This kind of debate feels foreordained. Whenever anyone looks down on the Marvel formula, the poptimists swoop in to assure us that distinctions of genre and status are fluid, and we shouldn’t care about the difference between David Cronenberg’s struggle for funding and Sam Raimi’s half-assed retirement plan.

Vikander’s Tomb Raider is a perfect movie to watch at like 2:00 pm. Maybe the migraine is letting up, or the hangover. Maybe there’s a backlog of laundry. But here is this action movie that seems content to do its thing without inflating the stakes or putting on a bogus style. And that humility has its own charm…

It’s almost like the poptimists who freaked out when Martin Scorsese said a lot of the same things without showing due deference to an auteurist gem like Thor Ragnarok were willfully missing the larger point about that industry changes are making it harder for independent artists.

Frenzy is a fun Hitchcock movie that defies genre almost entirely. There’s aspects of thriller, mystery, horror, and (dark) comedy.

Man, those Jim Lee costumes suck.

Elden Ring. The death screen should say, “The Important Thing is that you Tried.”

I love Raimi but Evil Dead 2 is to much horror comedy I think. Its great but I feel like this contest is pure horror movies.

Valid point...I guess he just looms so large for Psycho and The Birds that I assumed there must be a third one out there!

You know what? I think you’re probably right. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in the context of Peele comparisons Fisher IS, as you say, too much a craftsman and not enough of a distinct individual director. The movies themselves make the grade (Peele’s movies have thus far been too preoccupied…

Fisher, though? For sure same league. An overlooked guy. Which I get, Hammer as a studio and aesthetic kinda overshadows their talent. (I wonder if someone could draw parallels between Hammer and the MCU...)

These are obviously all big names for horror fans. My three for Mario Bava would probably be Black Sabbath (undeniable), Kill Baby Kill, and The Whip and the Body, but his career has enough killer material (as it were) that the exact picks are pretty flexible.

Tourneur’s best horror movie is probably Curse of the Demon, though I love those B horror movies he made in the 1940s, including Bedlam and Isle of the Dead

No Hitchcock?

Off the top of my head, directors who have made three great horror films:

No fandom that hates its own subject is more toxic than any other.

Joe Casey. Respeck.

I’m cracking up that Bayonetta got a Prude Mode before any of the Souls-likes have embraced an easy mode (unless ranged builds count).

Would someone in the know explain to me what John Singer Sargent’s Madam X is doing on the cover of Seven Rings? I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason; it’s just not an image that I expected to see in an article about recent games.

Like Ben Shapiro, these are who dumb people think are smart people.

There’s something about transphobia that results in maximum brain rot. I don’t know what in particular about the topic of trans people in particular causes it, but it really does just reduce people to incomprehensible savages screaming catchphrases into the void. It’s on par with cryptobros in terms of jargon-laden…