"It's doctrine that a woman wiped his face and came away with an image of it on it.'

Great Horror films of the oughts in the order that they occur to me:

TomWaits—all that depends on whether you see the victims as the vanishing girls or the ones they left behind. I'm not going for a definitive reading here, but I'd say the "sexual power inherent to the natural world" resonating with the "girls' repressed sexual energy" is the central event, and that the girls have…

Peevish—my answer to that question is on the thread below.

Well, all that may have clinched it—or at least piqued my curiosity. I'm the furthest thing from a Catholic, but I'm not an athiest in the strictest sense—I'm a Buddhist so my goto Jesus film is 'Last Temptation of Christ'. But I liked the look of 'Apocalypto', and when it came out I had students tell me they would…

Some of them get it entirely, some don't. Some of them continue to use the "N" word but will not use the word fag or bitch anymore—at least in my class—ya can't win 'em all.

Why is it stupid? Because it's not your approach? It's not mine either, but I'm not willing to dismiss it just because it comes from a different perspective. There are all kinds of ways to come to wisdom and understanding and this is just one you haven't come across before. But I assure you it's not something he made…

Ugh! That is absolutely putting words in my mouth (and that's been going on a lot lately—don't think it'll get me to shut my mouth though). The very fact that the man is willing to work through the factors of enculturation to question assumptions he likely grew up with is a testament to self determination and…

I'm not convinced eel. You're just expanding the definition of natural to include "anything that is" (and by that definition I have to agree with you). You can do that, and you can make the case that all we are are deterministic globs of natural matter, and that our behavior is nothing more than elaborate variations…

TV-watching guy—is there any horse higher than the one from which you dismiss my insights as half-formed without knowing them or me? I will cop to an attitude about numbers because I grew up being told by every math teacher I ever had that I should be better at math than I was. I figure I have a kind of learning…

Torture Porn has its roots in the French Grand Guignol theatre of the early part of the century. That's the type of venue that 'Blood Sucking Freaks' was building on, were it a real thing.

'Strange Behavior"—it starts out as a conventional slasher, but by the end you're in a totally different movie.

'The Descent' is one of the greatest Horror films of the last ten years (not that that's saying much). What scares me most is that they're making a sequel,
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and it takes off from the possibility that Juno is still alive down there, and Sarah arranges a rescue party. NO NO NO. Sarah is…

The Alien as Haunted House Movie thing comes down to the nature of the setting. A large ship (mansion) but composed of dark corridors and shadowy chambers in which some undefined and horrible thing is lurking. But part of why 'Alien' is one of the greatest films of all time is that isn't easily consigned to one pigeon…

I stopped counting after 'Halloween II'—which is about as pure a sequel as you could name insofar as it literally picks up where the first one leaves off. I'm not a fan of Horror sequels generally. I can only think of a few that do justice to the originals.

It is the Supernatural element that, in my mind separates the Horror genre from the Thriller. It's totally arbitrary, I know, but to me, if what happens in the film—however unlikely—could actually happen in real life, then it's not really Horror. So Slasher films can fit into either camp, depending on the nature of…

I forgot to say that most fans of Slasher films are not in it for scares anyway—after a certain point they became more about the inventiveness of the kill and devolved into a kind of graphic slapstick. I think you hear more laughs from the audience at a Slasher film than screams.

'Halloween' is indeed scary for it's atmospherics and the mastery Carpenter has of the jump scare (i.e. sudden invasion from outside the frame), but the problem with Slasher films as examples of Horror (and in many cases I would argue they are more acurately Thrillers) is that the scare notes are almost entirely…

There's no denying the debt 'Halloween' owes to 'Black Christmas' (or that they both owe to 'It's Alive'), but the original 'Halloween' is a perfect movie, whereas 'Black Christmas' is like a road sign that says 50 miles to a perfect movie.

I have 'The Passion of the Christ' home from Netflix as we speak. It's been sitting on my TV for a week or so and I can't bring myself to watch it. I'm not squeamish and I don't have any hang ups about heavy foreign language films or religious propaganda, but can anyone tell me objectively—as a piece of cinema—is it…