Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Director: Philip Kaufman
Screenwriter: W. D. Richter
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy

This film is about aliens. Technically. But also, it isn’t.

This is the second adaptation of “The Body Snatchers” by Jack Finney (following the 1956 Don Siegel adaptation, also titled Invasion of the Body Snatchers). It follows roughly the same plot, where strange, plant-based life forms come to Earth after travelling across the stars, where they grow replicas of human beings in huge pods, each identical save for the removing of emotion (and so no war, no pain, no love). Their infiltration of the community they find themselves in is the scene of paranoia, of the discovery of a conspiracy, of the terror of realising that your family members may look and sound the same, but that they aren’t actually them. A small band of survivors must battle the odds when the system has been infiltrated and turned against them. The novel and original film, taking place in the midst of 1950s Red Scare McCartheyism, is as thinly veiled an allegory for America’s fear of communism as you can get, though Finney denied this throughout his life (movies such as The Thing From Another World and It Came From Outer Space also follow the trend). Both of those texts are also seminal sci-fi horror reading/viewing. The question, therefore, is how does this version stack up?

Part of the genius of this interpretation is the decision to move the action from the small town of Santa Mira (in the film)/Mill County (in the book) to downtown San Francisco. The added chaos of urban life gives a sense of menace to the spreading contamination. The allegory here is of corporations turning people into shells of their former selves, and of the destruction of the natural world – a kind of capitalist updating of the red weed from H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds”. Roger Ebert commented that it might also be influenced by the Watergate scandal, with tapped phones and wires. Whilst this is a possibility, those features were always elements in the novel and the first film. What is certain, is that by putting this viral personality takeover in the middle of a city, the danger is far more immediate. With the first film, if it gets out of the small town, there’s still a chance. There’s a larger civilisation out there to help. Here, if you’re dead in the city, with all that manpower and all those connections, with all that modernity, there’s not much chance that anywhere else is going to last. Along with this updating, the pod-people in their growing stage are much more organic, more tissue-like, adding to the ecological themes. It isn’t as strong a body-horror shift, but perhaps comparable to the way in which the 1958 version of The Fly (starring Vincent Price) was updated for modern audiences: a reimagining rather than a remake, as directed by David Cronenberg in 1986 (ironically, also starring Jeff Goldblum).

The air of being hemmed in is all around. The buildings impose, the close proximity that everyone is to each other (and in some sequences having several of the characters together in every shot one after the other), makes the idea that the people next to you aren’t who they say they are even worse. The main cast is terrific, bringing sufficient weight and drama to a terror slowly building up as the horrific realisation of what is going on dawns on them. The little things occurring in the background add to that paranoia, and is something Edgar Wright specifically mentions as an influence on the background details for Shaun of the Dead in his DVD commentary (ironically, Wright’s body-snatching film The World’s End actually has the ending of the original novel, in which the invading force realises humanity will never be converted, which is something no actual novel adaptation has kept). The occasional shots of the garbage compactors crushing the husks of used pods comes back time and time again unmentioned but always there, and when you realise what they are, by then it’s all too late. Everything’s already over.

Speaking of endings, Kevin McCarthy (who played Dr Miles in the first film) has a cameo in this one, playing very much a similar character (but not the same), slamming on Donald Sutherland’s car and screaming ‘You’re next!’, much like his famous ending to the first film. Even if it’s not Dr Miles, it gives the impression that Miles has been wandering for years warning us of the oncoming apocalypse. It’s so iconic an original ending that one wonders how this film could possibly one-up it. And yet it does, in an ending reveal burned into the public consciousness with just sound. Sound that has drained from the world as the film runs on, with characters fleeing through the streets, their feet slamming against the road. Somehow that’s the most disturbing thing of all. The takeover of the pod people, with their uniformity, has reduced the need for talk, for going anywhere unplanned, for noise. Despite their horrifying screech, the emptiness of the sound of the world is what truly scares. The naturalness of the world has faded. Now it is simply a factory of the pods, a greenhouse for empty husks.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has everything you could want. A great cast, direction that mostly stands up (there are unfortunately some parts when Kaufman decides to go for some egregious camera movements which betray the camp B-movie roots and lodge in the cinematic throat), an all-consuming tone, and some of the most iconic scenes of all science-fiction and horror. It has to be seen to be believed, and, even with the odd misstep, remains an all-time classic.

Score: 20/24

It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
Director: Tyler MacIntyre
Screenwriter: Michael Kennedy
Starring: Jane Widdop, Joel McHale, Justin Long, Jess McLeod, Katherine Isabelle, Cassandra Naud

One has to wonder if a review for a film titled It’s A Wonderful Knife needs any introduction, but one must be written regardless. If you think it might have some twist to what the title would suggest, please allay those fears: it’s exactly what you think it is. Knife is a slasher take on It’s A Wonderful Life, the 1946 Frank Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart, a man who wishes his life never existed and through visiting an alternate timeline at Christmas, comes to appreciate what he had. Here we have a play on the same thing, with Jimmy Stewart being replaced by Jane Widdop’s Winnie, who stopped the Angel Falls masked killer one year before, and when ending up in a timeline where she never existed, finds the killer still on the loose, now with over 25 kills under his belt. If Winnie doesn’t stop the killer before the end of the night, she’ll never get back to her home world.

When you realise that Michael Kennedy also wrote the screenplay to Christopher Landon’s 2020 slasher film Freaky, a slasher sendup of classic Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis film Freaky Friday, you know what you’re in for. It’s a film that isn’t afraid to lean into the film it’s stealing its storyline from. It’s going to be pretty campy, silly in parts following teen outsiders coming together in the strangest of circumstances, with a decent production budget, and everyone knows what they’re doing. There’s never an attempt to be anything it isn’t and there are a few people who overdo the acting for the sheer joy and fun of it. Case in point, horror veteran Justin Long as the smarmy corporate businessman Henry Waters, doing his best capitalist megalomaniac impression. It’s overdone to a Matthew Lillard Thirteen Ghosts level, but so good for it. As the kids would say, he understood the assignment.

The cinematography from Nicholas Piatnik is great, full of christmas lights managing to set off the darkness well. It’s a film of contrasts, of light and dark, of neon greed shining out in a world that has forgotten hope and faith. In a film like this which is, despite the bloody slayings, warm and cosy, the atmosphere is perfectly captured. Of course, congratulations also go to the art direction by Louisa Birkin, and set dressing by Matt Carson and Jan Sikora for helping Piatnik get the lighting right with the practicals. It’s a wonderfully cohesive film in terms of its visual aesthetic, and when the blood hits the snow and the white costume of the killer, the blood is dark and visceral, which only works in contrast to the vibrant lighting. It’s a gorgeous looking film.

It’s a Wonderful Knife also isn’t afraid to go the whole way with its anti-capitalist statement. Its whole sentiment is that greed and complicit non-action in the thuggish, brutal ways to establish corporate dominance is not only manifest in physical actions, but is a kind of mental virus, capable of taking over the minds of those watching. It preys on grief. It preys on when we are at our lowest. Even those vehemently opposed to megalomaniacal corporations taking advantage of the lower classes still order from Amazon on occasion. In this way, Knife manages to take criticism of capitalist greed further than other films which might otherwise just have a statement of ‘capitalism bad’ as their fundamental premise.

But despite all this praise, there are parts that aren’t fantastic on a technical front. A few moments are very on-the-nose with their dialogue, expositionally overdoing the points we already know. The first kill is badly done, seeming like it’s cut to hide any effects work that they apparently haven’t done. Either that or it’s just badly cut. And even though Justin Long is perfectly embodying the smarmy businessman, one could say it’s overdone even past the point of campiness; overdoing an overdone performance. It’s how you take it.

So it isn’t perfect. Perhaps the messages are heavy handed, as subtle as a candy cane to the throat. But who cares? It’s not the greatest film in the world, but the main cast is great, the visuals are very Hallmark, and it’s got a cute ending. So on a cold night, if you’re fed up with the regular Christmas films, this 90 minute blast might just hit the spot for some holiday horror hooliganism.

Score: 16/24

Thanksgiving (2023)
Director: Eli Roth
Screenwriters: Jeff Rendel
Starring: Patrick Dempsey, Nell Verlaque, Addison Rae, Rick Hoffman, Milo Manheim, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Gina Gershon

There were quite a few issues with the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez exploitation double feature ‘Grindhouse’ from 2007, with Rodriguez’s film Planet Terror admittedly being the superior film to Tarantino’s Death Proof, which whilst not awful, is certainly his worst film so far. What was possibly the best part of both films were the opening few minutes, which contained mock trailers for exploitation horror films before the main feature. Out of these came Rodriguez’s Machete in 2010, which somehow has become Danny Trejo’s modern day calling card, and Hobo with a Shotgun starring Rutger Hauer in 2011. Now, twelve years after the last feature-length version, and sixteen years after the fake trailer short film first aired in the double bill, Eli Roth brings us Thanksgiving, a pure exploitation slasher flick of the greatest kind.

Following a massacre at a Black Friday sale at RightMart, the next year’s thanksgiving is rightly looked to with apprehension. Demonstrations to close down the store, comments towards the store owner’s daughter, Jessica (played by Nell Verlaque), and the return to town of her old boyfriend, Bobby (played by Thomas Brooks) are just small parts of it. The more pressing issue is that someone has stolen an axe from a mock-up of John Carver’s ancestral home, and there are a load of masks of his face being handed around for the upcoming parade. Someone is back for revenge, and this time there will be no leftovers. So says the tagline.

The poster designs for Thanksgiving have shown clearly where the film’s interests lie, as four are variations of old slasher posters, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to Halloween (1978). The original Grindhouse short was very much a love letter to these films of the seventies and eighties. However, it would be remiss to say that Thanksgiving is simply an 80s tribute, because whilst there are moments (even referencing slightly lesser known entries like Prom Night and even Happy Birthday To Me), there’s as much praise given to the neo-slashers of the modern era. The slick stylings of Kevin Williamson-penned slashers like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer are front and centre, and Roth’s swift direction and Rendel’s dialogue make it clear that this is a modern film which isn’t interested in replicating the crackly quality of the 80s, as the film Abrakadabra (2018) did to stylistically replicate the 70s giallo. There’s as much tribute paid to old schlock like My Bloody Valentine and New Year’s Evil (80s slashers, after Halloween, took any national holiday they could to make a film around) as there is to Happy Death Day. Thanksgiving is traditional in sentiment and tropes, but modern in its slick execution.

It is precisely this balance that makes Thanksgiving so fun to watch. Yes, it’s violent to the extreme, with gnarly gore and twisted deaths, and if that’s not your cup of tea then the film won’t be for you, but this amount of red meat is to be expected of Roth, who has never shied away from ripping off body parts for the past twenty years. Yes, the formula is baked into the film’s very existence, and Roth never tries for a single second to step away from it. It is cliched to the hilt, shining its axe blade to a finely honed edge of horror formula. Yes, it never for a second tries to do a single thing which might be considered new or innovative or interesting from a standpoint of pushing things forward.

Yet that is the exact point of the film. This is a love letter to all of the teen slasher’s history, from Blood and Black Lace’s giallo beginnings to the most recent Scream films. The characters are stock but well acted, music by Brandon Roberts in the now-traditional orchestral stylings that Marco Beltrami used to great effect in Scream doing its job, and everything slots together nicely in the final product.

There’s a strong anti-capitalist message which comes and goes in varying strength depending on when the plot calls for it, and the clunkiness of its execution in this department isn’t going to score it any points, but there is, at least, something in there. It doesn’t simply use teen technology as a joke, although it also doesn’t put its full weight behind using it to give the message of the viral nature of crime and the desensitisation to violence as it seems to think it is doing. Perhaps this would be explored in a sequel, as the film certainly leaves enough scope and enough lingering doubts as to warrant it. There are no loose ends, but there’s a feeling that things aren’t all said and done.

For the most part, however, Thanksgiving does exactly what it says it’s going to. It gives a good, bloody slasher flick with confident writing and directing, and whilst it never achieves anything distinctly new, it is as monolithic a tribute to the slasher film as there ever has been, without going postmodern and meta to name-and-shame every film it stole a shot from. It feels very much like a film which heralds the end of an era for the slasher film, as the reboots of Halloween and Scream have seemed to begin to usher in a new wave of the formula. The film holds its axe high to the world and confidently, without shame, declares, ‘I am a slasher film, and I love it.’

Score: 18/24

Born November 27th, 1951, and raised in San Carlos, California, Kathryn Bigelow originally began life as a painter, earning a degree in Fine Arts in 1972. Eventually however, after some time working with renowned composer Philip Glass (who, amongst other classical works, wrote the score for Candyman (1990)), she turned to filmmaking, earning her Masters from Columbia. There is an irony in one of her professors being Andrew Sarris (one of the leading exponents of auteur theory), as this particular branch of film criticism has been attacked over the years for being very male-centric, and Bigelow is certainly a director to have done her part at taking down that idea.

Following her short film in 1978, The Set-Up, Bigelow would go on to direct her first feature a few years later. Ever since then, she hasn’t gone for more than six years without releasing a film. Her ten directorial features have attracted some of the biggest names in the business, including Jeremy Renner, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Lee Curtis, Keanu Reeves, John Boyega, Harrison Ford, Anthony Mackie (twice), and Jessica Chastain. In honour of her groundbreaking work, The Film Magazine ranks the trailblazer’s feature films from worst to best.

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10. The Loveless (1981)

The Loveless was Kathryn Bigelow’s debut (co-directed and co-written with Monty Montgomery), and a first leading role for everyone’s favourite Green Goblin, Willem Dafoe. A film of leather bikers, punk music, and small-town sensibilities, it sees Dafoe’s Vance riding into town with his small gang of riders, staying in this town in the middle of nowhere as one of them needs their bike fixed. He ends up involved with a diner owner’s daughter, and it’s always going to end only one way.

The Loveless shows many hallmarks of a directorial debut; a simple storyline, actors that aren’t always the best, a smaller budget, an actor who also writes the soundtrack for the film. Still, despite these limitations, Bigelow’s command of the camera is apparent. Everything is controlled, every movement determined and thought through. Whereas many low budget films are simple point-and-shoot affairs, this one is choreographed and planned.

It’s a slower paced film, with not much going on for much of the runtime, but it still nicely looks at small-town youth culture when the world was still riding the crest of leather and punk rebellion. A solemn, melancholy ending caps off the film nicely with a haunting denouement. Just which parts were purely Bigelow, purely Montgomery, or a combination between the two is impossible to tell, but the end result still shows off a director finding her feet with promise of a slumbering giant to come.

Recommended for you: Jane Campion Movies Ranked

9. The Weight of Water (2000)

Based on the novel of the same name by Anita Shreve, this half modern drama, half historical crime mystery, on the surface has a lot going for it. You’ve got serious talent behind it in names such as Sean Penn and Ciaran Hinds. You’ve got beautiful visuals from the combined powers of Bigelow’s direction and the cinematography of Adrian Biddle. It’s based off an existing property. There are murder mystery elements. Surely this should be a hit.

The film, unfortunately, has an incredible issue in two timelines that never satisfactorily meet up. The historical side of proceedings is undoubtedly the more interesting of the two stories, the modern day events of a strained marriage whilst trying to uncover what truly happened back then more of a framing device which goes and sticks its nose into where it doesn’t belong. There are attempts to tie the two together but it never really holds water (pun intended), and one is left with the overall impression that there are deep structural issues which hold the film back from the page, before we shoot a single second of footage.

It looks gorgeous, it’s decently acted (even if the characters themselves are underwhelming) and it feels like there should be something there. The trouble is that there isn’t anything really interesting to work with or be remembered for.

Embers (2023)
Director: Christian Cooke
Screenwriters: Dave Florez, Christian Cooke
Starring: Ruth Bradley, Christian Cooke, Clare Perkins, Samuel Anderson, David Wilmot

In order to be tense, a film does not need to be a thriller. It doesn’t need a slasher in a corner waiting to jump out at the main character in order to have the viewer filled with anticipation, shivering from head to toe. It could be a film like Embers, an independent social drama which manages right from the outset to give the feeling of a bomb about to go off at any second. Amy (Ruth Bradley) is an intimacy therapist, using physical contact (often sexual) as a form of therapy. Her boss (Helen, played by Clare Perkins) ropes her in to helping break 33 year-old Dan (Christian Cooke) out of his silent shell in a mental health ward, where he has been silent for 18 years after a crime all those years earlier.

With a brilliant central trio of performances from Bradley, Cooke, and Samuel Anderson as Amy’s boyfriend Joe, the film roots itself in the palpable tension between the characters. A premise which many would find uncomfortable at the best of times, it uses Amy’s twin relationships between her boyfriend and her patient to keep the entire film fizzling under the surface. Dan’s framing as a constant, unstable threat makes it an almost Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling relationship, with both films having women tasked with breaking through the exterior of dangerous criminals. Director Christian Cooke chooses not to reveal Dan’s face for quite a while, keeping the underlying potential danger brewing for as long as possible. This is the impression we hold throughout the film, and the further through we go, the more we clamp the arms of the seat. When combined with Isobel Waller-Bridge’s tremolo score burbling like a stream underneath a house, one can’t help but to feel under threat.

Yet it’s not all knuckle-biting tension. It is in many ways a look at views of mental health issues from those who haven’t experienced it themselves. Pressure from government organisations who don’t really know what they’re doing but need to make themselves look good puts those who have expertise under pressure to perform, and when most psychiatry and therapy is, at best, working from educated guesses where everyone responds in different ways to different stimuli, it piles on the workload for Amy beautifully. Several scenes showing her trying different methods to engage with Dan is a welcome display of both enthusiasm and desperation. Mental health issues, and severe ones at that, don’t do well with deadlines, and Embers does a good job at highlighting the stupidity of this viewpoint which still pervades in society today.

The third act isn’t as strong as the first two, where some rash decisions are narratively predictable to a film-literate audience, but not completely out of keeping with the foolishness of human nature. We knew some of the final scenes were always coming, but the film does a decent enough job of putting moments in throughout the film to try and cover its back. It’s not perfect, but the point is at least argued. Additionally, Dan’s final revelations are good changes from the usual way his character might have been written, his backstory highlighting once again the prejudices that can be placed upon the severely traumatised. It’s not perfect, and a drop off from the opening two thirds, but it doesn’t tank the picture.

In a way, the film is as much focused on curing us as an audience as it about Dan, trying to break down the barriers to our understanding of therapy and mental illness as much as breaking into Dan’s isolated world. On a fairly small budget – only a few main locations, a few characters, and everything kept nice and intimate – it is wonderful how much it achieves with so little. Plenty have done far worse with far more. It’s a short, sharp shock that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.

Score: 19/24

These debates are of relevance to this article because, in reality, the identities of the two clashing cultures (that of the Osage, and the all-consuming wave of capitalist USA) are largely irrelevant to the thematic core of the story. They are relevant in that they are only tangential to the beating heart of the point of the film. This specific filmic presentation of this storyline uses the Osage and white USA as two sides of the coin, but you could transplant this to colonial Africa with Britain exploiting the native peoples of those nations and it could be the same frame with differing cosmetics. Put a French colonial power in Vietnam or Morocco, and the same is there. Go to Tasmania and look at the occupying forces there, as Jennifer Kent did with her revenge western The Nightingale. The principals remain constant, an examination of the deliberate exercise of colonial, oppressional power over the native inhabitants of a land. This is what the surface level of Killers of the Flower Moon would have us take away.

Whilst KOTFM is based on a book (“Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”, by David Grann), which is in turn based on real events, it is the specific presentation of events in Martin Scorsese’s film which are of discussion here. This film’s narrative, detailing the marriages and assassinations of Osage people at the hands of white locals in order for the white people to strategically inherit their oil-rich land, is not the centre of the film. It is not what it is all about. As is often the case, the plot and the story are different levels of communication.

Instead, the film is actually about the relationship between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and William King Hale (Robert De Niro), and the exploitation of a malleable, weak individual by a stronger, more ambitious, and more ruthless mind. The plot goes along, but what drives it is the obedience and defiance of Burkhart to his powerful uncle. De Niro is the snake whispering in DiCaprio’s Eve of an ear with the promise of power from the metaphorical tree of knowledge. It is about evil corrupting those who are on the fence, and dragging them down to the ground. Once we realise this, we see that much of KOTFM plays out as a reinterpretation of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, written over 400 years ago. Not everything lines up perfectly (that’s how reinterpretations work; Akira Kurosawa had the three witches changed for a single medium in Throne of Blood, for example), but there are enough similarities to line up fairly nicely.

Macbeth, warlord for King Duncan of Scotland, begins the play having just taken out Macdonald, an usurper to the throne. His penchant for violence is well noted, and in killing Macdonald, ‘unseam’d him from the nave to th’chops’. In KOTFM, Earnest Burkhart may not be quite that violent, but he does return at the film’s opening from WWI, so they both have that ability in them, having both returned from national combat. In Macbeth, the titular character is told of a prophecy that he will one day be king, which he expresses with his wife. Lady Macbeth then takes charge, constantly whispering to him that the prophecy will come true, that he will be king. She already has a plan. Everything will be OK. She tells her husband ‘look like the innocent flower,/ But be the serpent udner’t.’ The mention of flowers here is obviously mere coincidence in connection with the film’s title, but it is exactly this notion of being the evil hiding in plain sight under a notion of goodness which both Ernest and King act out in KOTFM. King is constantly giving out grants and finances to the community, and is fluent in the Dhegihan Siouan language of the Osage. Lady Macbeth, in Duncan’s words, is ‘our honour’d hostess!’. The similarities are plain to see in the setup. Lady Macbeth manipulates her husband into carrying out murders so that he will become King and inherit the country, and make her queen by default, which is what she is really after. In KOTFM, Ernest is manipulated by King to carry out murders so that Ernest will inherit the wealthy land, and King will get some of the wealth as a result. Once more, the whisperer in the ear is not so much concerned with the wellbeing of their familiar, but what their understudy’s success will mean for them.

A common misconception with Macbeth’s character is that he is a tyrant and ambitious warlord right from the start. He may well have ambition, but most of his actions are as a result of the persuasion of his wife, and then being in too deep to pull out. Macbeth asks before murdering the king what happens ‘If we should fail?’, and Lady Macbeth has to reassure him to ‘nail your courage to the sticking place,/ And we’ll not fail.’ He constantly questions whether what he is doing is right, hallucinating the murderous dagger before going to kill Duncan, his mind already fracturing under the pressure. After one murder, everything runs away from him, and he has no choice but to keep going. He must kill his friend, Banquo, not only because of the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will sire a line of kings, but because of Banquo’s tendency to sit on the fence about absolutes. Banquo is unsure about the intentions of the witches, ‘oftentimes, to win us to our harm,/ The instruments of darkness tell us truths,/ Win us with honest trifles…’ and even muses to himself as part of a soliloquy to open Act 3 Scene 1, about Macbeth becoming king, that ‘Thou play’dst most foully for’t…’ It’s clear that Banquo would never be on Macbeth’s side, for as much as he is Macbeth’s friend and similar in many ways (he is also a great warrior on the battlefield, and fought alongside Macbeth against Macdowell), he is always on the side of justice and so must be silenced. Macbeth therefore pays two assassins to take out Banquo to keep himself in power. After this, when Macduff flees, Macbeth brands him a traitor and must kill his family as a warning against uprising. He rules with the sheer intention of holding onto the power he was (to an extent) pressured into. With his wife’s persuasion, he has dug a hole, and he refuses to stop digging, instead continuing down in the hopes of an escape.

Ernest likewise finds himself executing more and more murders in order to maintain his position and keep himself close to King. He pays to have Harry Roan killed as part of King’s plan, but it goes wrong, showing that Ernest isn’t as completely in control of things as he would like to think. He later hires for the murder of more family members, which begins to put his wife Molly into a kind of surrogate role for three characters; that of Duncan (the one who holds the power), Banquo (someone he must kill, and appears, ghostlike, to haunt and prevent Ernest from keeping himself completely on the dark side), and eventually Macduff (when she goes to Washington to bring reinforcements to out the tyrant). Note that like Macbeth, Ernest is often reticent to kill himself, and on multiple occasions gets others to carry out his dirty work for him.

It is, tangentially, interesting that a deliberate highlighting of King’s membership to freemasonry is made in the outcome of the botched assassination of Roan, as this implies a belief in a supreme being. There are a lot of supernatural moments in Macbeth, from witches to prophecies to apparitions to ghosts, to the appearance of Hecate (for almost no reason except to tell the witches to go somewhere and have a musical number; got to maintain audience interest somehow). But Lady Macbeth also clearly believes in spirits, through her belief that the prophecy must come true, and explicitly in her speech calling to them; ‘Come, you spirits/ That tend on mortal thoughts…’ Once again, more parallels appear.

In the second half of Killers of the Flower Moon, the new Bureau of Investigation is brought into the scene by Molly, Ernest’s wife, fulfilling her role as a partial avatar for Macduff. Led by Jesse Plemons’ Tom White (who plays the military side of Macduff), a kind of army from a land far away (Washington standing in for England, in a twist of irony for American history), arrives in the town. The BOI is not exactly the moving copse of Burnham’s wood, but what is interesting is not necessarily the arrival of the cavalry, but what this does for Ernest, who the plot centres around.

In the final reels he undergoes a constant turmoil of emotions. This mix has been seen throughout in relation to his seemingly genuine affection for his wife, Molly, and at one point he swallows some of the poison he has been putting in her insulin. The similarity to Macbeth Act 3 Scene 2, where Macbeth is tormented by what he is doing, beautifully demonstrated by the famous line of ‘full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!’, is interesting, as scorpions are known for their poisonous sting.

Three points are of note in the finale of the film and play in relation to this turmoil. Firstly, Ernest is initially convinced to fight on and defend King by the townsfolk (the white ones, at least), in order to preserve their way of life; after all, King is a great benefactor for the town. In Macbeth, despite the army marching toward them and the apparent tyrannical rule of Macbeth (Macduff describes him as the ‘fiend of Scotland’), he still has servants and doctors attending him, messengers, and so on. However, overcome by sorrow for his child who has passed away, Ernest decides to testify against King. This idea that the battle is perhaps lost is mirrored in Macbeth’s final soliloquy, where he stares into the abyss of time and finds life meaningless, the fighting pointless, the murder empty. Life, he says, ‘is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.’ However, there is still a little of that bitterness in him. Macbeth still fights on, despite Macduff telling him that the prophecy has come true and Macbeth can die by his hand. He says, ‘I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff;/ And damn’d be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough!’ Similarly, Ernest can’t admit to Molly, when she has recovered and she knows he was poisoning her, even with prison just around the corner, that he was putting the poison in the insulin. Like Macbeth, there’s still that initial grain of darkness left inside him. It’s not a big, eye-popping finale as seen in Justin Kurzel’s direct 2015 adaptation, but it is a moving finale nonetheless.

This article hasn’t been to say that Scorsese deliberately set out to make a new version of a classic Shakespeare tale with this film. It’s not even to say that Scorsese must have been deliberately conscious of Macbeth when adapting the script. Indeed, most of the elements (though shifted and changed a little for dramatic purposes), were based on the real serial murders of innocent people – the real Ernest Burkhart and William King Hale were despicable individuals. For all of the extraordinary influence of The Bard, he didn’t create these people. Additionally, by saying that this presentation of the narrative echoes Macbeth should not in any way be taken as a suggestion that it reduces these figures to caricatures. Real lives were lost needlessly and cruelly by individuals hellbent on murder for their own material gain.

What it does hope to show, however, is how much William Shakespeare was able to put a finger on human nature, and how he was seemingly able to immortalise it in a narrative that has its unconscious echoes throughout time, to be rediscovered in the most unlikely of places. The real history and folklore that inspired Shakespeare to write Macbeth were not invented by him, but he found a way to use it to shine a light on the folly of humankind, and the corruption underneath polite society. That these narrative ideas find their way across the centuries, across the waters, to Scorsese’s film (which did have script changes in development, showing that differing perspectives and angles even to real events are possible), proves if nothing else that cinema as a medium has harsh truths inside its beams of light. That these stories are still relevant, redigested, disguised, and re-presented, is both a damning proof of humanity’s inability to learn from its past, and a testament to storytelling’s continued effort to plead with us to listen.

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Movies discussed include The Godfather, Seven Samurai, Blade Runner, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Pan’s Labyrinth, and many, many more.

The goal of our top 10 lists here at The Film Magazine was to help showcase our team’s personalities and spotlight movies that are important to film history and ourselves. Everyone’s lists are worth a read, as the different approaches, perspectives, and personal histories brought something unique that other writers had not seen before.

As Kieran noted in his list, these are not necessarily favorite films, though there is some crossover. Jacob’s list aims to cover Western film history from the silent era through 2016, the latest entry on his list. Kieran’s approach was to showcase “the peak of cinematic mastery,” and controversially includes a film trilogy as one entry (a fun topic of debate amongst the hosts). Sam’s list spans genre and history to find the films that impacted him the most throughout his life. Since there are 30 different films discussed, this episode is a bit longer than usual, and is the first of the new livestream episode format. Each approach yielded a list unique to the podcast, and we are proud to present the Second Cut episode on the Top 10 Best Films of All Time.

The Film Magazine’s Team page, with links to everyone’s Top 10 lists in their bio!

Jacob Davis: Jacob’s Top 10 Best Films of All Time

Kieran Judge: Kieran’s Top 10 Best Films of All Time

Sam Sewell-Peterson: Sam’s Top 10 Best Films of All Time

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Join us for our next episode, where we go back to our roots and discuss famous film flops! Because who doesn’t love a box office bomb with a fun story? Elizabeth Taylor’s old Hollywood epic Cleopatra, the Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli musical New York, New York, and the Michael Cimino western Heaven’s Gate will all make an appearance.

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For requests, suggestions, and feedback, email the hosts at secondcutpod@gmail.com.

The films range in quality, from absolutely abysmal to actually okay-ish and enjoyable. Here at The Film Magazine, we’ve saved you the effort of suffering through the unbearable ones. In this Movie List, we’re putting the Children of the Corn movies in order to establish which ones are worth checking out, which ones are probably a fun time for a “so bad it’s good” drunk horror marathons, and which ones you should ignore with every fibre of your being. You’re welcome.

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11. Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return (1999)

Some films are cinematically void of anything intelligible, fun, or even salvageable. Isaac’s Return might just be one of those films.

Featuring Brian De Palma stalwart Nancy Allen, Isaac’s Return presents her character’s (Hannah’s) return to Gatlin, where she believes she’s from, to find her mother. However, Isaac, not seen since the first film, is secretly kept alive, comatose, and when Hannah comes home, Isaac returns.

John Franklin tries his best. So does Nancy Allen. Possibly. Her character is so devoid of sense, even for a horror movie heroine, that it’s hard to tell. She probably just did it for the paycheck, as Betsy Palmer did in Friday the 13th and apparently Ellen Burstyn did in The Exorcist: Believer. The direction is atrocious, the editing awful, the plot nonsensical. Isaac, despite now being in his thirties, isn’t immediately sacrificed (breaking the rules and entire point of the story, for some reason), everyone’s in on everything, and you just spend your time bashing your head against a wall.

Thankfully there’s absolutely nothing redeeming here, and the word thankfully is used because, if there was a nugget of quality, you might seek it out, enduring the horrors for some grain of cinematic interest that will only disappoint.

10. Children of the Corn (2009)

When remaking a cult classic from 25 years earlier, the place to do it in the late 2000s was Syfy.

This version is, for the most part, fairly similar to the original. Burt and Vicky hit a child with their car, go to Gatlin to get help, and find there’s nothing there but corpses, children, and a presence behind the rows.

There is perhaps one interesting idea in this, which occurs near the end, with Burt’s post-Vietnam PTSD causing him to hallucinate in the cornfields, like the jungles he fought in. However, his Vietnam veteran past is overdone to the point of driving you insane (as opposed to the character). The new Isaac can’t act, the couple squabble for most of the movie so you almost want them to die, and there’s simply nothing likeable here. The ending is awful, and though there’s more mystery around whether it is all just a cult or actual supernatural activity, it still lands like a dead husk of corn.

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Becoming known for his portrayal of Count Dracula in the 1927 Broadway adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, Lugosi found himself in a slew of Universal’s monster movies (and Hammer’s The Mystery of the Marie Celeste, only their second film, and their oldest surviving), often alongside Boris Karloff, Glenn Strange, and Lon Chaney Jr. By the late 1930s, he had begun to develop health issues as a result of his wounds sustained during the war. Leading roles declined, his efforts to get out of a typecast role never truly happened. He struggled to perform without morphine and, when coupled with his alcoholism, the work began to dry up. His final appearance was in the much-panned Plan 9 From Outer Space, posthumously. He passed on August 16th 1956, having gone upstairs for a nap and never woken up. He’d married five times, had one son, and was buried in Los Angeles at the age of 73.

Lugosi was a giant of the screen, and remains so to this day. Once seen and heard, never forgotten, much like Vincent Price or Christopher Lee would be in later years. His is a presence that transcends the films he starred in, goes beyond his horror staples, and is still adored by millions to this day. If you’re wondering where to start with Bela Lugosi, here are some suggestions for you.

1. Dracula (1931)

The role that brought Bela Lugosi to the United States remains his most iconic, important, and influential.

When Carl Laemmle Jr of Universal took on Dracula to develop their first talking horror picture, it was Lugosi they asked to reprise his role after trying for several other actors. Stepping back into the Count’s shoes wouldn’t be too strange; the film was based on the stage play adaptation he had starred in, and Edward Van Sloan (who had played Van Helsing on stage alongside Lugosi) also returned to face off against his nemesis.

With his thick, stilted English, Lugosi’s Dracula is a vast departure from the novel, where it is stressed that the Count tried as much as possible to speak fluent English (a take that Christopher Lee would adopt when Hammer Films made their version in 1958). Yet despite this, it is Lugosi’s voice we think of when we think of the character, and of vampires in general. When we act out Dracula as kids, or grown-up kids, we all do Lugosi’s accent. His floating mannerisms, almost gliding across the floor with his cloak spread out like bat’s wings, bring the audience into his world. His piercing stare holds you captive. Anyone else pronouncing some of Dracula’s lines would have failed to make quite the impression on the public consciousness. “Listen to them. Children of the Night. What music they make.” Would it sound as menacing, as chilling, in any other voice than Lugosi’s? Others have tried, and they have all failed.

His opening remark in the film – “I am… Dracula” – came to define his entire career. When he passed away, his family decided to bury him in his Dracula cloak. The vampire made him famous, but it shadowed his entire life and legacy. His performance might not have had any blood or fangs, but the vampire fed on him throughout. This character, if nothing else, will ensure he lives forever, but it doomed its hero in other ways, being both a blessing and a curse. If that isn’t a potent-enough metaphor in the film industry, nothing is.

2. White Zombie (1932)

The very next year, Lugosi would unwillingly play his role in cementing another legendary monster on the screen: the zombie. Back in those days, zombies were still very much a tradition of voodooism, an import on the slave ships from African nations, now often depicted in places such as Haiti (see Wes Craven’s The Serpent and The Rainbow from 1988 for a more violent depiction), and it would take films like 1967’s Plague of the Zombies (which itself was inspired by the vampires of Richard Matheson’s novel “I Am Legend”) to give Romero the impetus to really define the modern zombie in 68’s Night of the Living Dead. In 1932, however, zombies were still a fairly new concept to western audiences. They were people brought back to life by magic to do the summoner’s will, and in this case, it’s Lugosi wanting them to turn the mills and work as slave labour.

Often regarded as the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie plays very simply as an allegory for black slavery. A white aristocrat forces black men to work the land for the profit of the landowner. And the film is, for better or for worse, not remembered for much other than Lugosi’s powerful, mesmerising stare. There hasn’t been a pair of eyes quite like them since, transfixing the viewer without trying very hard. When he puts in the malice, it shows.

Up in his castle, Lugosi’s Murder Legendre (yes, that’s really the character’s name) is a scheming, plotting spider of a man, twisting the love of the central characters for each other into murder. He is the whisperer in the ear, not too far removed from Ann Radcliffe’s evil monk Schedoni in her classic gothic novel “The Italian” (1795). He might not have liked being typecast into sinister, evil characters, but when he really put his heart and soul into it, he outshone everyone and everything around him. Some of the other acting isn’t great in White Zombie, but its air of malice is achieved by some decent directing and Lugosi’s impossible presence.

3. Ninotchka (1939)

Lugosi was cast as so many sinister villains in horror and science fiction (his role in the influential 1939 serial ‘The Phantom Creeps’ is one of his best) that it is unfortunate he didn’t get the chance to spread his wings further. Despite fourth billing in the end credits of Ninotchka, a romantic comedy following Greta Garbo’s Comrade Ninotchka as she falls in love with Melvyn Douglas in Paris against her loyalties to communist Russia, Lugosi only appears in one scene near the end, and only for three minutes or so. There are other characters that appear pretty much throughout the entirety of the film that are underneath Lugosi’s name. In Ninotchka, he was on the very verge of breaking out from his typecast role and into the mainstream.

With only a few moments of screentime, it is clear to see what Lugosi could have been if he had been given the chance to properly go for it. That is not to say that his roles in films such as Son of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man aren’t great, but in three minutes he brings class, presence, and power to a simple scene. His Commissar Razinin is relaxed yet stern, completely in control of the scene. His eyes still hold menace, his stance still holds power. Hollywood star Greta Garbo trembles before him. Even this small glimpse of him as something other than a horror bit-part shows what a talented actor he was.

This was his chance, a break that never came to be. Despite the film receiving four Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Story, and Best Screenplay), it did nothing for his career. Under a decade later he was reprising his role as Dracula in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a fun spoof by Universal of their own films. One wonders what might have happened to Lugosi’s career if more people had taken notice of this scene-stealer and stretched it out over an entire film, or even a string of them. Horror was grateful to have him, but for the rest of the world it’s a tragedy they never got him.

For obvious reasons, the TV show, despite being in the same timeline, is not included in this Ranked list from The Film Magazine, much like ‘Ash vs Evil Dead’ wouldn’t be included in an Evil Dead franchise ranking. We’re looking at the six feature films only. These are The Exorcist Movies Ranked.

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6. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

It is an incredible achievement to get this many big names together for what must be the most anticipated sequel in horror history at the time, only for it to go this catastrophically wrong. Linda Blair returns as Regan MacNeil, they brought back Max von Sydow for a few fleeting shots, Jason Miller’s Father Karras is replaced by the inimitable Richard Burton as Father Lamont, Louise Fletcher comes in two years after winning the Oscar for Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, James Earl Jones is in it the same year as voicing Darth Vader for the first time… it really beggars belief. And this, the sequel to the most profitable, infamous, and most critically acclaimed horror movie of all time, should surely ensure nothing could go wrong?

But this film, directed by Sir John Boorman (Deliverance), is an absolute mess.

With Regan in hypnotherapy to try and discover what happened that fateful night in the first film, and Burton in to try and find out the truth, there’s some strange Pazuzu telepathy, lots of locusts, trips to ‘Africa’, and James Earl Jones changing into a leopard – it’s just two hours of clutching your forehead and asking ‘why?’ There’s nothing interesting, nothing thrilling, nothing even remotely scary. Much of the acting is awful, with the principal cast trying seemingly to stop themselves from bursting out laughing.

Very simply, it’s amateurish and derivative even by 1977 standards. There wouldn’t be a sequel for thirteen years thanks to this film, and even then, when Exorcist III did come out, writer William Peter Blatty didn’t want it to be named ‘Exorcist’ for fear people would have flashbacks to this one. Rightly reviled, The Heretic is damned for all time.

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5. The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

Deciding if this should be fifth or fourth in this list is a toss-up, and could change depending on the weather, as this and the following instalment in the franchise are both dull. This one takes fifth spot for having the least in connection with the rest of the franchise, seemingly just a normal exorcism film they retroactively messed around with and shoved into the series to get some more bucks out of.

The first of Blumhouse’s run with the series, this time there are two children being possessed. Only one of them is of any interest or has much characterisation, however, because only one is the main character’s kid. The pacing is all wrong, the shocks aren’t shocking, the best ‘scares’ are fake jumps. If that’s the best you’re pumping out, you’re doing something wrong. The atmosphere is non-existent, the reverence for tone and feel gone out with the bathwater. Nothing has any kind of bite.

It feels like a cheap Conjuring Universe film (one of the bad ones, which is a decent amount of them) that they just shoved the Exorcist name on. It is distressing how badly a lot of intelligent filmmakers can misunderstand the franchise they’ve bought, and the result is something one might need an exorcist to help them forget.