I enjoy the work of director Jeremy Saulnier. He did the bleak, regular-dude-sloppily-getting-revenge movie BLUE RUIN in 2013, followed by the punks vs. bigots favorite GREEN ROOM in 2015, and then he kind of went off the radar because HOLD THE DARK (2018) only exists in the mists of Netflix, but I liked that one too.
Those three movies paint a certain picture of what kind of filmmaker Saulnier might be. They may have moments of humor, but they’re all very grim and dry, the emphasis on their unblinking look into the dark fringes of life, with a particular fascination for people not too cool to step into enormous fuck ups and messes that movie characters usually don’t. In BLUE RUIN, for example, the protagonist steals a gun to use in a murder, but it has a lock on it, so he tries to break it off with a rock, and breaks the gun. In HOLD THE DARK a guy shoots at cops from a barn with a high powered rifle and they just scurry around helplessly for several minutes until our protagonist gets a gun and takes careful aim… and then he can’t hit him either.
What I think is fairly unknown or forgotten about Saulnier is that his first film, a whole six years before the wide acclaim of BLUE RUIN, presents that view of life in the context of a straight-up horror comedy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Many years back I wrote about 
THE BIRDS. By Alfred Hitchcock. The one where the birds attack. Good movie. He was a total bastard to Tippi Hedren but she was good in it. Her first movie. Then she raised Melanie Griffith and a bunch of lions.
Every October for the last 14 years I’ve been doing what I call “Slasher Search,” where I try to scrounge up some obscure slasher movies you probly never heard of, preferably from the ‘80s, and usually still only available on VHS. Originally the hope was to discover some little-known gems from this particular subgenre and era I enjoy, or at least get to dissect some strange ones, and I achieved those things for a long time. But between the finite number of stomachable films of this type, my deep scraping of the barrel, and the fine work of Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome and other blu-ray companies to shine their bigger spotlights on movies like this, I’m having a hard time finding fresh material these days. There will always be new horror out there to discover, but not ones that I considered eligible for the name Slasher Search.
I started to think I was reaching the end of the line last year, but some of you kindly encouraged me to keep going even if it meant adjusting the rules to a different type of movie. So I’m taking your advice. This year I’ll try exploring a different era of also-ran low budget exploitation by treating Tubi (and possibly other ad-supported streaming services) as my video store, searching for titles I’ve never heard of, to see if I can find some watchable ones. I went through a page of 1,000 horror titles and jotted down a long list of not-well-known vaguely slasher-ish ones, and I’ll pick some out to sample. We’ll see how it goes. No guarantees are being made. (Except that I started late due to all that 
SPEAK NO EVIL is the English title for the Danish film Gæsterne (The Guests). It’s directed by Christian Tafdrup, an actor who was in The Killing and Borgen, and he co-wrote it with his brother Mads. I watched it on Shudder with only a vague awareness that it had been on some people’s lists of best movies in the banner horror year of 2022. I keep forgetting the title and questioning whether it’s actually SEE NO EVIL or HEAR NO EVIL, but no, it’s gotta be SPEAK, ‘cause there’s a kid in it with no tongue. Anyway, it was a successful viewing. If my stomach was coal it would’ve turned into diamonds.
COBWEB (2023 American film) is not to be confused with COBWEB (2023 South Korean film directed by Kim Jee-woon). Totally different thing. This is a new horror movie that wafted briefly through theaters during the OppBarbenheimerie era, came out on disc a few weeks ago, now is on Hulu. I knew nothing about it except that some people had said it was good, and that served me well. It’s a pretty simple story that benefits from a sense of unfolding mystery, so I’ll try to tread lightly for a bit and then warn you when it’s time to start stomping.
NIGHT OF THE HUNTED is a really tense, unsettling single-location thriller just released to Shudder. It’s directed by Franck Khalfoun (who did the 
Are you familiar with the screenwriter John Logan? He’s been nominated for three Oscars – for 
THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT is an enjoyable, well-put-together modern slasher movie. I saw and liked the first chapter of the 
BRAHMS: THE BOY II is obviously a sequel worth doing just to apply something close to the 
