Posts by Hazel Cills
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#WhiteGirlProblems: The Terror of ‘Scream Queens’ Draws From Greek Life Reality
‘Scream Queens’ has bloody horror, relatively of-the-moment references, and sick burns, but its bread and butter is its sense of satire, lampooning the dredges of sorority culture. It is, at times, a genuinely uncomfortable depiction of the racism, homophobia, and classism found within that subculture. But when a show’s characters are straightforwardly all of these things — openly and somewhat cartoonishly — where does the satire begin and end?
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Something Wild: The Sounds of Jonathan Demme
A mixtape of sorts, made up of some of the director’s major music moments; the musicians he loves to shoot, to work with, and to cast in weird bit parts in his movies.
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‘The Gallows,’ ‘Creep,’ and the State of Found-Footage Horror
Found footage has come a long way since ‘The Blair Witch Project.’ Can it still deliver any scares?
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Bravo’s ‘Odd Mom Out’: The Fictional Housewife of New York
It’s easy to map the intentions of ‘Odd Mom Out’ and why Bravo might want a more self-aware, snarkier program on the docket. But the show ends up feeling like a slap in the face to the historically humanizing ‘Housewives’ franchise Bravo has built, including the women who genuinely enjoy it.
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An ‘Insidious’ World: Why James Wan and Leigh Whannell Are Masters of the Horror Film Funhouse
Wan and Whannell aren’t making standard haunted-house flicks. They’re building modern horror’s most terrifying franchises.
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Truly Outrageous: What the New ‘Jem and the Holograms’ Film Gets Wrong About Modern Pop Stardom
“At some point we all wish we could become someone else.” This is something ‘Jem and the Holograms’ star Jerrica Benton (Aubrey Peeples) says in the trailer for the film (due out in October), before playing what sounds like dime-a-dozen singer-songwriter tropes available for your consumption on YouTube.
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Punch-Drunk Laughs: Kristen Wiig and the Art of Comedians Going Dramatic
The transition for a comedic actor or actress into drama isn’t an easy one, as the former ‘SNL’ star is showing us.
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The Call Is Coming From Inside of Skype: The Tech Terror of ‘Unfriended’
It’s not the B-movie gore death scenes that make ‘Unfriended’ squirm-inducing, it’s how it taps in and holds on tight to how annoying the Internet and computers can be, especially when they’re being tinkered with.
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Does Television Only Like Female Killers When They’re Campy?
It’s not that the stories Lifetime chooses to tell, like Lizzie Borden’s, are somehow more or less ridiculous than prestige television’s equivalents. A woman wielding an ax is no more inherently trashy than Walter White strangling someone to death with a bike lock.
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Not Safe Sex: The Terrifying, Retro Indie Horror Film ‘It Follows’
‘It Follows’ is a movie about very scary sex. Or, rather, what darkness can bubble to the surface of a teen girl’s life in the aftermath of fooling around.
