Halloween Horror Week: #Horror (2015)

Girls dance in creepy masks in #Horror

To be quite honest about it, Tara Subkoff’s #Horror is a mess. I love that it’s a movie dominated by women, from the director, most of the creative team and the vast majority of the cast, but it’s mostly atmosphere hung around the thinnest of plots (which, upon reflection, doesn’t make too much sense) and characters who are barely there. But there’s something compelling about Subkoff’s vision and take on this material that transforms it into something beautiful and frantic.

Halloween Horror Week: The Falling (2014)

Florence Pugh and Maisie Williams in The Falling

For the first half-hour of The Falling, we’re in what feels like a quiet English drama about a girls’ school in the late 1960s. But after the beautiful popular Abbie (Florence Pugh) dies and her best friend Lydia (Maisie Williams) and other girls begin fainting without cause, it becomes something much stranger and darker. Writer/director Carol Morley’s film is a moody exploration of every-day horrors through the eyes of girls and women.