The truth is that the horror canon, like any other film group, contains a vast spectrum of work ranging from smack-somebody awfulness to transcendence. The only thread holding it all together is that every horror film DEMANDS something of you—that you abandon the safe, bucolic cognition of your daily reality and confront the darker aspects of being alive. Some movies do this by plopping a likable protagonist in a haunted-to-the-gills mansion. Others do it through crotch-stabbing intestine-smearing celebrations of mayhem. The Woman in Black (opening today!) is of the former ilk, and it's a reason in itself to drop the Judgment McJudgeypants routine and take your ass to see a horror movie.

Part of WiB's greatness lies in its restorative role: It marks the real resurrection of Hammer Film productions. (Hammer also produced Let Me In.) If you're not familiar with Hammer, here are two words to jog your memory: Vincent Price Christopher Lee.

From the 1950s to the mid-'60s, one film company dominated the horror market, churning out megahits like The Curse of Frankenstein and The Brides of Dracula. (Snicker you may, but these were the popularity equivalent of Iron Man II.) With nary a chainsaw in sight, Hammer films celebrated the broody glamour of Victorian abstruseness, packing every shot with heaving bosoms and British countrysides. They made household names of thespian giants like Christopher Lee (one of the great Draculas of all time), Peter Cushing (Victor Frankenstein, aka the best thing in Star Wars), and of course, His Royal Price (if you don't know his work, there's no hope for you. Just kidding—get thee to Wikipedia!). Hammer films were the antithesis of slashers—Hammer honed its focus to monstrous aristocrats who terrorized innocent farm lasses in the night. Grand orchestral scores accompanied kidnappings of virgins, townsfolk bearing pitchforks and the occasional burning at the stake. While the nukes proliferated around them, moviegoers were entranced with the mystery and casual brutality of the pre-industrial world.

Then came the hyperrealism of the '70s, and things got all Last House on the Left. Horror abandoned its sense of wonder in favor of grisly torture scenes set to Moog synthesizers. Forget the mummies or doleful Dracula—we found the true monster, and it was us.

Cut to modern day, where Hammer has staged a grand return just as our taste for realism is reaching its saturation point. (Right? I mean come on, you can watch every sick and twisted vagary of humanity on your smartphone while eating a bagel, so do we really need more movies full of hapless teens injected with hydrofluoric acid?) And what better cultural trademark to usher in the new era than Harry Potter himself? Daniel Radcliffe was made for oldfangled ghost movies—his expression of clenched stoicism must be a near-reflex after 10 years of Voldemort's BS.

With Radcliffe at the fore, Hammer reclaims its place in pop culture with no explanations, as if 40 years of fevered tech-transmutation hadn't happened. Here we are, right back in the Victorian small town, where life is segmented by stone walls, hedge rows and gloppy English bogs ( Saw? What Saw?). The movie does this setting perfectly—every chamberwick and copper pot is perfectly placed and weighted. Even the wood panels lining a train car evoke an emotional response. Radcliffe's character, a grieving solicitor struggling to support his son after the wife dies in childbirth (another fun Victorian fear) finds himself in precisely the sort of situation one would encounter before solar-powered GPS systems and turbo engines and Gchat: He must travel to a remote village to settle the estate of a now-deceased widow. Her house, natch, is a repository of undead angst located smack in the middle of a fog-infested moor. Kudos to the prop designer for assembling this gothic paradise, where even the sconces ooze creepiness. One plot point revolves around the single scariest collection of toys since Poltergeist—it's a virtual madness menagerie (which presents the question, how was every nineteenth-century child not frightened into a coma by age 4?).

Radcliffe and his spectral companions usher us, the tech-saturated seen-it-all generation, back to this perfect era just before communication and transportation blew up and spoiled all the ghostly fun. WIB proves a valuable point: that modern moviegoers can be entertained by a man, his mutton chops, and a fantastically spooky house. The film contains no huge surprises, and there aren't SUPPOSED to be any—you know when Radcliffe looks in the window and the director cuts to an external shot of his face that a ghost will pop out behind him. But it's STILL SCARY ANYWAY. For the simple reason that we are human beings, and we possess a nervous system that responds in predictable ways to an established set of stimuli. If you prime us with 20 minutes of ominous music and creepy imagery and then slap a ghost in our faces, WE WILL BE SCARED, whether we like/admit/Tweet it or not. We can still participate in that delicious shared experience of humanity, iPhones be damned.

Granted, none of this would work quite so well if we weren't already enraptured by all things Victorian. When our new cultural obsession is a PBS series in which liveried butlers iron the morning newspaper, you know we're in nostalgia territory. Which, in my view, is a lovely thing. Perhaps we're tiring of our information being delivered on an instantaneous basis. Perhaps we're sensing there's a wonder being lost in always having answers at our fingertips. Perhaps we can't learn EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS from RSS feeds. Maybe we still want to MARVEL AT SOMETHING. Even if it is a beleaguered Harry Potter with mutton chops.

This film gets four bloody chainsaws (out of five)—or if you'd rather, four drippy candelabras. Vive le Victorian!

Melissa Lafsky is pleased to have been scared by your movie.

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This concept—the universal fear of an unseen menace stalking us in our place of safety—has been the heart of the “PA” trilogy, the third installment of which opened this week (and is shown mostly at midnight, meaning you have to go to bed right after seeing it, get it??). All three PA films plunk in the same formula: one member of a suburban California couple installs cameras throughout their impossibly well-appointed two-bedroom house to document strange happenings during the night. Said strange happenings occur, everyone freaks out, and then we all go home and chug some Ambien.

Unfortunately, the trope is feeling heavy, and all the sameness can get tiresome—the “handmade home video” footage has a carbon-copy look and feel in all three movies, the scares are similar (if not identical), and even the title treatment is rote. Plus, by now, the plots are running a bit thin—the story always centers around the same two sisters (these chicks cannot get a demon-free break) and the various Bumps In the Night that pursue them wherever they go (and sleep).

This time around, we see protagonists Katie and Kristi in their late-80s childhood, tormented by yet another preternatural corps de ballet as their parents flounder to figure out what’s going on. Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (remember “Catfish”?) come up with a few new gimmicks to expand on the original premise—a camera placed on a fan oscillator is a clever trick, enhancing spookiness by taking its time to show you a full view of the room. But for the most part, we’ve got a regurgitated hash-up of the previous two films in all their grainy, irradiated splendor.

None of this ruins the film’s effectiveness. The point is to hit that “creeped out” sweetspot that exists in all our brains, and that’s what these movies do. Whether they’re “good” or “bad” is irrelevant—what matters is that they’re effective. You could make the case that they’re monotonous on purpose—they know they have a Pavlovian audience that’s trained to scare on cue. There’s not much point in changing things up. We already know what’s coming: We’ll have an “oh shit something might be watching me” feeling delivered straight to our neocortex, where it will sit and germinate until we get home and turn off the lights.

The PA movies also get big fat bonus points for evicting Saw from its penthouse on the top floor of mainstream horror. The Era of Torture Porn was getting oppressive, threatening to drown us all in hematic flesh-soddering banality. When PA came along, with its piggy bank budget and $13,000 in profits-per-dollar-spent, the Saw series dissolved like skin in hydrochloric acid, social commentary and all. And thank God for that, since I wasn’t sure if I could sit through another one of those damn things, horror column or no.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

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I’m one of those assholes who can prattle on for days about the 1982 version—seriously, just ask anyone who’s gotten stuck talking to me. It’s often credited (correctly) as the first great creature film. John Carpenter took a weird little movie (the 1951 The Thing from Another World) and plopped in a fantastic script, perfect pacing, Kurt Russell, and the best creature effects that anyone had ever seen. No CGI, no digital enhancing, just some dudes with a truck full of clay and fake blood.

Then there were Carpenter’s characters: a research camp full of isolated men (not a woman in sight, which honestly didn’t matter) who quite literally become the monsters. Once the mysterious beastie appears and starts killing and replicating everyone, the characters are reduced to twisting, shrieking, blood-spurting bodies—coagulated simulacra of humans. Set this freakshow in a desolate Antarctic base, then add a paranoia-laced script and Russell at his nihilist best, and there’s your friggin’ great movie.

Of course, what most of us don’t admit is that the real scare in the 1982 version wasn’t the monster, but the spectacle of the human body itself. Who isn’t a little terrified of his or her own body? I mean, look at this thing that we’re forced to live in. It’s mercurial, temperamental, unpredictable; it rips and cracks and oozes and swells and shrinks and bleeds and turns various colors and emits any number of viscous liquids and rarely, if ever, gives you an explanation why. Our bodies have an agenda that is entirely separate from our conscious minds, and the two don’t always communicate well, or at all. In a sense, your body is the ultimate prison—it’s going to do what it wants, and you are stuck inside with no escape. When you think about it, it's more terror inducing than a Perry-Bachmann ticket. Almost.

Cut to today, when we have director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. essentially saying, “Hey, remember that Carpenter flick? That was good shit. So good, in fact, that we’re not even gonna attempt a remake. Instead, we’ll give our movie the exact same title, but call it a prequel, to indemnify ourselves from charges of unoriginal assholery. And then we’ll go make the exact same movie, only draped in layers of humorless mediocrity.”

The remake's plot is a prosaic amplification of the 1982 film’s beginning, which opens with a helicopter trying to shoot a dog bounding across the snow. That opening is effective because it starts in media res. What Van Heijningen takes as his entire story was dispatched by Carpenter in a few minutes. Kurt Russell figures out that the dog comes from a Norwegian camp where everyone has been butchered by an alien capable of replicating its prey as a survival mechanism. Boom, done, plot explained, now let’s get to the escalating derangement of the surviving characters, and the attendant freaky gore.

The new version misses the point. We don’t need to know precisely what happened at that Norwegian base. And we certainly don’t need to spend 95 minutes exploring every detail. But hey, why not do it anyway, this time without a single iota of humor, suspense, or any of the elements that made the original great? Today’s cast is so dull, you want them to turn into the Thing simply so their faces will do something besides project a semi-comatose stupor. Mary Elizabeth Winstead puts her game face on as the paleontologist who figures things out, though even she walks around looking like she just popped two Klonopin. Granted, it’s not really a fair comparison. Kurt Russell can pull off perfect comedic timing while shooting a flamethrower, for Christ’s sake.

So yes, The Thing gets 1.5 chainsaws (out of five) for sucking all joy out of a horror classic. If you want a better scare, smash one of your digits in a door and watch what happens—now that's terrifying.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

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If you know anything about this movie (no judgments if you don't) you likely know that everyone's bitching that it's not as good as the 1971 original, which was made by Wild Bunch director and famed nihilist Sam Peckinpah. Call his version anti-feminist, call it exploitative: it's been called both (and many other) names for years. But what holds up about his film is its visceral depiction of just how awful it is to be a “nice guy” who gets ripped in half by the opposing forces of civility and survival. 



The simple reason the original is so good is Dustin Hoffman. No one is better at embodying an ostensibly effete intellectual harboring a fucking rage machine deep inside. Hoffman is emotive, he’s emotionally vulnerable and, well, there's no polite way to say this—he's small. Tiny, even. Which, in the chest-thumping department, is an automatic 40 handicap. There's something baseline archetypal in the plight of a small man. His struggle is the struggle, the inescapable fight to triumph over one's immutable circumstances. He can do whatever is in his power—obtain expensive degrees, make bank, build up intellectual capital—to raise his social valuation. But he's never going to be the guy you veer away from on the sidewalk.



When you take this compelling a hero and plunk him down in extreme circumstances—specifically, into a rural town packed with locals who punch holes in his manhood (figuratively), rape his wife (unfiguratively) and attack his house, forcing him to unleash the Paleolith in a spray of plasmic carnage—well, you’ve got a great movie. Add a little Clockwork Orange-ultraviolence, and voila! a cult classic. 



Then there’s the remake, which came to theaters last week. Critics are excoriating its mere existence, which seems pointless; the movie's been made, and people are seeing it, so let’s quit bitching and discuss it on its merits. The fact is that despite its lack of Hoffman-ness (chiseled sensitivity aside, James Marsden is no Dustin Hoffman), this is a perfectly good remake. A loyal-to-the-point-of-lacking-all-imagination remake. In fact, the only real difference is that instead of the perfect hero, you have the perfect villain. Yup, I'm talking about Alexander Skarsgård.

The part Skarsgård plays here is Paragon Alpha, the man who can win on all fronts and serves as a boot in the ass to the socially softened hero. He evokes fear and respect in men while simultaneously compelling women to bang him (in Skarsgård's case, perhaps literally; as the credits rolled, two lesbian friends declared themselves “willing to make an exception”). Skarsgård pretty much runs away with the role; he presents an Alpha that’s every bit as riveting as Hoffman’s beleaguered rabbit.

Beyond Skarsgård’s presence, the remake is little more than a carbon copy of the original, with some minor modernization and a change in setting. A Harvard atheist with Hollywood pedigree rolls his vintage Jag into a rural town and clashes (hard) with the local menfolk. That the setting has changed from rural England to the deep South adds a bit of cultural critique to the proceedings, as the Alpha Males mutate from British hoodlums to gun-toting, whiskey-swilling redneck clichés. But the rubric is the same; they’re all walking chunks of Id and Ego, creating violence in a violent paradigm. The hot blonde wife (Kate Bosworth, looking like she needs a sandwich) is once again merely a vehicle for the men to achieve domination over each other, and the central conflict still comes down to one bloody battle between a sensitive dude and five guys with guns. 

Which isn’t a knee-jerk bad-thing; with all due respect to my estrogen kin, there’s plenty to gain from an honest exploration of masculinity’s ugly underbelly.

And that’s the real point we can take from the remake; that decades after feminism entered the cultural mainstream, after we’ve slogged through all these social and gender reconfigurations, the Act of Being Male still stirs up the same shitstorm it always did. However much we’ve resocialized men away from blatant sexist norms (which we now fetishize with "Mad Men" et al), it still comes down to a simple test: How do you make do with whichever branch of the Masculinity Yggdrasil your ass happened to land on? In the movies, at least, there's still one surefire way to measure a "man's worth"—if he can defend his home and family from other men.

Straw Dogs gets three bloody chainsaws (out of five).

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

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The 1985 original was one of those tepid '80s movies that make us olds feel all nostalgic but, at the end of the day, was truly crap. The premise was your classic “fear thy suburban neighbor” scenario: teenage kid lives with single mom in Anywhere, USA and discovers the cool single guy next door is a vampire. Clichés and lame special effects abound, and characters flounder in pools of phlegmatic dialogue. The only life in this movie was Chris Sarandon (of Prince Humperdinck fame) as the vampire, though with his oily biceps and Rizzo hair, he looked like he’d sprung straight from the bowels of a Richard Simmons video.

But the remake… Well, it’s simply great. Better than a mid-August '80s-remake vampire flick has any right to be.

Director Craig Gillespie knows exactly what he's here to do: make a smart, mainstream carnage-fest that manages some originality without going all Yōkai torture porn. Give us a dose of savvy dialogue between your standard relatable teens (loveable hero Charley Brewster, played by Anton Yelchin, has a falling out with his former best friend, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, over their LARPing past). Shovel on some gore and monster effects, and then let the characters cut loose. Marti Noxon’s clever script lulls you into “Yeah, yeah, I know where this is going” complacency for the first 20 minutes or so and then tosses in a fantastic loop that takes us fully out of ‘80s dullness. The element that makes the plot-craziness work is the setting: Vegas, that sanctum of transience where nothing wholesome or normal ever happens to anyone.

And then there’s the cast. Girls have been getting their fair share of attention in horror lately, but this one's all about the boys (hey, we can afford to be generous). Thankfully, the two female leads get significant intelligence upgrades from the original; the mom (a tan and sexy Toni Collette) and cutie girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots) can handle themselves in a crisis and don’t subject us to any of the flailing idiocy of their ‘80s counterparts (though Amanda Bearse will always be awesome).

But Fright Night belongs to the dudes. The audience cheered when Mintz-Plasse, aka McLovin, hit the screen (poor kid—but this is the typecasting hand you've been dealt, so you may as well run with it). David Tennant is slap-somebody good as “vampire slayer” Peter Vincent, a Midori-guzzling pleather-wearing faux-Russell-Brand-doing-Criss-Angel that’s funnier than, well, Russell Brand. Sarandon shows up for a fun cameo (which almost no one in the theater registered, since they were still encased in amniotic fluid when the original was released). And there's even a Franco! (Dave Franco, James's brother, playing the manscaped cool-kid.)

And of course, there’s Colin Farrell, loping across the screen in wife beaters and circulation-cutting jeans, desecrating everyone with his unholy, unpasteurized sexual energy. He’s the perfect monster—who isn’t a little afraid of Colin Farrell? His slightly manic puppydog eyes, his absurd good looks, his sudden, uncomfortable vulnerability, the rumors of his massive, er, shoe size. He’s all id and ego: a walking erect cock. Gillespie plays up the “fear of the predatory bachelor” perfectly with Farrell’s dirt-caked appearance and sparsely furnished house (the only piece of serious furniture is a 50” flatscreen). Farrell knows when to play it “cliché vampire” and when to go off the grid, and he even does humor: The scariest scene in the movie is made hilarious by his watching "Real Housewives of New Jersey."

Who wouldn’t want to see the blue-eyed, marble-chiseled Yelchin take on this manimal? The contrast between the two—the emotionally vulnerable and slightly weak kid, versus the all-power, all-destruction pillar of virility—is played to maximum effect in one exchange. The scene is blood-free, but by far the creepiest in the film. In it, Jerry the Vampire informs Charley that the women in his life are "ripe for plucking,” and there are a “lot of bad people in the world” who’d be happy to do it. After that throwdown, well, it’s on, and you can’t help but be psyched when Charley metamorphoses from sullen jellyfish to self-sacrificing badass. (OK, maybe you can help it. Now stop looking at Colin Farrell’s ass.)

As for the whole 3D business, when I asked the publicist why 3D was necessary in a vampire flick, she gave me an incredulous look and said, “Why would you watch something in 2D when you can watch it in 3D!?” To which I replied, “Why would you watch something in 3D when you could stab yourself in the cheek with a ballpoint?” (All right, I didn’t really say that. Her attitude exemplifies the current industry sentiment, and I pick my battles.) Still, this 3D doesn't have the schlocky awfulness of, say, Final Destination 4 and 5. It's used with discretion and it even heightens some of the best gory moments, like when a Vegas showgirl explodes into a cloud of blood or a motorcycle comes crashing through a van window… you get the drift.

Oh, and there’s merciless mockery of Twilight, too. Win!

So yes, ‘Fright Night’ gets 4 bloody chainsaws (out of five). If you don't like it then you hate fun.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

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Movies wade through death in a variety of ways. Typically, there’s buildup to a tragedy, with a focus on the pain of loss and the hardship left in its wake. Death is used alternately as character forger or plot device (is the hero really dead?? He CAN’T be!!). But horror films enjoy a singular relationship with death. Horror alone has our permission to roam the Stygian shore and frolic in all the coarse, grubby ways the human body can cease functioning. Morbid and profane, you say? Well, if we can chat about anal sex over breakfast, why not death? Both happen on a daily basis. 

And no series delights in death more than the Final Destination franchise.

There is literally NOTHING to these movies other than the rampant celebration of Demise (and the young hotties sacrificed to it). Death isn’t merely the villain in these films: It’s the protagonist, the minor characters, the subplot and the leitmotif subject. Not even the Saw series gives death such star treatment. Saw and its spawn are focused on pain and agony, rather than what follows after; the torture scenes in those movies are so impossibly gruesome that death comes as a denouement. But in the Final Destination movies, death is the means, the end and everything in between. The only point is to watch people get knocked off in kitchens, or planes, or escalators, or SUVs, or dentist offices—you get the drift. The key is to recognize that it’s all an inside joke, the punchline of which is that you don't need a psychopath in a mask to deliver death to your door, all you need are a few mundane objects and your own mortal stupidity.



Alas, a good joke can be spoiled by a tired setup. Which is what has happened to FD—it’s a prisoner of its own formula. Group of hot young things cheat a violent public death due to someone’s accident-premonition (the opening sequences of these films are always spectacular, and the major bridge collapse that starts off Final Destination 5 is hardly a stretch of the imagination these days). Then the survivors get systematically picked off in Rube Goldberg-meets-Dario-Argento sequences that utilize everything from swimming pool filters to laundry lines. Cultural fears are reflected (death by acupuncture! All that loony Eastern medicine could KILL you!), and various statements are made about the fragility of life and the emptiness of middle-class consumption (getting Lasik? Going tanning? Prepare to meet thy doom). Toss in Tony Todd for a little exposition about how “you can’t cheat death blah blah.” (You put Tony Todd in your movie for one purpose: to show your predominantly white audience the scariest black man alive.)

The problem here isn’t the accident sequences—they remain the raison d’etre of these films. No, the issue is the premise. It was silly in the first movie, and now its omnipresence bogs the sequels down like piñatas in a septic tank. The producers need to ditch the “cheating death” formula. It’s not necessary. Just present the characters, and have them start dying. If you want to add a little social relevance/Saw-style sermonizing , have them act like douchebags until the universe conspires to take them out in creative ways. Abandon the increasingly peripatetic dialogue and lame attempts at character development, and accept that the sole purpose of these people is to perish in a cacophony of blood and irony. 

As for FDfans, we get a bad rap for being shallow gore-junkies. Which isn’t entirely true (ok, it’s a little true). But we’re into more than just satisfying our gruesome death-lust. We want to see death not taken so seriously. We want to laugh at it, even a little. And yes, we want suspense to precede the gory thrill. We're human beings; we may as well embrace that not everything about us is lily-coated dulcitude. We flail, we bleed and, eventually, we die. Turning inevitability into a joke climax renders the event itself less scary. That is, if we could ever really convince ourselves that our own deaths were anything but terrifying.

NOTE: We’re unveiling a new ratings system! Behold the drippy chainsaws! Out of five chainsaws, FD5 gets two.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

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If you're the one getting married—which I am, in three months, while also attending eight other weddings in as many months due to a hyper-marital zeitgeist (that, as of July 24th, includes New York gays!! Welcome to the madness!!)—a mysterious stupor befalls you. The tales of "bridal nervous breakdowns” have become ingrained in pop culture, "ingrained” meaning “anything that gets its own reality show.” Such breakdowns do happen, and they're hardly gender-specific, but these displays of emotional gangrene fail to get at the heart of the nuptial plight.

So where does one go to find a guide to the true sources of wedding-angst? One resource is the wedding industry, that fondant tower of chintzy madness that exists to suck your wallet and self-esteem out through multiple orifices. The industry gets plenty of flack, mostly for its organza-wrapped obfuscation of anything important. But all this hating is silly. Yes, the wedding industry will crack open your skull and pour in gallons of raspberry-hazelnut ganache, and then send you a bill for $15,000. But that's its job. It's absurd to expect people in the industry to tell you the truth about weddings. They're there for one purpose: to sell you shit. Calling them manipulative capitalist assholes (ahem, Rebecca Mead) isn’t solving the problem; it’s simply blaming the addiction on the dealer.

The truth about weddings was once something we all figured out for ourselves as we made our way across the glurpy morass of the engagement tar fields. Until now! Here is your look into the things no one ever tells you about weddings (but are nonetheless true).

1. WEDDINGS ARE EMOTIONAL RECKONINGS.
Have you dealt with your issues? I’m not talking about a few months in therapy and the occasional Xanax on a bad day—I’m talking about really digging in, sitting under the Bodhi tree, and dealing with all the nasty icky hurts and fears and angers that have burned your face and clamped your guts since you were five. If you have never once taken a hard look at what really triggers you emotionally, and figured out a way to release that trigger, you're in for a shock. Because ALL of your submerged emotions will rear their Gorgon heads during the process of planning a wedding. Prepare to be confronted.

First, there’s your family. Ahh, family. The one group with perma-instant access to every emotional trigger in your psyche ("Of course your mother knows how to push all your buttons!" a matriarch once told me. 'She created them!!"). Do you still resent your mom for that "Honey, your thighs don’t need that ice cream!" comment in 8th grade? Clinging to the last vestiges of anger at your dad for never kissing you goodnight or reading your term papers? Secretly seethe at your brother for moving far away and leaving you to deal with the full brunt of your parents' needs? Lucky you! You're going to experience all of it again, since each of these people will be intimately involved in your Big Megaspecial Day (whether you invite them or not). If you do not give up any and all familial anger, it will seize you in its talons and tear out your liver at least once a day, Prometheus style. You will find yourself shrieking over the fact that your mom disapproves of your choice of chair covers ("You never liked my clothes in junior high!!! Wail Sob!”) or that your dad suggested "Psychokiller" as a father-daughter dance ("You spent my childhood in the office and now this!!"). Any unresolved issue, annoyance or pin in the side that you’ve had since, well, birth will now be a part of your daily life. And we haven’t even gotten to the fact that you may be asking them for money!

Then there’s the invite list, which is basically a socially condoned form of friendship slaughter. Every minor dig and insult will rise from the depths of your consciousness when it comes time for the guest-list-culling. Who will be invited to the biggest public transition of your life? Are you really going to invite that wench who texted your ex for six months after you broke up? Or that assclown who hasn't picked up a bar tab since, oh, college? If you’re someone who holds grudges, your invite list will dwindle like an oak tree showered in acid. The girl who said your engagement ring was "cute"? DEATH. The guy who ruined the ending of “Game of Thrones” on purpose just to fuck with you? OFF THE LIST.

Plus you have everyone’s OPINIONS—those are some of the biggest hurdles to navigate. Every friend will have views and needs to lob your way: this one doesn't like the bachelor party date since it conflicts with his annual fishing trip, that one thinks it's outrageous that your bridal shower is in another town, and don’t even get them started on the hotel you chose for the bridal party. And then when they attend your actual wedding, it is a fundamental law that they will comment on how they would have done it differently "had it been MY wedding." Well, yes, asshole, but it is not your wedding, and you have not subsisted on cabbage and rice for months so you could pay for that open bar you're currently guzzling. (See? There's that anger again! Damn.)

But before you begin your process of wreaking vengeance, remember just one thing: your wedding is not an opportunity to dole out justice to everyone who’s pissed you off in the last decade. In fact, that's the furthest thing from its purpose. If you wield your wedding like a samurai sword, it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll do the same with other big events in your life. And die alone.

2. THIS EMOTIONAL RECKONING INCLUDES YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER.
Everything you don't absolutely adore about this magical human you've pledged yourself to is going to now manifest itself in wild screechy detail. You will fight about things you didn’t even register during those blissful days of moonlit walks and Sunday afternoon sex. Eventually, you will have to face a stunning reality: The person you are marrying is exactly who she/he is, and will never be anyone else. Not now, and not once you're married. Whether that's a beatific thing or a source of night terrors all depends on you. (Note that I didn't say it depends on your partner. If you don't like what you're marrying, then it's on you to either get over it or call it off. Sorry!!)

All your interactions will be weighed with a new gravity. When you do fight, it's fighting as a COUPLE THAT WILL BE MARRIED. Those things that were mere annoyances are now albatrosses draping your shoulders for eternity. (Seriously, it's no coincidence that Coleridge’s Mariner ranted to a wedding guest).

The good news: Your incentive to get over these fights is sky high, since you've committed to this person and put down a venue deposit and changed your Facebook status and introduced him/her to your grandmother. So after a while, it can all fade into "Well, it's all part of the package—and I guess his videogame habit is better than hookers n' blow!"

3. IT ALSO INCLUDES YOURSELF.
Your head can become a scary place in the months before your wedding. Any insecurity that has made its home nestled in your gray matter? You will come face to face with it now. Am I pretty enough to be getting married? Why is everyone in every wedding picture so much prettier? Will all the people I care about judge me as I walk down the aisle? Am I rich enough to be marrying this person? Am I rich enough to be marrying at ALL? Aren't I supposed to have paid off my student loans by now? What if I can't be the provider I want to be? Will it shred my masculinity like a 2010 Super Bowl ad? Will my partner start to resent me not pulling my weight? Can we afford this wedding? What if I get fired, and can't make the next catering payment? What if no one says yes to our invitations, since they all secretly hate us? What if too many people say yes, and we have to pay for them all? What if I lose sleep over our wedding budget and start to look haggard and my betrothed starts having second thoughts like, "Why am I binding myself to this haggard-looking worrywart anyway" and what if he/she leaves me and then I'm out of a catering deposit and out of a job and I'll have to return all these presents and my grandmother will pity me and everyone will mention my name in hushed tones at parties and I'll shut myself away until I die of infected bedsores and WHAT IF WHAT IF WHAT IF AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then you have a drink.

4. YOUR WEDDING WILL MAKE YOU FACE EXACTLY WHO YOU ARE, EVEN IF THAT'S A PERSON YOU PREFER TO HIDE MOST OF THE TIME.
Wedding planning will give you a funny little window into who you really are in life. Not who you think you are, not who you say you are, but who you are.

"But I'm so down-to-earth!" you say. "I'm the furthest thing from psycho about these things! I don't even subscribe to any of that antiquated bourgeois nonsense!" Maybe so—but maybe not. Get a few months into the planning process and see. Are you obsessive and controlling about every last detail? Overwhelmed by the whole thing? Laissez-faire to the point of doing nothing (and waiting for someone to bail you out)? Projecting false calm whilst mortgaging your organs to pay for the surf-and-turf entrée and Herrera gown? The ways in which you navigate these choices—not what you tell yourself about them—are some of the clearest indications you'll ever get of what's going on in the personal universe you call life.

And I don't mean the choice between peacock blue centerpieces and turquoise (although even those small choices will eventually come to mean something to you too, but more on that later). No, I’m talking the laborious internal decisions that govern the big picture. When it comes down to it, how big a deal is this wedding—not the marriage, the wedding—in your personal narrative? How much of your identity and self-esteem are you basing on this one event? How much are you focused, either consciously or unconsciously, on being someone who adores/despises being the center of attention? (Hint: they’re basically the same thing.) What portion of your emotional needs are you expecting this wedding to fulfill?

We're smart people. We all know what the answers to these questions SHOULD be. But trafficking in "should be"s won't do you much good when you're dissolving into sobs, supposedly over a turquoise bouquet that you REALLY THOUGHT should have been peacock.

5. THE REAL STRESS OF WEDDING PLANNING IS THINKING EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING.
We humans are remarkably good at ascribing meaning. If he doesn't call you back after a fantastic date, then it must mean that you're a complete dud of humanity who is destined to grow old alone. If you don't get that new job, it must mean that you're a mentally inferior troglodyte with nothing to offer the world.

Nowhere does the Mental Meaning Machine work as much overtime as during wedding preparations. It starts from the initial proposal: if the ring is not expensive enough to buy six orphans on the Siberian black-market, then it means you are stuck with a cheap bastard and your life is inferior to that of every rock-sporting wife. (Gays, please, renounce this practice.) From then on, every choice you make about your wedding, from cummerbund colors to china patterns, somehow brims over with alleged meaning about things like "who you are as a couple" and "what kind of life you'll have."

Ultimately, we all know this is foolish: Does it mean something if you pick the New Testament reading over the Yeats poem? Does it mean something if you serve the halibut instead of the chicken roulade? Of course not. But try telling that to the stream of brides pouring into the Plaza Ballroom for this year's Wedding Mega-Expo.

And alas, ascribing all this meaning is exhausting and, inevitably, disappointing. Getting your write-up in the Times wedding announcements doesn't mean that your marriage will be perfect, and having the latest Vera Wang hardly means your wedding will be the most blissful day on Earth. Rather, it simply means that you won't be able to eat. For realz, Elizabethan corsets much?

6. IT IS EASY TO DEVELOP VERY BAD FINANCIAL HABITS WHILE PLANNING A WEDDING (OR VERY GOOD ONES).
Even if you opt for the most frugal of wedding receptions, the cash issue will come up. Paying for a wedding can be like wearing a hair shirt—after a while, writing a four-figure check (or five-figure, or six-, all depending on your level of insanity) stops feeling like flesh-scouring pain.

The fact is that money (or rather, its scarcity) is a reality for everyone, and that reality shifts once you have to weigh the large, emotion-laden purchases that accompany weddings. Unless you're a hedge fund manager, in which case fuck you, and go get a job that's useful to society (but invite me to your wedding! I like Dom Perignon fountains as much as the next gal!).

Still, for those who make it through the dark tunnel of wedding spending, you can look forward to one bright, beautiful moment: The day after your wedding. On that day, you get to choose if you ever lay another cent of your hard-earned (or inherited—no judgments) cash on damask tablecloths or Waterford goblets. And all those Excel-spreadsheeting skills you've acquired can be used to budget your future finances. Or not. But at least it's up to you, and not your mother-in-law with her 80-person guest list.

Just promise me this: For the love of all that is remotely holy in this world, do NOT go into major debt to pay for your wedding. Which is what I say about law school, but no one ever listens to me.

7. YOU WILL LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE THAT WILL NEVER REALLY BE USEFUL AGAIN (EXCEPT WHEN DISCUSSING OTHER PEOPLE'S WEDDINGS).
We know a lot of words—we sit on the Internet all day, we can't help but live in a word-driven world. But exotic, bizarre words like “chivari” and “shantung” and “Asscher” had never been in my vocabulary before now. These days, I spend more time swimming in them than I’d ever admit to my therapist. Don’t fight the small battles: Embrace the wedding-speak and fold it into your lexicon, at least until the last gift check has been cashed. And know that when everyone nods after a wedding planner announces, “We’ll just highlight the centerpieces with pinspots and up-lighting!” no one else knows what the fuck she’s talking about either.

8. THE THINGS NO ONE SAYS ARE IMPORTANT ARE IN FACT THE MOST IMPORTANT.
Two words: Premarital counseling. It is perhaps the most vital thing you can do before marching down the aisle. It doesn’t matter if your love is so all-powerful it can superglue glaciers, you need to talk about the changes that are about to envelop your day-to-day lives. As a couple, you must sit down in a room not filled with cakes and hors d'oeuvres samplers and ask the squirmy, uncomfortable questions that no one ever really wants to ask: Who's going to pay the ConEd bill? Who's going to unload the dishwasher 99% of the time? Who's going to initiate sex when we're both bone-tired and haven't done it in a week? How strongly do we each feel about fidelity? What religion (if any) do we want to impart to our children? And how can we set ourselves up with the ability to keep discussing these things in the future? Because they will come up.

This crap—these thorny, excruciating conversations—is THE crap. It is the only reality. The ribbon-clad roses and monogrammed key chains and signature cocktails are not. Messy conversations are what you are signing up for, and what you will bump up against regularly for the remainder of your lives together. They are the gateway to a fulfilling and joyous relationship. And I can absolutely 100,000% guarantee you that not a single tux tailor or band singer or wedding planner or overbearing third cousin will ever tell you this. But your divorce lawyer certainly will.


One final note: If you think I exempt myself from these rules, I assure you I do not. I have fallen into each and every sinkhole described here. Just ask my saintly fiancé, who somehow still wants to marry me.

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, is getting married this Halloween weekend. There will be blood.

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Still, at the end of the day, no matter how much we may want to enmesh this film in political importance or elevate it to a cultural statement, it’s just a slasher flick. And a pretty good one! So let’s try to slog out of the political muck (as much as possible, anyway) and just talk about that.

The best part of being the “first slasher flick from a country” is the lack of canon dragging you down. There’s no precedent, no ankle-weights of Freddy or Jason or Michael or Carrie or Chuckie or Vigo the Destroyer, etc., etc. A clever filmmaker will take this freedom and use it to ferret out a new way of doing things, while remaining faithful to the genre at large.

All of which happens, for the most part, in Rabies. The premise sounds as unoriginal as they come (but then, that’s sort of the point). Good-looking (and I mean slap-somebody good-looking) 20-somethings heading for a day at the country club find themselves lost in the woods, hunted by a serial killer. Mayhem ensues, blood and madness spurt, and body counts rise. 



The spark of originality comes from an early twist: taking the killer out of the equation. How many slasher films shoot the psychopath up with a tranquilizer and leave him unconscious 'til the third act? And then proceed to create shit so nuts you barely notice? It's a neat trick that hasn't been pulled off since... well, ever really. Of course, to get this trick to work, you’re required to believe that normal people could become murderous at the drop of a hat (or a gun)—a bit of a stretch, even for directors trying to make a statement about the savagery of their nation’s history (crap, there’s that political discussion again). The film plays with a few clever touches that are distinctly Israeli; one scene in an abandoned minefield is fantastically tense (you can’t exactly get away with that plotline in the woods outside Cleveland). But other imagery is unsubtle to the point of eye rolls—cue the close-ups of the young hottie wearing a Star of David around his neck, which eventually gets covered in blood.



Nonetheless, the mayhem manages to suck you in, particularly with the entrance of cops, who bring with them the “authority figures are worse than psychopaths” trope. Yes, it too has been done, but Danny Geva is just about the rapiest policeman ever depicted onscreen, and his scenes with the women are more viscerally uncomfortable than any murder in the film. His performance steals all attention away from the killer, and turns the film into a brutal gender battle. Let’s see that happen to Jason or Freddie.

Of course, in the third act, things fall apart. Massive plot points make no sense, huge details are never explained (is there incest going on here? Who is screwing whom? WTF??). Then things turn unapologetically sour and nasty when two sweet men are mistakenly murdered, leaving behind devastated women. Their grief transports you out of the adrenaline-cranked horror-movie fun into a world of loss—which again is fine for a political statement, but it won’t mean a good time at the scary movie. You can make your horror film, or you can make your fraught statement about Israel—but you’re not gonna bake both into the same cake.

As for future Israeli horror, Jerusalem’s walls have come down (sorry, I’ve been so good ‘til now!). A zombie film is already in the works, promising Romero-levels of patent cultural critique. Though if there are any Palestinian zombie raids, I may have to maim somebody.

We are ranking movies now!! This one gets two drippy chainsaws (out of five).

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl's Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.

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And sure enough, no one wanted to see it. Opening weekend was dismal, grossing a mere $18.7 million (which ain’t bad for a horror flick, ‘til you consider the projections were for over $40 mill). The youngs are apparently too busy planning Green Beret death missions on Rebecca Black. As for us olds, well, we're famous for not wanting to be reminded that we're old—no one wants to see Sidney Prescott as the hoary 30-something with neck wrinkles and a book deal.

Still, despite the fact that it bombed harder than a convent donkey show, Scre4m is nontheless an important contribution to the Horror Canon. In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and dub it the first mainstream feminist horror film.

From the ultra-meta opening to the semi-ridiculous ending, this is a woman's show. The ladies dominate nearly every scene, bitching, snarking, joking, and [WARNING, HERE COMES A BIG FAT SPOILER] stabbing with rapturous abandon. And, most important of all, they’re not being punished for it. There’s no comeuppance for hitting on another man’s husband or telling the hot jock to fuck off. The notable one-liners, ballsy moves, wisecracks—all are made by girls (with the exception of a “Please don’t kill me, I’m gay!” crack from Erik Knudsen and Anthony Anderson yelling “Fuck Bruce Willis!”)

The male characters are bumbling, depth-free distractions, there to look like fools, or look like fools and then get killed, or just serve as continuous reminders of the ‘90s. (It’s David Arquette looking like a washed-up gambling addict! And look! They even cast a Culkin!) Meanwhile, the chicks get to shout and punch and spout out lists of classic horror films and treat boys like dryer lint and generally act AWESOME. And they don't get killed for doing so (well, ok, some of them get killed—but Jesus, it’s a horror movie).

Even ‘90s weep-queen Neve Campbell adds a bit more gravitas to Sidney’s trademark watery squint. (Funny how Neve looks exactly the same as she did in ‘96… or is it just that I’ve aged at the exact same rate? Don't answer that.)

But the true femme accompli here is Courteney Cox. She slashes her way out of the 40-something female stereotype, and takes over this movie with a flick of her scorn-ready (albeit Botox-ed to the hilt) brow. Let’s face it: Few film archetypes are more brutal than the “older woman in a horror movie”—either you’re the psycho nutcase (Friday the 13th, Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby) or you’re the pathetic victim (nearly every other movie). And no matter what, you’re ALWAYS an obsessive mother.

Cox pulls off a pretty impressive coup, upstaging not only the cute flouncing teens, but also her 15-years-younger self. Her character—now successful, childless (!), and utterly bored with the “middle-aged wife” role—shrugs off all orders to “stay out of it” and leaps back into the murderous fray, husbands, younger blondes and kitchen knives be damned. She takes nothing for granted, and thinks not a second about sneaking into dark corners to catch homicidal fruitcakes (and bitch is 47!!!). While Arquette and Campbell slide into their ‘90s cliché groove, Cox reinvents and one-ups, kicking this meta-fest to life and providing the only sexy thing onscreen, gelatinous lips and all. Gale Weathers is shrewd, aggressive, cunning, but never heartless;despite it all, she still loves that stupefied ass clown Dewey. And she does it all while sporting a better ass than the 20-somethings. And [yet another spoiler coming] she doesn’t even have to die for it!

Oh yeah, and there’s not a hint of sex or drugs. Seriously. Not even a half-finished joint or awkward boob-grab. Apparently teens today have moved on to other pursuits—like creating Internet memes and starring in reality shows.

Melissa Lafsky wants to be scared by your movie.

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Well, for one, he steals. From Argento, Polanski, Spielberg, Amenábar, even Shyamalan (who, let us not forget, did make one great ghost movie). And yes, James Wan even steals from himself. When faced with the prospect of a meat-and-potatoes horror film, the maestro of torture fetish has spackled together bits and shards from nearly everything in the genre, forming a pasty drywall that’s scary in some places, and just silly in others. And thus we have Insidious—in theaters today!

Do you really need me to tell you the premise of this movie? No, you don’t. It’s a formula that’s fueled countless ghost stories through countless decades (well, ok, around ten decades). Ridiculously attractive family enjoys the spoils of suburban life, with strapping dad (Patrick Wilson) heading off to work while fragile mom (Rose Byrne) writes girl-folk music and minds her brood. They wear matching PJs and drive SUVs and traipse through their well-appointed mahogany-paneled McMansion, until something goes… wrong. Something SPOOKY! Bumps in the night, doors creaking louder than a supersonic jet, windows mysteriously cracking at 100 decibels (seriously, this movie is LOUD), and all of it centered around a sweet, overly-shrewd child who winds up in a coma. Beautiful mother is besieged with fear and grief, while stoic husband bears it all. The marriage frays, the other children cower, the ghosts get nastier, and then… well, Jigsaw shows up? (No, that’s not a spoiler.)

The reason this premise is a cliché, of course, is because the cliché WORKS. There is nothing more terrifying than a big suburban house (seriously: I will only live in apartments). And there is no character more poignant and empathy-rousing than a terrorized child (or the terrorized mother trying to save him).
But to transform a cliché into a great horror movie, you need technique, and pacing—the slow, gradual reveal, the building of dread and unease that mounts until your chest hurts and your knuckles crack. Classic ghost-in-the-house films can have you reaching for an oxygen mask and crawling under your chair by the second half, even over something seemingly-mundane (remember the ball bouncing down the stairs in The Changeling? Yeah, me too, since I was shrieking like a tween watching Justin Bieber die by chainsaw).

The key to all this ghostly mastery, of course, is SUBTLETY. Shadows, dark corners, strange noises, all presented with patience and nuance and skill. So now you see the problem: Is there anything remotely subtle about Saw? Take away the bone-crushing machines and vats of hypodermic needles, and what are the Saw films really? Some cheap sets, a crazy albino, and a fetid shitpile of terrible acting. Which is essentially what we get with Insidious.

To be fair, despite all the clumsiness and mess, the first hour or so is pretty friggin’ scary. While Wan falls victim to every trap in the Ghost Gospel—excessive melodrama at every spooky sighting, screechy violins for every self-opening door, revealing the first ghost (a carbon copy of Vigo from Ghostbusters 2) way too soon—he does have a flair for using sound and mechanics in a horror film. Say what you will about Saw, but those death contraptions looked and sounded terrifying, and he puts those skills to use here.

But around two-thirds of the way through, it all devolves into mush. Specifically, we take a dive when Wan breaks Commandment Number ONE in ghost lore: Thou shalt not overexplain. Ghosts cannot be rationalized. There is no place for them in logic. Attempting to re-cast them within the sphere of lucid thinking will destroy your entire movie. (Remember the whole “demon expert” scene in Paranormal Activity? Remember how it was boring as shit?)

So when Byrne calls in “The People Who Can Help,” they proceed to steer the movie off a cliff. Wan can get away with stealing, and over-showing, and over-soundtracking, and even absurd character set-ups (I mean, Jesus: a four-bedroom house, an SUV and six months of medical bills on a lone teacher’s salary?). But when a set of hipster ghostbusters show up to help an old lady perform a séance in a gas mask, you officially know your movie has been composted into mineralized waste.

From there, it just gets laughable—which is a shame, since this one could have gone any number of ways. Even a Jigsaw cameo would have been preferable. At least he could have tossed in a catchy tagline.

Melissa Lafsky wants to be scared by your movie.

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