already have a vocabulary for it. There are rules, warnings, and specialists called cleaners who are supposed to handle these situations. The trouble is that knowing a danger exists doesn’t mean anyone responds responsibly. Rugna builds his supernatural world through anxious conversations and half-understood instructions rather than a long explanation. We pick things up while the characters are already struggling to keep pace. It makes the setting feel lived-in, as though this nightmare has happened elsewhere and the lessons simply haven’t stuck. There’s something particularly unnerving about watching people face a known threat with so little practical preparedness.
The countryside adds another layer of discomfort. There’s plenty of open space, but very little actual freedom. Roads connect one vulnerable household to another, and leaving a dangerous place doesn’t necessarily mean escaping the danger. Rugna and cinematographer Mariano Suárez make farms, modest homes, and stretches of daylight feel exposed rather than peaceful. You don’t spend the whole movie peering into dark corners, waiting for something to emerge. Sometimes the threat is clearly visible, and the suspense comes from watching someone approach it anyway. That directness gives the horror an unpleasant physical presence. It isn’t safely tucked away in shadows or confined to some obviously sinister building. The ordinary surroundings also make the violence feel intrusive, as though something has broken into a world that wasn’t visually prepared for it.
The physical effects make that presence hard to ignore. The rotten man’s swollen, decaying body is an early announcement that Rugna isn’t interested in keeping this material tasteful. Flesh looks vulnerable, contaminated, and capable of becoming something horribly unfamiliar. Yet the gore isn’t effective simply because it’s graphic. It destroys the comfortable distance between recognizing a horror setup and feeling genuinely worried about what comes next. Children and animals aren’t protected by the usual genre boundaries, which makes otherwise ordinary scenes nerve-racking. Viewers sensitive to violence involving either should approach cautiously. The movie doesn’t merely suggest that terrible things could happen; it follows through. More importantly, those moments alter the atmosphere afterward. Once a familiar source of comfort becomes dangerous, it’s difficult to trust another one.
Rugna is especially good at deciding when to make us wait and when to pull the floor out. Some sequences stretch a warning sign until you want to shout at the screen. Others turn violent before you’ve fully registered the possibility. That combination keeps the film from settling into an easily predictable rhythm. A quiet conversation can feel more dangerous than a frantic escape, because you’re never sure which moment Rugna is preparing to rupture. The effect is exhausting, sometimes deliberately so. Like the characters, you’re left trying to assess the next immediate threat without having recovered from the last one. The film’s strongest stretches create a nasty tension between wanting the characters to hurry and knowing that rushing is exactly what keeps getting them into trouble.
Ezequiel Rodríguez gives Pedro enough emotional weight to keep this from becoming an empty collection of atrocities. Pedro wants to protect his family, but that desire doesn’t automatically make him thoughtful, reliable, or brave in useful ways. His fear often comes out as impatience, and his need to act can override his ability to listen. Rodríguez makes that combination painfully believable. You can understand the emotion driving a decision while still wanting to stop him from making it. His performance is especially effective when confidence starts looking like a desperate pose rather than a genuine belief that things will work out. Pedro needs to see himself as someone who can help, even when his actions suggest otherwise.
Demián Salomon provides an effective contrast as Jimmy, and their exchanges carry the strained familiarity of brothers who don’t need a crisis to have disagreements. Their relationship gives the movie a human texture that its grotesque imagery alone couldn’t provide. They don’t suddenly become a perfectly coordinated team because the stakes are high. They argue, react differently, and struggle to turn shared concern into a useful plan. That messiness matters because the movie keeps questioning whether emotional attachment actually makes people better at protecting one another. Love creates urgency, but urgency can become recklessness. The brothers’ attempts to help are frightening partly because they aren’t detached from the people who might suffer.
Still, the movie’s reliance on bad decisions is also its biggest weakness. There are moments when a character’s mistake feels tragically human, and others when it feels like the screenplay needs someone to ignore an obvious warning. Pedro in particular can test your patience. The supernatural rules create a related problem: they’re specific enough to invite scrutiny but incomplete enough to leave certain developments feeling arbitrary. Not understanding everything can deepen the horror, but it can also weaken the sense that choices have clear consequences. When almost any action might trigger disaster, suspense occasionally slips into the expectation that everyone is doomed regardless. The later stretches also feel less tightly focused than the opening, as the story divides its attention and keeps introducing fresh complications.
What keeps those frustrations from taking over is the film’s consistent interest in responsibility. People try to move the danger, deny its implications, or overpower something they don’t understand. The impulse is rarely outright villainous. More often, it’s recognizable self-protection mixed with pride and impatience. That makes the spreading evil feel like more than a supernatural gimmick. It becomes a way of exposing how easily private shortcuts turn into collective disasters. Rugna doesn’t stop the action to underline that idea, and he doesn’t need to. We keep watching people confuse doing something quickly with doing something useful, then leave others to absorb the consequences. The film is bleak because good intentions offer so little protection against that pattern.
By the end, what lingers isn’t a neat explanation of the demon or a satisfying display of courage. It’s the awful distance between wanting to protect someone and being capable of it. When Evil Lurks isn’t perfectly controlled: its rules can frustrate, its characters can exasperate, and its cruelty will be too much for some viewers. But Rugna gives those rough edges a powerful emotional center. He makes horror out of failed judgment as much as bodily destruction, leaving no comfortable separation between the monster and the mistakes that help it along. The film gets under your skin because the evil is extraordinary, but the behavior allowing it to flourish feels painfully ordinary.
“Not everything that moves, breathes, and talks is alive.” — Il-gwang
For about an hour, The Wailing pretends to be a detective story. There’s a series of bizarre deaths in a remote village, a suspect who fits nobody’s profile but everyone’s prejudices, a witness with a wild story, and a cop digging for the truth. Everything about Na Hong-jin’s 2016 film is structured like an investigation — interviews, evidence gathering, surveillance photos, a timeline of incidents. The twist is that this is a detective story where the crime scene is the entire world, the culprit may not be a person at all, and every tool the genre normally hands you to solve the case is precisely the thing that gets people killed. Watching it, you keep waiting for the reveal that ties everything together, and slowly it dawns on you: the movie has been quietly teaching you that some cases can’t be closed, and that a detective who can’t accept that is the most dangerous man in the film.
The setup is beautifully simple. In a small village called Gokseong (which gives the film its Korean title), people start getting sick. Then they start getting violent — wild-eyed, homicidal, creepier than your standard zombie by a wide margin. At the center of it all is Jong-goo, a chubby, cowardly, deeply ordinary local policeman played by Kwak Do-won, whose daughter Hyo-jin falls mysteriously ill after the family has a run-in with a stranger. Rumors quickly gather around that stranger, a Japanese man who lives alone in the mountains (Jun Kunimura), who fishes, photographs things he shouldn’t be photographing, and was reportedly seen at the scene of one of the killings. The village has already convicted him; Jong-goo, half-convinced and half-scared, decides to build the case, and the more evidence he collects, the worse everything gets.
What makes The Wailing special isn’t the premise, though — it’s how Na stacks unreliable testimony on top of unreliable evidence until the whole movie feels like a case file with every page contradicting the last. You’ve got a shaman, Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min, having an absolute blast), who performs one of the most electric exorcism sequences ever filmed, all drums and chanting and animal sacrifice, cross-cut with something else I won’t spoil — essentially an expert witness with his own competing theory. That sequence alone is worth the price of admission: a frantic, drum-driven standoff between two rituals playing out simultaneously, with Na cutting between them faster and faster until you realize he’s using suspense-film grammar to stage a theological argument. You’ve got a mysterious young woman in white (Chun Woo-hee), who shows up with her own version of events, a burned-down house, a zombie-looking guy in the rain, and a very unlucky police partner who keeps finding the worst possible things at the worst possible times.
The genius of the movie is that every one of these characters confidently testifies about what’s happening, and they can’t all be right. Is the Japanese man a demon? A ghost? Just a scapegoated outsider? Is the woman in white a guardian or the actual source of the evil? Is the shaman a fraud or the only person who knows what he’s doing? The film keeps handing you exhibits, then yanking them away — the procedural pleasure of gathering clues, weaponized against you. There’s a scene with photographs that made my stomach drop, a hair tie that functions as a gut-punch with zero gore, and an interview over a cigarette break that recontextualizes the entire first hour. Na shoots all of it in gorgeous, humid, rain-soaked widescreen — this is a beautiful film about terrible things, all green mountains, wet fields, and pale sunlight — and the unhurried pacing isn’t padding, it’s the point: it lets you settle into the village’s rhythm so that each new irregularity registers as a wrong note in a familiar song. The horror rarely announces itself; it’s just suddenly there, sitting in the frame, and half the time you notice it before the characters do.
The folklore texture deserves its own shout-out. Na reportedly built the film from real shamanic traditions, rural superstitions, and his own questions about why inexplicable suffering happens, and you feel that authenticity in every ritual scene. This isn’t Hollywood exorcism-by-numbers; the shamanism feels lived-in, transactional, dangerous, and the film even works in bits of everyday folk logic — the old rule that meeting someone’s gaze means you’ve seen a ghost, the black hair nailed to a door, the persistent Korean dread of the Japanese stranger as a carryover of historical wounds. The title itself points at the movie’s worldview — there’s an old belief that a spirit’s wail can possess the living — and the film is smart enough to treat belief, not just demons, as the thing doing damage. When an entire village decides someone is a monster, what happens next is horror regardless of the supernatural facts.
Performance-wise, this is Kwak Do-won’s movie. His Jong-goo is one of the great horror protagonists precisely because he’s not brave, not sharp, and not special — he’s a tired dad making guesses, and every wrong guess costs him. You watch a decent, dim man get dismantled piece by piece, and the film’s darkest trick is making you complicit in his worst decision. Jun Kunimura is remarkable in a role that requires him to be sinister, pitiable, and genuinely terrifying depending on which scene you’re watching — the man can shift the temperature of a room just by deciding whether to make eye contact. Hwang Jung-min goes full rock-star shaman and steals the middle of the movie, and Chun Woo-hee does extraordinary work with a character who has to work on two levels at once: every time she speaks, you’re simultaneously calmed by her and checking the frame for what she might really be.
Now, fair warnings. The pacing is slow, especially in the first hour, and the runtime is a hefty 156 minutes. If you need jump scares every ten minutes or a third act that explains itself, this will test you. There’s also animal harm on screen, which I know is a dealbreaker for some folks. And the ambiguity is total — people walk out having landed on completely opposite conclusions, and I genuinely think the film is more layered on a second viewing, since the dialogue is full of lines that read completely differently once you know how things shake out. But Na leaves one crucial scene open-ended on purpose, because the whole point is that certainty, in the face of real evil, is a luxury nobody gets.
And that’s what elevates The Wailing above most possession movies. It’s a horror film about epistemology, honestly — about how we decide what to believe, who benefits from our belief, and how being unable to choose can be the most dangerous state of all. The village looked at a stranger and closed its case; Jong-goo spends the whole film trying to close his, following every lead, consulting every expert, and the movie watches what each conclusion costs him. There’s a line near the end, about trusting versus doubting, that lands like a knife because the entire film has been secretly about that question. The scariest thing in The Wailing isn’t the demon; it’s the idea that you could do everything right and still lose everyone you love because you hesitated a moment too long.
So, where does it land? For my money, The Wailing is a masterpiece of modern horror and easily one of the best South Korean films of the 2010s — a decade that includes Train to Busan, The Handmaiden, and Parasite, which tells you how competitive that field is. It’s not a crowd-pleaser in the jump-scare sense; it’s a slow-burn, smoky, mystifying fever dream that rewards patience and punishes assumptions. Watch it late, watch it with subtitles, don’t look up anything beforehand, and let it mess with you. Most detective stories end with the case closed and the world set right; The Wailing ends with the file left open on the desk, because Na Hong-jin’s real subject was never whodunit — it was the hubris of assuming that every mystery owes you an answer. That open file is exactly what keeps the film wailing in your head long after it’s over.
Filmed in 1957 for a television program called Westinghouse Studio One, The Night America Trembled is a dramatization of the night that Orson Welles terrified America with his radio adaptation of War of The Worlds.
For legal reasons, Orson Welles is not portrayed nor is his name mentioned. Instead, the focus is mostly on the people listening to the broadcast and getting the wrong idea. That may sound like a comedy but The Night America Trembled takes itself fairly seriously. Even pompous old Edward R. Murrow shows up to narrate the film, in between taking drags off a cigarette.
Clocking in at a brisk 60 minutes, The Night America Trembled is an interesting recreation of that October 30th. Among the people panicking: a group of people in a bar who, before hearing the broadcast, were debating whether or not Hitler was as crazy as people said he was, a babysitter who goes absolutely crazy with fear, and a group of poker-playing college students. If, like me, you’re a frequent viewer of TCM, you may recognize some of the faces in the large cast: Ed Asner, James Coburn, John Astin, Warren Oates, and Warren Beatty all make early appearances.
It’s an interesting little historical document and you can watch it below!
“There’s something strange in this house.” — Eun-joo
A pretty room can hide a lot, and A Tale of Two Sisters makes you suspicious of every one it shows you. The wallpaper is elegant, the furniture looks carefully chosen, and the countryside outside seems peaceful enough. Yet almost immediately, you want someone to open a window and let the dread out. Kim Jee-woon’s 2003 South Korean horror film builds its power around that mismatch between appearance and feeling. Everything looks arranged, but nothing feels settled. Underneath its polished surfaces is a family whose grief and resentment have made ordinary life almost impossible, whether or not a ghost happens to be watching.
The story follows Su-mi, played by Im Soo-jung, and her younger sister Su-yeon, played by Moon Geun-young, as they return to their secluded family home. Waiting there are their emotionally withdrawn father and their stepmother, Eun-joo, whose attempts at friendliness have a distinctly threatening edge. Su-mi is openly hostile toward her, while Su-yeon seems to shrink from confrontation. Nobody looks particularly pleased to be together. Kim gives us these tensions before supplying much explanation, so we spend the opening stretch reading faces and weighing uncomfortable silences. It’s an effective way to make the audience feel unwelcome in the house, too.
What’s impressive is how little the movie initially needs to do to create unease. The family members don’t interact like people working through their problems; they behave like people trying to prevent those problems from being named. Conversations become contests over who gets to define what’s normal. Eun-joo’s brittle politeness clashes with Su-mi’s refusal to play along, while the father’s passivity allows the hostility to keep spreading. Even without the supernatural material, this would be an unpleasant place to spend a weekend. The horror works because it amplifies an emotional situation that already feels dangerous rather than replacing it with something unrelated.
That brings us back to the house, which is much more than an attractive backdrop. Its patterned walls and rich colors make the rooms visually busy, giving your eyes plenty of places to wander and very few places to rest. Doorways suggest hidden spaces, and shadows seem to deepen when nobody is paying attention. Kim repeatedly makes you question where to look, which is a wonderfully simple way of making you doubt your own observation. A room can appear perfectly still while the composition insists otherwise. The beauty doesn’t soften the tension; it gives the tension somewhere elegant to hide.
The scares grow naturally from that visual uncertainty. Kim lets shots breathe long enough for anticipation to become its own kind of punishment. You begin studying empty space, listening for movement, and wondering whether the film has already shown you something you failed to notice. When a disturbing image finally arrives, it feels like the release of pressure that has been building for minutes. There are sudden shocks, but they aren’t the whole strategy. The more effective moments leave a residue, making the next quiet scene uncomfortable before anything happens. The film understands that a scare can end while the fear keeps going.
The performances make sure this atmosphere has something human at its center. Im Soo-jung gives Su-mi an intensity that can seem prickly or even exhausting, but there’s vulnerability beneath it. Her anger often feels like a method of staying upright rather than a simple personality trait. Moon Geun-young brings a gentler presence to Su-yeon, and their contrasting energies make the sisters’ attachment immediately important. Su-mi’s protectiveness gives the film a clear emotional thread even when its events become difficult to follow. We may not understand every strange occurrence, but we understand why she feels compelled to keep her sister close.
Yum Jung-ah makes Eun-joo a particularly unsettling presence because she rarely lets an interaction settle into one mood. An awkward smile can become a reprimand, and a gesture of concern can suddenly feel like a demand for obedience. The performance draws tension from the work involved in maintaining a pleasant appearance. Eun-joo seems to want control not only over the household but also over how everyone experiences it. That makes her more compelling than a straightforward wicked stepmother, even with the film’s connection to the Korean folktale Janghwa Hongryeon jeon. She embodies the gap between domestic respectability and the hostility simmering underneath.
The storytelling is where the film becomes more demanding, and occasionally less satisfying. Kim withholds information, unsettles our confidence in what we see, and eventually asks us to rethink earlier scenes. That can be absorbing, especially when a revelation changes the emotional meaning of an image. It can also leave a first-time viewer feeling a few steps behind. Not every transition is easy to place, and the later explanations don’t turn the whole experience into a tidy equation. Some viewers will enjoy that uncertainty more than others. There are moments when the effort of sorting out the story competes with the experience of feeling it.
Still, treating the film mainly as a mystery to solve undersells its strongest quality. Beneath its narrative complications is an exploration of guilt: how it distorts memory, reshapes attachment, and makes the past feel permanently present. Without spoiling the major revelations, the film gradually changes what we think its frightening moments are expressing. Images that initially register as threats begin to carry sorrow as well. That shift matters because it gives the horror an emotional afterlife. The point isn’t simply that appearances were misleading. It’s that those appearances offered a way of avoiding something much harder to face.
The music and cinematography help sustain that sadness without draining away the dread. There’s a tenderness to parts of the film that makes its cruelty more painful, particularly when the sisters’ relationship occupies the foreground. Occasionally, the emotional emphasis edges toward melodrama, and the deliberate pacing won’t suit anyone looking for a brisk sequence of scares. But the lingering feels earned more often than not. Kim allows scenes to remain troubling after their immediate purpose seems finished. He’s interested in what an experience leaves behind, and that patience makes the eventual emotional damage harder to brush aside.
What remains after A Tale of Two Sisters isn’t just a collection of frightening images or a clever arrangement of revelations. It’s a changed relationship with the beautiful rooms where the story unfolded. Their elegance starts to look less like comfort than a surface nobody has managed to see beneath. The film can be frustrating, but its best moments turn that uncertainty into something painfully intimate. Kim makes us look closely at a home, then question whether looking closely can ever reveal everything. By the end, the wallpaper hasn’t changed. What we imagine behind it has.
“The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments.” — Louis
There’s a particular kind of nightmare where nothing looks entirely impossible, but everything feels wrong. The people around you seem familiar until they speak. A room you recognize leads somewhere it shouldn’t. You keep trying to explain the situation, only to realize that nobody else thinks an explanation is necessary. Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder captures that feeling with remarkable precision. Released in 1990, it’s a psychological horror film that makes confusion feel physical, then gives that confusion emotional weight. Its shocks are effective, but the real hook is watching someone search for reassurance in a world that keeps withdrawing it.
That someone is Jacob Singer, played by Tim Robbins, a Vietnam veteran whose life in New York is interrupted by disturbing visions and memories. He works as a postal employee, lives with his girlfriend Jezzie, and carries grief over the death of his young son. Those details establish a life beyond the central mystery, which matters because the story soon makes almost every part of that life uncertain. Jacob sees things he cannot account for, and the explanations available never remain convincing for long. The screenplay keeps us close to his perspective without guaranteeing that his perspective is reliable.
Robbins gives the film its emotional center. He plays Jacob with an openness that makes the character easy to care about without becoming overly sentimental. There’s something affecting about watching this tall, seemingly capable man become so unsure of himself. He searches other people’s faces for confirmation, tries to ask reasonable questions, and sometimes looks embarrassed by his own fear. Those small reactions do more than constant shouting would. Jacob feels like someone attempting to preserve his dignity while losing the basic confidence that he understands what is happening around him.
Lyne surrounds that performance with environments that seem to magnify Jacob’s anxiety. The New York locations have a worn, claustrophobic quality, and even crowded spaces offer little protection. People are nearby, but help feels strangely unavailable. The subway scenes make especially good use of that disconnect. A familiar public setting becomes threatening through its emptiness, strange encounters, and lack of a straightforward exit. The film understands how quickly an ordinary inconvenience can become frightening when you’re already uncertain about your surroundings. It doesn’t need a spectacular transformation to make a place feel hostile.
The more openly nightmarish imagery grows out of that atmosphere rather than replacing it. Distorted faces and violently unnatural movements appear like interruptions in the visible world. They’re frightening partly because the film rarely allows a comfortable examination of them. You see enough to register something awful, but not enough to understand it. That restraint gives the images an unpleasant afterlife in your imagination. Instead of presenting monsters as clearly defined opponents, Lyne makes them feel like evidence that Jacob’s entire experience has become unsafe. There’s no obvious distance he can put between himself and the threat.
The hospital sequence brings that idea to its most punishing extreme. Jacob cannot control where he is taken, what happens to his body, or whether anyone will answer him honestly. The sequence turns the expectation of medical care inside out. Equipment, corridors, and staff become elements in a process he cannot understand or interrupt. It’s gruesome, certainly, but the gore isn’t doing all the work. The deeper horror lies in being handled as though your fear is irrelevant. Lyne makes the loss of agency unbearable before the most disturbing images even finish registering.
What keeps the movie from becoming exhausting is its attention to Jacob’s emotional life. His memories of his son aren’t simply clues for the audience to collect. They show what he misses and why an ordinary family moment might matter more than a logically satisfying explanation. These passages soften the film without making it less unsettling. Once we understand what comfort looks like to Jacob, we understand how cruel it is when that comfort becomes uncertain. Elizabeth Peña’s vivid, sometimes disquieting presence as Jezzie and Danny Aiello’s reassuring warmth as Louis further complicate his search for someone he can trust.
Not every narrative move is equally successful. The conspiracy thread gives Jacob something tangible to investigate, but its explanatory passages feel stiff compared with the uncertainty elsewhere. Some of the spiritual dialogue also states ideas that the imagery and performances have already communicated more subtly. The fragmented structure becomes repetitive in places: Jacob encounters something frightening, finds a possible explanation, and then loses confidence in it. That pattern occasionally makes the film feel more calculated than spontaneous. It’s noticeable because the strongest scenes create dread without seeming to work nearly so hard.
In its latter stretches, Jacob’s Ladder also reveals itself as another piece of creative work whose narrative DNA reaches back to Ambrose Bierce’s excellent short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The kinship lies in the unstable relationship between subjective experience, passing time, and a reality the central character cannot comfortably confront. Without spelling out either ending, both works draw their power from making an intensely personal experience feel expansive and immediate, then asking us to reconsider its boundaries. That connection doesn’t make Lyne’s film feel redundant. Its urban nightmares, war-haunted atmosphere, and intimate grief give the familiar storytelling lineage a distinctive emotional texture.
Ultimately, Jacob’s Ladder earns its impact through compassion, not just ingenuity. Its closing movement redirects attention from solving a mystery toward understanding the cost of Jacob’s struggle, and Robbins makes that change feel earned. The film isn’t flawless; some explanations are less compelling than the questions, and a few speeches push too insistently toward meaning. But its best images remain inseparable from the vulnerable person experiencing them. You remember the nightmare hospital and the faces that won’t stay still, certainly. What gives those memories their sting is the man beneath them, still hoping that the next familiar voice or open doorway might finally lead him home.
