Sara Watches Stuff

When a movie is fairly universally regarded as terrifying, I become fixated on it. My fascination with horror as a genre has really hardened me to the notion of "scary", but Hereditary  was getting rave reviews and being called scary by all the people whose opinions result in critically acclaimed horror. I had to put on my cynical boots - a lot of these people also loved The VVitch , which I found very hit and miss, and the movie comes from the same producers. Still, my yearning to get to the bottom of what people consider to be a properly scary movie in the current day found an acceptable target.  With Hereditary , it's easy to see why people were so enraptured. It's a thrilling experience. For a relatively new filmmaker on the mainstream scene, Ari Aster has created a very tightly directed and composed movie. It follows a family after the death of Toni Collette's character's mother, through varying places of grief and understanding of the complexities...

On a superficial, deeply gay level, the reason I watched Byzantium is that Gemma Arterton is out of this world gorgeous and she spends chunk of this movie wearing lingerie and killing people (not necessarily at the same time).  The movie itself is a softer, quieter take on the traditional vampire story. Two vampire sisters tackle the world together, attempting to remain undiscovered. Neil Jordan, who directed it, also adapted Interview with a Vampire and while I haven’t seen that one, I’ve heard they share a lot of the same DNA. It’s beautifully shot, and the balance between period segments and the modern day is nicely done so that it isn’t overwhelmingly a period drama. All that said, there are times when it feels overwhelmingly like something else: a teenage melodrama. It’s definitely not a byproduct of the story’s feminine energy, but rather of how the material is handled - centuries old characters act, at times, like fifteen year olds and their views of romance ar...

When Julia Ducournau's Raw   was first released, it gathered a lot of hype thanks to its reputation in regards visceral imagery and pretty confronting cannibalism story. I was worried that I would watch it and be let down, because reviews seemed generally positive and I'm always here for horror tinged plots driven by female directors and female protagonists. On finally watching Raw , I can tell you that it is barely a horror movie and barely a cannibalism movie at all: it is a thinly veiled allegory for burgeoning sexuality alongside themes of sisterhood and coming of age, all wrapped in the skin of cannibal tropes past. I loved it.  The story of Raw is not anything revolutionary. Someone (in this case, a first year vegetarian veterinary student named Justine played by Garance Marillier) gets forced to eat meat, and develops a taste for human flesh. There is nothing subtle in the way it is told - Justine's cravings for meat evoke a sexual awakening and echo her transfo...

There is absolutely no doubt that Anna Biller, who wrote and directed  The Love Witch  (and edited, and composed, and costumed, and did the set work and art direction and some of the makeup and produced and made this thing from top to bottom), did something visually breathtaking and completely singular with her labour of love. Beyond that, it becomes hard to sit on objectives: fans of film as a whole will appreciate it for its composition as a love letter to the exploitation films of the 70s, but beyond the novelty factor, I suspect that this movie will quickly wear thin on a lot of viewers. It follows the story of a new-in-town witch whose desperation to find her ideal man sees weaker men getting twisted up in her web of sex and love and spell-casting, and a trail of bodies starts to build up. The slightly stilted delivery and just parallel to reality action feels straight out of those 70s films - I draw a lot of Argento comparisons, mostly due to the use of colo...

I’m always wary of horror anthologies and they’re notoriously difficult to review because you have to think of them as the sum of their parts. Why am I bothering with this year’s  XX  then, especially writing about it? Not only is it newly released on Netflix in Australia as I'm transferring these reviews over to this blog, it also falls squarely into my wheelhouse. Let’s do some feminist horror dissection! If the name or the surrounding buzz in the usual feminist internet hotspots hadn’t clued you in, every short in XX is directed by women and theoretically based around ideas in horror linked to femininity and the female experience. It manages to do this, thankfully, while retaining near-consistent quality.  My hopes were not high. I always loudly advocate for more prominent female voices in horror, and this felt like too good a concept to be well executed. I've watched V/H/S descend into chaos and sat through the goddamn mess that was ABCs of Death . There are lul...

Ginger Snaps  is cheesy and unsubtle and a bit overlong and often silly and  excellent .  It shouldn’t surprise you to read that - I am on record as loving and being a passionate advocate for female centric horror, so this tale of two sisters - with lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty - was perfect for me.  It was also a fun adventure in who’s-that-guy searching, so get ready to go on a ride that won't be interesting to anyone who doesn't consume the pop culture that I do. Katharine Isabelle is wonderful as the titular Ginger, and went on to be one of many facets in my realisation of my bisexuality with her turn in American Mary  years later, but there’s also some real laughs going through the cast list. The two main male stars, whose voices both sounded super familiar, both went on to be in my favourite Final Destination movie together (the third one, with the roller coaster and my celebrity crush Mary Elizabeth Winstead) - the drug dealer as the goth gu...