Comrade Courant Culture Critic

The Blair Witch Project (1999): A Found-Footage Landmark That Changed Horror Forever “What happened to them is real.” — And for a while, we all believed it. — 3/5 Stars In the summer of 1999, a marketing campaign unlike any before it began seeping into the cultural bloodstream. Posters appeared in record stores and video rental shops showing a grainy black-and-white photo of three missing students, their names printed beneath like a police bulletin. A cryptic trailer—aired without context on late-night TV—presented shaky footage of screams in the dark, sticks snapping in the trees, and a voice whispering, “I’m so scared.” And then there was the website: www.blairwitch.com . Now preserved only in the Internet Archive , the original site listed Heather, Mike, and Josh as missing persons, complete with police reports and “recovered” video tapes. There was no mention of actors. No studio...

The Dark Half (1993): King's Doppelgänger Nightmare Gets a Gothic Makeover "A slow-burn psychological horror that prioritizes atmosphere over scares, anchored by Romero's eye for the grotesque." — 3/5 Stars The Dark Half (1993) review: In an era when studios are finally mining Stephen King’s deeper cuts for fresh horror, it’s worth revisiting George A. Romero’s The Dark Half —a film that was ahead of its time in its psychological ambition, if not always in its pacing. Based on King’s 1989 novel (itself a thinly veiled reflection of his “Richard Bachman” pseudonym), the film explores the terrifying notion that the darkest parts of our creativity might not stay on the page. It’s a gothic, atmospheric, and deeply strange work—flawed, yes, but genuinely haunting in its best moments. Timothy Hutton stars as Thad Beaumont, a literary novelist whose violent crime thriller...