The exultant brilliance of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets is that, equipped with so very little, it was able to discover the truth; the tragedy of Targets, the terror of it, is that it still remains that truth.
For our B-Movies issue–just in time for spooky season–we’re casting an eye back toward RKO darling Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), one of the studio’s most successful forays into low-budget, low-runtime horror, with film critic and curator Miriam Bale.
Though Brain Damage is a B-movie through and through, it makes a lasting impression and communicates its simplistic metaphor with admirable economy
Maybe, in order to ‘B-movie’ reality, we need to make a dream of Edward D. Wood Jr.
Though it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits remains a jewel in its singular filmmaker’s body of work.
Siege revels in its shock value, as most B-movies do, but it’s also a movie that’s fiercely sympathetic to its gay characters in a way that feels quietly revolutionary.
On Popcorn, meta-horror, film fanaticism, Dante, love, and loss of identity.
Monte Hellman's The Shooting offers a clear and present microcosm for the world’s unknowable hostility.
Michael Winner's The Sentinel is an allegory for the way we come through trauma, battered and devastated, to be the guardians of our actualized selves.