The Rule of Jenny Pen: A Geri-Horror Masterclass

There is a growing trend within the horror genre in which aging is being employed as a mechanism of terror. Geriatric horror—or, abridged, geri-horror—is taking the inevitably of aging (frightening in its own right) and factors closely associated with growing older (dementia and cognitive decline, physical deterioration, isolation and loneliness, communities for the elderly such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities) and examining them through the context of the horror genre.

Geri-horror is the natural successor to the hagsploitation movement in film of the 1960s and 1970s in which former Hollywood starlets would play deranged old women. The formula was simple: glam it down and camp it up. This subgenre—also known as “hag horror” or “grand dame Guignol"—captured Hollywood's seeming disdain for older women at the time yet, in an ironic, subversive twist, gave some of these actresses the best roles of their later careers. Think Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or Davis (again), Olivia De Haviland, and Agnes Moorehead in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) or Crawford (again) in Straight-Jacket (1964) or Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) or Shelley Winters in both Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and What's the Matter with Helen? (1971).

In geri-horror, expectations that elderly people are kind and harmless are upended. Take Minnie and Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for example, who turn out not to be frail elderly neighbors but satanic cultists and master manipulators in the plot to bring the Antichrist into being. Keeping with the satanism theme, there’s the entire community of senior citizens in the film The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) who are turning the children of a small California desert town into Satan worshipers or the eccentric Ulmans, played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, in Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009) who lure a young babysitter into a sinister trap. In 1988, The Legend of Hell House director John Hough employs silver screen legends Yvonne DeCarlo and Rod Steiger to play the unhinged parents of a weird, murderous family in the slasher American Gothic. Earlier, Lassie actor Arthur Space and television actress Mary Jackson played deranged proprietors of a sham resort where vacationing college girls were lured, fattened up, and then (literally) served up on platters in the lurid Texas Chainsaw Massacre cannibalism precursor, Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972).

At other times in geri-horror, old age itself is the source of the horror. In the film adaptation of Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story (1981), a group of elderly men calling themselves the Chowder Society are plagued by guilt-ridden nightmares stemming from an impulsive act in their collective past. In the film Late Phases (2014), werewolves preying upon the residents of a retirement community become a metaphor for struggling to relocate a physically challenged parent against their will into a retirement community. This one is stacked with a fantastic over-60 cast that includes Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island), Rutanya Alda (Mommie Dearest, Girls Nite Out, Amityville II: The Possession, The Dark Half), Caitlin O’Heaney (Savage Weekend, He Knows You’re Alone), Karen Lynn Gorney (Saturday Night Fever), and Tom Noonan (Wolfen, The Monster Squad). In M. Night Shyamalan’s pandemic-era Old (2021), the acclaimed director adapts the French-language graphic novel Sandcastle written by Pierre Oscar Lévy from France and drawn by Frederik Peeters from Switzerland, taking the body horror route to show aging as grotesque and inescapable—much in the way 2024’s The Substance does. Shyamalan’s other geri-horror contribution—2015’s The Visit—offered up a pair of sinister grandparents whose increasingly bizarre and disquieting behavior is cleverly couched within the Alzheimer’s symptom of “sundown syndrome.” Dementia takes centerstage in Relic (2020), an Australian gem of a cinematic metaphor about how the disease not only wreaks havoc on the victim but also on those closest—often caregivers.

In yet other works, aging is a badge of honor—and a weapon in confronting horror. In She Will (2021), Alice Krige plays an aging actress who goes to a healing retreat after a double mastectomy, where she discovers that the process of such surgery opens up questions about her very existence, leading her to start to question and confront past traumas. Likewise, Jamie Lee Curtis stepped back into her iconic role as terrorized babysitter Laurie Strode for David Gordon Green’s trilogy Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2023)—only this time her PTSD has fueled her preparedness, making her an AARP card-carrying survivalist and Final Grandma. This theme of “Don’t Fuck with Old People” is carried out again in Don’t Breathe (2016) and VFW (2019).

Requisite history lesson aside, The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)—directed by James Ashcroft and written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent, based on the short story of the same name by Owen Marshall—is the latest, and perhaps most fully realized contribution to the geri-horror subgenre to date. This haunting, malicious New Zealand-lensed psychological tale of elder-on-elder abuse features Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush as Stefan Mortensen, a judge who suffers a stroke, mid-sentencing, from the bench. He finds himself admitted to a nursing home (or “care home” as is the geographic idiom) for rehabilitation. His character, seemingly friendless, is the epitome of an entitled elite—dismissive toward women, caustic, and outright rude at times. The post-stroke wheelchair he finds himself in does little to humble him. Enter multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner and two-time Academy Award nominee John Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a fellow resident who’s as kooky as he is dangerous. Before becoming a resident, Crealy was the longtime handyman at Royale Pine Mews and that familiarity with the facility and its grounds gives him a different type of entitlement. He’s a geriatric bully—commandeering other residents’ food when the well-meaning if inattentive staff isn’t looking, aggressively shoving other residents out of the way during a dance activity, and—worst of all—paying nocturnal visits to his fellow residents’ room in the middle of the night to terrorize them with an eyeless hand puppet he calls Jenny Pen. The scenes in which Lithgow demands a pledge of allegiance to the titular doll that includes “licking its asshole” (thankfully, just the underside of Lithgow’s wrist) are chilling to the bone. Ashcroft wisely uses Lithgow’s towering 6’4” frame to powerfully frame the power dynamic between him and his frail elderly counterparts.

Crealy’s cruelty to the nursing home’s other residents varies from the humiliating (dumping a urinal full of pee onto Mortensen’s crotch while in bed) to the downright sadistic (tugging violently on the newly-inserted catheter of Mortensen’s roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare) or leading a demented woman who spends the majority of her screen time looking for the family about to pick her up and take her home any minute out of the gated grounds where tragedy befalls her). Although Mortensen reports the abuse, the nursing home’s administration does little to investigate, dismissing his concerns as part of his adjustment disorder. As Mortensen’s rehab fails to progress, he gradually loses his voice to the endemic ageism that sees the institutionalized elderly as ignorable. Still, Mortensen is determined to bring Crealy’s reign of terror to an end—using whatever means necessary. The film gradually builds in a tense game of cat-and-mouse before the two geriatric foes finally square off.

Ashcroft and company do a superb job of portraying life in a nursing home—from the near-drowning Mortensen experiences when left unattended in a bathtub when the aide leaves to retrieve towels to the way the center’s staff is portrayed as generally caring more about completing tasks than listening to what their elderly charges try to tell them. There is an intrinsic sadness hanging over Royale Pine Mews even as festive activities take place in the background and the residents’ care needs seem tended to adequately enough. It’s here—in the loneliness and social isolation at the end of one’s life, when autonomy is slowly lost and hope abandoned—that the geri-horror aspects of The Rule of Jenny Pen really kick in. There can be no happy ending because even if the villain is defeated, the audience knows that there is no escape for Mortensen from the decay aging brings.

Circling back to our de facto history lesson at the beginning of this review, The Rule of Jenny Pen is also notable for subverting the rules of the hagsploitation subgenre—here enlisting two Hollywood males of a certain age (Rush, 73 and Lithgow, 79) and placing them in the psycho-biddy cinematic scenario usually reserved for women. Ashcroft ably proves that the horrors of growing old in an ageist society aren't reserved just for women. It’s just another bit of the understated brilliance of this film that will likely go on to have a long shelf life.

Buckets of Blood and Gerontological Madmen in 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'

Horror fandom is a curious thing indeed. This week’s bemusement has been watching the horror faithful on social media extolling the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—the story of young people from out-of-town trespassing on other people's property and getting butchered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac named Leatherface—as a virtuous classic while in the same breath decrying the new TCM—a  story about young people from out-of-town trespassing on other people's property and getting butchered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac named Leatherface—as the stupidest thing they've ever seen. It's literally the same plot, just updated. It’s hard not to laugh out loud at the computer screen some days. I’m reminded of the tagline from Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie…’”

So, let’s unclutch those pearls and talk about the latest installment in the franchise that began with Tobe Hooper’s gritty 1974 slasher. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the ’22 film drops the “the” from its title) is directed by David Blue Garcia, with a screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin, from an original story co-written by Fede Álvarez (also a producer on the film) and Rodo Sayagues. Originally, the production began with brothers Ryan and Andy Tohill (who directed 2018’s The Dig) at the helm, but the directors were replaced with Garcia after studio displeasure with the footage they shot. That’s never a good sign.

Ripping a page from the playbook David Gordon Green used for his 2018 relaunch of the Halloween franchise, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre serves as a direct sequel to the original film—however it doesn’t necessarily retcon the sequels the way Green’s film trilogy does, with Álvarez stating in interviews that it's up to audiences “to decide when and how the events of the other movies happen.” Fair enough—and who cares, anyway, right? To tackle direct sequel problem #1—the 2014 death of Marilyn Burns, who played TTCM Final Girl Sally Hardesty—the filmmakers cast Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, an especially accomplished stage actor with about a dozen movie and TV credits each to her name. It’s excellent casting and Fouéré does the best with what she’s given; unfortunately, she’s not given anything other than a watered-down version of 2018’s Laurie Strode. To tackle direct sequel problem #2—the 2015 death of Gunnar Hansen, TTCM’s original Leatherface—Mark Burnham was cast in the role of the iconic horror villain. Burnham does a most respectable job given the big shoes he has to fill, but of course his character’s agility and stamina at (at least) age 70 requires a huge suspension of disbelief. Suffice to say that 2022 Leatherface is one fast, strong-ass motherfucker.

The new film opens as San Francisco speculators Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore)—with Melody's sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) and Dante's girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) along for the ride—travel to the remote, long-abandoned Texas town of Harlow. Melody and Dante plan to auction off the town’s properties to create a trendy, heavily gentrified area for hipsters of every persuasion. Why, you ask, would said trendy hipsters with ample cash to burn pick an out-of-the-way, hot-as-Satan’s-ass locale like bumfuck Texas as an investment opportunity? No one really knows—and Lila even questions it aloud at one point in the film.

Upon the foursome’s arrival, they discover that one of the buildings—the town’s orphanage—is still occupied by the elderly Mrs. Mc (a welcome cameo by the wonderful Alice Krige) and a silent, towering older man. While enjoying some sweet tea provided by the congenial Mrs. Mc, a kerfuffle over who holds the rightful deed to the orphanage breaks out—and ends with Mrs. Mc suffering a heart attack. Fearful of the bad publicity, Ruth offers to accompany the sheriff and his deputy as they transport Mrs. Mc—and the not-so-mysterious hulking man—to the hospital. En route to the hospital, things go awry—so much so that hulking mute guy goes ballistic, kills almost everyone in the emergency rig, and peels the face off one of them. Leatherface is back—and he’s pissed. Cinematographer Ricardo Diaz shines in this gorgeously shot scene that has Leatherface standing in a field of dead sunflowers, holding up the skin of his new face. Ruth, who’s injured but alive, witnesses the rebirth of Leatherface and manages to get a radio transmission off before she’s (literally) gutted by him.

As Leatherface makes his way back to Harlow, a charter bus full of potential investors arrives and the property auction ensues. As word of Mrs. Mc’s death makes it back to Melody via Ruth’s last text before Leatherface’s ambulance ambush, local contractor Richter (Moe Dunford) hears her and Lila talking about it and takes Melody and Dante to task for causing Mrs. Mc’s heart attack and subsequent death. He confiscates the keys to the bus and their sports car, demanding proof that they had the right to evict Mrs. Mc before he’ll give them back. Discovering they don't have the deed showing they own the orphanage after all (oops!), Melody and Dante return to the creaky home for wayward boys to find it. Elsewhere, Sally Hardesty—her long grey hair and tank top giving us immediate Laurie Strode vibes—takes a call from the local gas station clerk who received Ruth’s last radio transmission, and he informs her that Leatherface is back. She arms up and heads out, adding an awesome cowboy hat to her survivor ensemble to perfect effect.

It's not giving too much away to say that Leatherface makes his way back to Harlow in what seems like record time and resumes his titular massacre once again. There are some over-the-top set pieces here—one of them pushed to the point of pure camp—and gorehounds will delight in the plethora of practical special make-up effects. The film is lean (at one hour and twenty-three minutes) and meaner than a rabid dog in the midday Texas sun getting poked repeatedly with a big stick. It’s all a heck of a lot of fun, even if the creative forces miss the boat almost entirely with the Sally Hardesty character. What could have been an awesome final chapter for survivor Sally is reduced to a mere sidenote, largely wasting Fouéré’s considerable talent. If anything, Texas Chainsaw Massacre reminds us how very important—crucial even—writers are to what we see and experience onscreen.

No, none of the characters are particularly memorable nor do we care when it’s their turn to meet the end of Leatherface’s chainsaw. No, making this film’s Final Girl a school shooting survivor adds nothing of note to her character or the plot. No, Leatherface’s speed and agility don’t make a lick of sense in the context of his chronological age. But 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a lot of fun despite its myriad flaws—in that kind of mindless Saturday matinee, popcorn movie kind of way.

How best to enjoy this latest entry in the venerable horror franchise? Let go and let Garcia. 

Fearing the Other in 'Other Terrors'

I'm very happy to finally share the exquisite cover for Other Terrors, my forthcoming HWA anthology, co-edited with the talented Rena Mason. The cover artwork was done by Venezuelan graphic designer Pablo Gerardo Camacho, who also did the cover for Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf. The anthology will be published on July 19, 2022 by Mariner Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). 

Even better, after many months of reading and re-reading member submissions and editorial deliberations, we recently revealed the contributors and TOC. Personally, I’m most proud of the fact that although we were slated to select five member submissions, Rena and I worked hard to open up space for ten, doubling the presence of HWA members in our TOC. There are 22 short stories, 2 poems, written by 15 female contributors, 9 male—each bringing a unique perspective to the universal theme of “otherness” from the diversity of their backgrounds and experiences. From the publisher’s website:

An anthology of original new horror stories edited by Bram Stoker Award winners Vince Liaguno and Rena Mason that showcases authors from underrepresented backgrounds telling terrifying tales of what it means to be, or merely to seem, “other.”

Offering original new stories from some of the biggest names in horror as well as some of the hottest up-and-coming talents, Other Terrors will provide the ultimate reading experience for horror fans who want to celebrate fear of “the other.” Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual preference, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren’t part of the dominant community—and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what’s different, as foolish as that may be, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is . . . it’s much larger than you think.

In Other Terrors, horror writers from a multitude of underrepresented backgrounds will be putting a new, terrifying spin on what it means to be “the other.” People, places, and things once considered normal will suddenly appear different, striking a deeper, much more primal, chord of fear. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there something truly sinister lurking under the surface of what we thought we knew? And who among us who is really of the other, after all?

We are happy to announce that the following HWA members will be included in Other Terrors:

• Holly Walrath with “The Asylum”

• Denise Dumars with “Scrape”

• Annie Neugebauer with “Churn the Unturning Tide”

• Nathan Carson with “Help, I’m a Cop”

• M.E. Bronstein with “The Voice of Nightingales” 

• Shanna Heath with “Miss Infection USA”

• Michael H. Hanson with “Night Shopper”

• Jonathan Lees with “It Comes in Waves”

• Maxwell Ian Gold with “Black Screams, Yellow Stars”

and

• Hailey Piper with “The Turning”

These exceptional stories from our HWA members will join previously announced esteemed contributors:

• Tananarive Due with “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge”

• S.A. Cosby with “What Blood Hath Wrought”

• Alma Katsu with “Waste Not”

• Stephen Graham Jones with “Tiddlywinks”

• Jennifer McMahon with “Idiot Girls”

• Michael Thomas Ford with “Where the Lovelight Gleams”

and

• Ann Dávila Cardinal with “Invasive Species”

Rounding out this outstanding TOC, the following talented authors will also be joining the Other Terrors lineup:

• Usman Malik with “Mud Flappers”

• Gabino Iglesias with “There’s Always Something in the Woods”

• Eugen Bacon with “The Devil Don’t Come with Horns”

• Larissa Glasser with “Kalkriese”

• Tracy A. Cross with “All Not Ready”

• Linda D. Addison with her poem “Illusions of the De-Evolved”

and

• Christina Sng with her poem “Other Fears”

Heartfelt congratulations to all those whose stories made the TOC, and our sincerest thanks to the HWA membership for making our decisions so difficult. The quality of the pool of submissions was impressive! We deeply appreciate your patience as we worked through the long process of bringing this anthology together. Special thanks to Jaime Levine at HMH, whose been a pleasure to work with, HWA's agent Alec Shane, and Lisa Morton, who both recommended me for the gig and had the insight to pair me with a superb co-editor.

Pre-orders are up now. Following the lead of one of our contributors, Jonathan Lees, here are several online retailers from whom you can pre-order Other Terrors:

• Bookshop (a great way to support indie booksellers)
• Barnes and Noble 
• Amazon 
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (straight from the publisher) 

Revisiting 'Amityville'

Among the sequel craze that started in the 1980s with Halloween and Friday the 13^th, many might be surprised to learn that the modern-day horror film franchise with the most films to its name is The Amityville Horror. With a canon of 21 associated films (including sequels, reboots, and in-name-only knockoffs), The Amityville Horror franchise has eclipsed both Halloween (with 11) and Friday the 13^th (with 12).

So it might come as a bit of a surprise when noted genre veteran Daniel Farrands—whose credits include screenplays for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and the 2007 adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, directorial work on a number of notable documentary features on film franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Friday the 13^th, and numerous producer gigs—would mine the Amityville archives for his feature film directorial debut.

The Amityville Murders, which Farrands also wrote and produced, goes back to the real-life events that led to the original horror: The six gunshot murders at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, carried out by Ronald DeFeo on the night of November 13th, 1974. DeFeo, in court testimony, claimed that voices coming from within the house drove him to kill every member of his immediate family. Although DeFeo was sentenced to (and remains in) prison, a mythos developed around the house itself when the Lutz family, who moved into the titular residence in late 1975, fled after less than a month because of the alleged supernatural events that served as the source material for Jay Anson’s bestselling 1977 book of the same name, which was based on about 45 hours of tape-recorded recollections from the Lutz family. The book became the ’79 film starring James Brolin, Margot Kidder, and Rod Steiger that went on to gross $86.4 million on a $4.7 million budget. In one of the longest-running acts of source material cannibalism, The Amityville Horror story has been artistically excavated, twisted and reconfigured, retold, and expanded upon for nearly four decades—with varying results.

Enter Farrands. Wisely, he opts to return to the scene of the crime—literally and creatively. Rather than add to the convoluted Amityville mythos, he chooses to revisit the story of Ronald DeFeo in what amounts to a proper prequel to the ’79 film. Diehard Amityville aficionados will note that 1982’s Amityville II: The Possession also attempted to loosely prequelize the pre-Lutz events, but Farrands’ outing is a more faithful retelling, coated with a nice period piece sheen.

The 1974 DeFeo’s are a suburban Long Island family whose outward picture-postcard success belies the dysfunction within. Patriarch Ronnie (an excellent Paul Ben-Victor) is the quintessential abusive husband and father, offering intimidation and beatings in private and paternal hugs in public. Wife and mother Louise (Diane Franklin) is that typical abused spouse who walks a fine line between trying to keep Ronnie’s rage at bay while facilitating some semblance of normalcy for her children. Eldest son Ronald (nicknamed “Butch”) is a directionless slacker and drug user while eldest daughter Dawn (Chelsea Ricketts) is smart, pretty, and protective of her older brother. There are three other siblings—Alison, Marc, and Jody—but they’re largely relegated to the periphery here, with Farrands choosing to focus his narrative on the DeFeo parents and their two oldest offspring.

Farrands spends time painting his cinematic picture of the DeFeo’s and their dysfunction—from Ronnie’s shady mafia dealings to Ronald Jr’s drug use and the especially volatile relationship between the two. At some point early on, both Lainie Kazan and Burt Young (who, in a nice wink to franchise fans, was also in Amityville 2 with Franklin) show up as Louise’s parents—with grandpa Brigante gifting Ronald and Dawn new cars on their shared birthday and Nona getting her hackles up when Louise casually mentions a possible West Coast relocation. “You’re going to sell my house?” she asks, practically drooling ill-omen. These early scenes are outstanding, even if the Long Island accents are a tad too exaggerated and the family’s Italian-Americanness bordering on caricature at times.

It’s revealed that Ronald Jr. and Dawn also mess around with the occult down in a little basement crawlspace with red cinderblock walls (aka the infamous “Red Room”). At some point, the dark forces within the house (it’s purported to be built upon land where the local Shinnecock Indian tribe had once abandoned their mentally ill and dying, an idea rejected by local Native American leaders) start their whispering through the walls and take possession of Ronald Jr. that culminates in the murders. The supernatural foreplay is effective although most of the visuals and set pieces will ring familiar to anyone who’s seen a Paranormal Activity film. Recycled but competent scares abound as the tension escalates.

Overall, The Amityville Murders hits its marks. Caveat: I’ve not seen a single Amityville film since the three-dimensional third so I may not be as jaded or franchise-weary as many reviewers seem to be. Farrands’s direction is solid, his pacing tight, and he really knows how to strikingly frame his shots. He also gets some major props for giving Diane Franklin a role befitting her talent. She’s been too-long relegated to shorts and subpar material in recent years for an actress of her stature and talent.

The standout here is John Robinson who does most of the film’s heavy lifting as Ronald Jr. He convincingly portrays a man slipping into madness, seamlessly shifting from anger and rage to vulnerability and melancholy with all the requisite raw emotion. It’s actually in considering Robinson’s performance where one might realize that Farrands missed a golden opportunity to muddy the waters a bit and aim higher with his franchise contribution. Instead of presenting the audience with a predetermined supernatural origin to Ronald Jr’s slip down the rabbit hole, layer in some ambiguity to suggest it might have been the drugs or PTSD from years of mental and physical abuse or even an undiagnosed mental illness like schizophrenia (the onset of which would correspond with the character’s age)—perhaps a combination of all these internal and external factors. When you make a movie based on real-life events and your audience knows the story’s ending from the outset, you need something else to make your mark. Leaving the audience pondering—and ultimately deciding for themselves—the origin of Ronald DeFeo’s eventual murderous snap would have added a decidedly cerebral element that would have elevated The Amityville Murders beyond the limits of its well-trodden zip code. 

‘Suspiria’: An Exercise in Arthouse Existentialism

Director Luca Guadagnino’s interpretation of Suspiria, Dario Argento’s 1977 cult-classic, supernatural horror film, is ambitious, overstuffed, and dazzlingly convoluted—in other words, it’s brilliant. The film—as an overarching metaphor for insurrection and the transference of power—works on almost every level and establishes itself as less a remake and more a companion piece to Argento’s classic.

Guadagnino’s take is set against the riotous backdrop of a wall-divided, post-war Germany circa 1977, terror-ravaged by Red Army Faction bombings and background news reports chronicling the hijacking of a commercial airliner. Into this sociopolitical bedlam—which is largely superfluous to the film’s narrative—enters Susie (Dakota Johnson), a talented but inexperienced dancer (and former Mennonite) from Ohio who shows up at a legendary all-female dance company in Berlin for a long-shot audition. As luck would have it, a roster spot has opened up after another dancer goes MIA, and her subsequent impromptu audition draws both the attention and tacit approval of the company’s enigmatic artistic director Madame Blanc (the unrivaled Tilda Swinton in yet another memorable role…or three). The preternaturally gifted Susie quickly ascends the ranks as Blanc's protégé, earning her the role of the protagonist in the company’s upcoming recital of Volk, which we quickly surmise has all manner of consequential otherworldly implications.

While most of the hallmarks of Dario Argento’s original giallo are present and accounted for, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich add a new character named Dr. Josef Klemperer, who is introduced in the updated film’s first few minutes. One of the elderly psychotherapist’s patients is a student from the dance academy named Patricia (whose mania is played well by Chloe Grace Moretz) who rants about a coven of witches that controls Markos Dance Academy and the evil of “the Three Mothers”—a witch mythology Argento refashioned from the writings of Thomas de Quincey—in a nice meta-tribute to Argento’s original trilogy. Klemperer—haunted by the wife he lost in World War II and stricken with an all-consuming survivor's guilt—is particularly invested in helping Patricia. The character is played by a first-time actor credited as Lutz Ebersdorf—but it’s largely known now that the role is played by Swinton in drag. There could be much said here about Guadagnino’s choice with this bit of stunt casting in terms of feminist themes and gender fluidity, but the casting largely misfires because he’s generously peppered the entire film with so much thematically elsewhere. One legacy of the reimagined Suspiria that’s a given: The film will give film scholars and other academics years of material to dissect.

On the surface, Suspiria is an odd choice for the Italian director after the blockbuster success of his plaintive coming-of-age romance of last year’s sublime Call Me by Your Name. Trading in the sun-dappled Italian vistas of his previous film for the darker muted tones of the grittier, concrete jungle of post-war Berlin here, Guadagnino—aided by the superb camerawork of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom—creates a purposeful contradiction to the Technicolor palette and deep jewel tones of Argento’s original. He opts for a severe and dispiriting look, its colorlessness periodically punctuated by vivid slashes of blood red to excellent dramatic effect. Mukdeeprom’s abrupt, purposefully clumsy whip-zooms charging toward the actors and the unexpected acceleration of cuts during otherwise unhurried scenes lends the film an authentic 1970s aesthetic that unites the two set design approaches.

Argento’s original Suspiria vision established tone largely through set design; Guadagnino opts to use dramatic choreography (mad props to choreographer Damien Jalet) to establish mood and escalate tension. Early on in the film, there’s a gut-churningly intense set-piece in which Susie’s feverish Salome-esque dance for Madame Blanc is juxtaposed against another dancer—whose attempt to flee the academy is thwarted by witchery—whose body is tossed around an adjacent dance studio and contorted in the most unearthly ways until she’s nothing but a protuberance of broken, misplaced bones. Aided by Walter Fasano’s precision-point editing, the scene is a strikingly gross yet captivatingly poetic bit of body horror.

Likewise, Guadagnino opts to choose his own fork in the road instead of following Argento down the same path he took with the original film’s score. That score—by Italian prog-rock band Goblin—was an intense wall of sound that blended screaming guitars, synthesizers, and wordless vocals to create an almost-deafening sound that matched the off-kilter, horror-schlock ambiance and garish visuals of Argento’s film. For his Suspiria, Guadagnino counters by engaging Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who ably captures the idea of descending into madness with his intricately languorous and brooding updated score.

Suspiria ’18 is a bold revisionist interpretation of Argento’s unassailable masterpiece, a refreshingly challenging film infused with an almost existentialist sense of dread. It’s a hypnotic exploration of the catharsis of female rage in which witches cast their spells through dance and, in the end, the ugliness of destruction is offset by the beauty of unexpected absolution. It’s a film that demands repeat viewings, if only to unpack its layers of themes. Loyalists are certain to appreciate Guadagnino’s inclusion of a touching cameo by Jessica Harper (the original film’s heroine) but fans expecting jump scares and a clean, linear narrative should look elsewhere; Guadagnino’s modern re-telling is a dense and cerebral slice of arthouse that’s as satisfyingly trippy as the original in its own right.

The Year’s Best in Thrills, Chills, and Kills

Although I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my favorite book of the year was The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, truth is that most of the books I’ve read this year fall squarely into the darker side of fiction. Horror, mysteries, and thrillers are, by far, my proverbial cup of tea. This year continued with the upswing in quality genre works—with horror continuing its meteoric rise in creativity over cliché, mysteries harkening back to the comforting familiarity of the cozy, and thrillers continuing to deliver twists and turns with whiplash speed.

Top Ten Horror Reads of 2018

This weekend, I’ll be submitting my recommendations for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award in various categories. I’ll be recommending sixteen works of horror this year that I felt rose to the level of the “superior” designation of the venerable awards program. This overall number is up slightly from the number of works I recommended last year, which I think is indicative of how far the current crop of horror writers continue to raise the bar in terms of creativity, quality, and innovation within the genre.

#10— Inhospitable by Marshall Moore

#9— The Devil and the Deep Edited by Ellen Datlow

#8— Porcelain by Nate Southard

#7— Distortion by Lee Thomas

#6— Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker

#5— Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl

#4— The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg

#3— Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman

#2— The Hunger by Alma Katsu

#1— A Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

Honorable mentions (which also garnered Stoker recommendations):

The Outsider by Stephen King

The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson

Of Echoes Born by ‘Nathan Burgoine

Rabid Heart by Jeremy Wagner

Scream All Night by Derek Milman

The Fives Sense of Horror Edited by Eric J. Guignard

Top Ten Mysteries/Thrillers of 2018

#10— The Surviving Girls by Katee Robert

#9— The Other Mother by Carol Goodman

#8— In Prior’s Wood by G.M. Malliet

#7— All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth

#6— Into That Good Night by Levis Keltner

#5— The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

#4— The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

#3— The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

#2— The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

#1— The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton