The exhibition will be on view from September 20, 2026, to July 25, 2027.

“The Horror Show” explores representations of identity, sexuality, and ability in horror films including: Alien (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Black Swan (2010), Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Get Out (2017), Halloween (1978), Ju-on (1998), Midsommar (2019), Misery (1990), Poltergeist (1982), Ringu (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Exorcist (1973), The Shining (1980), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)—while also offering a behind-the-scenes look at the storytelling and production processes of these films. 

It will be accompanied by a catalog and public programming, including film screenings, gallery talks, and educational tours to be announced at a later date. While the exhibition is designed for horror fans of all ages, parental guidance is suggested for younger visitors, of course.

“The Horror Show recognizes horror as one of the most emotionally resonant and innovative types of filmmaking, and celebrates its radical creativity and artists,” said Amy Homma, Academy Museum Director and President. “I am excited for visitors to explore and experience filmmaking that has influenced generations.”

“The Horror Show“ is organized by Senior Exhibitions Curator Jessica Niebel with Assistant Curator Nicholas Barlow and Curatorial Assistant Alexandra James Salichs. 

“Throughout film history, horror has thrilled and moved audiences, acting as a powerful outlet for expression and a tool for social commentary,“ said Niebel. “Through these stories, people have found catharsis and community among fellow horror fans around the world. I can’t wait for everyone—from horror enthusiasts to the horror-curious—to see The Horror Show.“

“Through these stories, people have found catharsis and community among fellow horror fans around the world. I can’t wait for everyone—from horror enthusiasts to the horror-curious—to see The Horror Show.”

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This week’s streaming picks are dedicated to sports-themed horror movies. These particular horror titles emphasize the mental grit of athletes and of course feature plenty of bloody kills. 

Here’s where you can watch them this week.

For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.

The Battery – Fandango at Home, Fawesome, Hoopla, Kanopy, Midnight Pulp, Prime Video, Screambox

This indie darling stars writer/director Jeremy Gardner (After Midnight). It follows two former baseball players turned best friends trying to survive long after a zombie apocalypse has ravaged the world. Even though the rules of the zombie apocalypse fall right in line with every zombie apocalypse before it, it still manages to reinvigorate the sub-genre by not being a zombie movie at all. It’s more of a unique road trip movie among buds – Ben (Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) – just trying to survive. While the apocalypse means no actual baseball, the sport plays a heavy role in the core friendship and zombie dispatching. It’s even baked into the title, referring to the pitcher and the catcher.

Black Swan – Hulu

Ballet may be an artform, but its physical and psychological demands veer straight into sports territory. Nina (Natalie Portman) lands the coveted lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” but her commitment to perfection threatens her sanity. Darren Aronofsky’s psychosexual mind-bender gets deep into Nina’s headspace as she hallucinates everything from sexual encounters to moments of body horror. It’s a dizzying mirror for Tchaikovsky’s ballet, in twisted psychological horror movie form. Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan is as beautiful as it is grotesque. Through ballet, Black Swan captures the all-consuming obsession that comes with trying to perfect an artform through visually arresting but disturbing psychological horror.

Fatal Games – AMC+, Fandango at Home, Fawesome, Shudder

Olympic-hopeful medalists find themselves systematically picked off one by one in this ’80s slasher in the vein of Graduation Day, and also known as Olympic Nightmare. Director Michael Elliot helms a pretty straightforward meat-and-potatoes slasher here, without any reinvention or deviation. What it does feature is a heavy sports angle, with the killer opting for a fitting javelin as their weapon of choice. The killer reveal definitely doesn’t hold up by today’s standards, but Fatal Games does bring the camp factor and some Olympics-inspired kills that make for an entertaining time.

Girls with Balls – Netflix

An all-girls volleyball team finds themselves hunted by back wooded locals when their van breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Yet, the hunters soon discover they might have bitten off more than they can chew with this resourceful bunch. Girls with Balls is so unapologetically goofy that it’s sure to perplex some. It doesn’t take itself seriously in the least and is sure to offend some with its sense of humor. For those that like their gore with a heaping helping of irreverence, though, it’s a fun one. The film marks the directorial debut by Olivier Alfonso, a notable special makeup effects artist who’d previously worked on Raw, Leatherface, Among the Living, and more. So, you know he applies his expertise on splatter here.

Night Game – MGM+, Prime Video

Jaws actor Roy Scheider stars in this slasher as a retired baseball player turned detective, and he’s on the case of a serial killer who preys on women anytime Houston Astros pitcher Sil Baretto wins. It’s a slow burn but grisly slasher that builds to a strong finish, helped by a memorable killer with a hook. Night Game may have been released in 1989, but it bears the hallmarks of sleazy ’70s crime thrillers, with a hardboiled detective at the center. It’s helmed by Peter Masterson, who fans may recognize for playing Dr. Barringer in The Exorcist and Walter Eberhart in The Stepford Wives.

The post Five Sports Themed Horror Movies to Stream This Week appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

On August 21 and 24, Black Swan 15th Anniversary Exclusive: Remastered for IMAX will launch on over 200 screens as the beginning of a series of celebrations for the film’s anniversary this year, giving audiences the opportunity to experience the film’s full cinematic scope and depth for the first time ever in the IMAX format.

The new restoration comes with a brand new trailer and poster, below.

Black Swan follows “Nina, a dedicated dancer whose pursuit of perfection spirals into obsession when a new rival joins the company. As she prepares for the demanding dual role of the SwanQueen, the mounting pressure begins to blur the line between reality and delusion—leading to a mesmerizing descent into the dark depths of ambition, identity, and madness.”

Natalie Portman won a Best Actress Academy Award for her role as a mentally tortured ballerina on the brink of fame in New York City.

Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder also star in the film.

The exclusive Black Swan screenings will be held at select IMAX theatres in major cities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Ticket holders will take home a commemorative 15th anniversary poster while supplies last. 

Tickets are available for this limited event now.

Black Swan grossed over $329 million at the global box office upon release in 2010 and was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Winner of Best Actress for Portman.  

Plans for further celebrations of the film’s legacy will continue to be announced throughout the year, so stay tuned.

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After a February spent looking at Mitchell Lichtenstein’s horror comedy Teeth (listen), one of the “good” Amityville entries – that would be Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (listen) – and Robert Weine’s classic silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), we’re kicking off a themed month of ‘Doppelgängers and Deception’ with a fresh look at Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010).

P.S. We previously covered the film as part of our editorial series. Read the article here.

In the film, sexually repressed ballet dancer Nina (an Oscar winning Natalie Portman) struggles to convince company director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) that she can handle the emotional complexity of playing the dual lead roles in a new production of Swan Lake.

Her overprotective mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) worries about Nina’s ability to handle the stress, which isn’t helped by the arrival of a new rival named Lily (Mila Kunis) who embodies all of the sexy confidence that Nina doesn’t have.

As Nina’s vivid hallucinations escalate and opening night fast approaches, will the novice be able to deliver the perfect performance she dreams of? Or is she doomed to end up like maligned and cast aside just her predecessor Beth (Winona Ryder)?

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, and RSS.

Episode 324: Black Swan (2010)

Break in your ballet shoes and for God’s sake, let this girl climax (!) because we are talking about Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

From Natalie Portman’s Oscar winning performance to this stacked cast to its immersive handheld camera, Black Swan is a big fave, even if Nina’s passivity can be frustrating to watch.

Plus: debate about Thomas’ sexual assault, lauding Ryder’s profane Beth, sheet cake meltdowns, the desire for perfection, and exquisite mirror work.

Cross out Black Swan!

Coming up on Wednesday: Our second entry in the series intersects with sex work as we check out Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber’s technology-inspired Cam (2018).

P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 370 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Oddity, Borderline, Opus, Death of a Unicorn and a brand new audio commentary on Sin City for its 20th anniversary.

The post The Dark Double of Sexual Repression in ‘Black Swan’ [Horror Queers Podcast] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Ballet requires a high level of dedication to practice and performance and frequently spills over into body horror through broken toenails, stress fractures, and overuse injuries. In other words, ballet is often a mix of pain and beauty, which means it pairs well with horror.

This week’s streaming picks are dedicated to ballerinas in horror.

These horror movies feature at least one ballerina tormented by her art form, highlighting the stark, beguiling contrast between beauty and horror. Here’s where you can stream them now.

For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.

Audition – Arrow, Fandor, Hi-Yah, Kanopy, Midnight Pulp, SCREAMBOX, Tubi

In Audition, Takashi Miike lulls you into thinking you’re watching a quiet love story unfold between widower Shigeharu and enchanting ballerina Asami.  It’s deliberate in pacing; it’s easy to overlook the red flags from both sides of this new couple. The more he falls head over heels with Asami, the more he wants to know about her past. The more he tugs at the threads of her history, the more her docile façade unravels until it builds into the most terrifying and explosive finale. Asami’s past and the abuse suffered in her dance upbringing are unsettling, but it’s nothing compared to how Asami deals with those who’ve wronged her.

Black Swan – Max

Nina (Natalie Portman) lands the coveted lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” but her commitment to perfection threatens her sanity. Darren Aronofsky’s psychosexual mind-bender gets deep into Nina’s headspace as she hallucinates everything from sexual encounters to moments of body horror. It’s a dizzying mirror for Tchaikovsky’s ballet, in twisted psychological horror movie form. Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan is as beautiful as it is grotesque. Through ballet, Black Swan captures the all-consuming obsession that comes with trying to perfect an artform through visually arresting but disturbing psychological horror.

The Cabin in the Woods – Hulu

Five friends opt for a weekend getaway at a cabin in the woods. Their party gets interrupted by a zombie redneck torture family, and they start dying one by one according to their archetypical horror role. Of course, there’s much more than meets the eye in this horror-comedy, and they realize there’s a much bigger plot afoot. In terms of entertainment and monster mashups, it doesn’t get much better than this. Just about every single conceivable monster is represented on screen in the Grand Guignol finale, including an elegant young ballerina with a ghastly gaping maw for a face. While her appearance may be brief, the imagery is so effective that this little monster dancer ensures you won’t forget her, even as the copious bloodshed and monster invasion kicks into overdrive.

The Red Shoes – Criterion Channel, freevee, Max, Plex, the Roku Channel, Shout TV, Tubi

Co-directed by Peeping Tom helmer Michael Powell, The Red Shoes centers around a ballerina, Victoria (Moira Shearer), forced to choose between love and her craft. Much like Nina in Black Swan, the ballerina soon finds herself cracking under immense pressure. The Red Shoes isn’t horror in the conventional sense, but it does walk a fine line between stunning technicolor drama and foreboding psychological horror, thanks to a constant sense of unease as Victoria spirals toward a tragic outcome. It’s helped by surreal dance sequences that feel nightmarish and red shoes that almost seem to entrance their wearer. Highlighting the horrors of artistic pursuit here helped bridge the gap between ballet and horror and no doubt influenced at least two horror movies on this list.

Suspiria – Artiflix, Kanopy

Jessica Harper stars as Suzy Bannion, an American newcomer at a prestigious dance academy in Germany who uncovers a supernatural conspiracy amid a series of grisly murders. Director Dario Argento borrowed from a lot of influences when crafting this gorgeous film, including Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Specifically, the vibrant technicolor process, though Argento also considered Suzy as his Snow White. It infuses a fairy tale quality to the almost dreamlike supernatural horror movie centered around witchy ballerina teachers and their unsuspecting students. The vastly different remake, currently available to stream on Prime Video, shifts from ballet to contemporary dance, but the effect is almost the same: dance remains a preternatural spell cast upon the audience as well as the films’ protagonists.

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Now more than ten years later, Darren Aronofsky teases in a chat with The A.V. Club that he’s working on bringing Black Swan to the stage with a musical based on his 2010 movie.

“We’re trying to do the Black Swan musical,” Aronofsky tells the outlet.

He continues, “We’ll see what happens. But we’re working on it.”

In Black Swan, “A committed dancer (Natalie Portman) struggles to maintain her sanity after winning the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.”

Portman starred alongside Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder, and Barbara Hershey.

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In celebration of one of the year’s best hitting Hulu this week, this week’s picks belong to horror movies that distort reality for their characters in disturbing ways.

Here’s where you can stream them this week.

Black Swan – Hulu

Nina (Natalie Portman) lands the coveted lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” but her commitment to perfection threatens her sanity. Darren Aronofsky’s psychosexual mind-bender gets deep into Nina’s headspace as she hallucinates everything from sexual encounters to moments of body horror. It’s a dizzying mirror for Tchaikovsky’s ballet, in twisted psychological horror movie form. Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan is as beautiful as it is grotesque.

Identity – Pluto TV, Tubi

James Mangold sets up an interesting yet familiar slasher mystery, complete with misdirects and gory deaths. But the biggest clue that there’s more to this slasher than meets the eye is in the title. Ten strangers become stranded together at a desolate roadside motel, only to discover that someone is picking them off one by one. Reality holds a very different meaning for these characters, making the killer’s motive particularly unique. The A-list cast brings it, too.  

Oculus – Starz

Kaylie (Karen Gillan) tries to exonerate her brother and seek retribution for her parents’ death by finding proof of a supernatural presence within an antique mirror. But this haunted mirror has one nasty defense mechanism; it can alter perceptions of reality for those near it. Mike Flanagan takes a mind-bending approach to a haunting, distorting reality for the protagonists that attempt to destroy it. In the process, it keeps viewers guessing, too.

Shutter Island – Netflix, AMC+, Pluto TV

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) investigates the disappearance of a patient from a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. The further he gets, the more it seems that a conspiracy is afoot. Worse, it appears that the staff seems hellbent on keeping Teddy there. Martin Scorsese plays mind games with his protagonist in this stylish Gothic thriller that goes big on a moody atmosphere.  

Videodrome – Peacock

One of Cronenberg’s most beloved films by fans, Videodrome follows James Woods as a sleazy cable TV programmer whose life begins to spiral out of control once he stumbles upon a broadcast signal featuring extreme torture. It infects his mind, causing bizarre visions and eerie shifts in perceived reality. Only Cronenberg could use body horror to depict a fractured mind so effectively. The surreal imagery combined with special effects master Rick Baker’s work on the film create one of the strangest, most fascinating horror films that’s way ahead of its time.

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Coming into my first viewing of Black Swan in 2010, I had no idea what I was about to see. At the time, I knew little of Darren Aronofsky‘s work. I had seen Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, and while I found myself intrigued with the latter, I wasn’t all that blown away by the former. But Black Swan grabbed my attention. 

Much of my taste in horror up until that point involved slashers, monsters, ghosts, and demons; I had seen psychological horror, but my passion for the subgenre had not kicked off yet. It’s fair to say that Black Swan played a big role in guiding me towards that direction, for I was intrigued by the spiraling mental descent of Natalie Portman’s character Nina. 

For Black Swan’s 10th anniversary, I present an analysis of Nina’s horrifying journey – how the film establishes her character and the narrative techniques it uses to explore her mind state. 

Please note this article will contain spoilers.

A brief synopsis of the film: Nina is a young ballet dancer in an upscale New York City ballet company. At the beginning of the company’s season, it is announced by Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the company’s artistic director, that he will be putting on a new rendition of the iconic Swan Lake – where a single female lead will play both the White and Black Swan. One thing leads to another and Nina gets the part, but though being in the spotlight has its perks, she soon comes to discover that the pressure of such a role comes with more struggle than she could have ever imagined. 

The core horror of Black Swan comes from that of Nina’s deteriorating mental state; from the pressures put on her by her mother, Thomas, and the role, she strives to let go of the control that weighs her down. Aronofsky goes about displaying Nina’s psyche through scenes of rigorous obsession and hallucinations she endures. Each hardship reflects the struggle she faces to not only master such a grand role, but to also embrace her being and let go of control.

From the start, Nina is framed in an innocent light. Her room is pink with stuffed animals and she has a somewhat child-like relationship with her mother (Barbara Hershey). She doesn’t speak up much and primarily represses strong emotion when it comes to conflict. She is also a tad naïve, which further plays into her innocence. When she goes to initially talk to Thomas for the role of Swan Queen, she puts on nice lipstick and says how she has learned the part. Yet, as she’s talking, Thomas – and the audience for that matter – notice how timid she is. 

There’s never an explanation as to why Nina is this way; that said, one may be able to connect the dots when it comes to scenes between her and her mother. The viewer learns that Nina’s mother was once a dancer too, but when she became pregnant with Nina, she gave up her career. In each scene where the two are together, the mother is always domineering. She is either picking Nina’s life apart or overly coddling her. Early in the film the audience is shown a small rash on Nina’s back; this has to do with a nervous tick she has developed where she scratches herself. When the mother finds that the rash has gotten worse, she strips Nina down to her underwear and pulls her into the bathroom to cut her nails. With this level of aggressive parenting, one could understand why Nina has such a tense and shy personality. 

But Nina is not entirely pure of heart. Upon walking into the dressing room of the company’s lead star, she pickpockets one of her lipsticks (the one she wears for Thomas). Behind all the sweetness and charm, there is something else there.

This character setup is the foundation for which Aronofsky and the screenwriters use to bombard Nina with conflict. Upon winning the Swan Queen role, her craft and focus are continuously questioned and challenged. Thomas makes a comment about how her movements are too controlled – and as the Black Swan – she needs to move more freely. He makes remarks about the Black Swan being someone who can exude sensuality. Throughout the film, Nina strives to continuously push herself and tap into the Black Swan, yet each effort is short of reaching the evocative spirit of the character.

Now while much of this may come off as a tortured artist sort of narrative, that isn’t what the film is going for. That theme is certainly present, as well as the struggles that young female performers may face when working in entertainment. But a big key theme in Black Swan is repression – a concept the film explores through Nina’s relationships and practice of the Black Swan dance. For as she continues to practice the role, she begins to endure nightmarish hallucinations. 

Some inspiration for the film comes in the form of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, a narrative that involves a man discovering he has a doppelgänger. In a manner, one could view Swan Lake as a story that involves doubles – given the dynamic between the White and Black Swan counterparts. The doppelgänger concept is one of Black Swan’s biggest story elements. 

Through her practice to become the Black Swan, Nina begins to slowly tap into her repressed feelings. The hallucinations she sees of herself – whether dressed in black or acting in some menacing factor – are meant to represent the urges she keeps buried. The desire to be more carefree. A quality she wants to live by but doesn’t express out of fear of losing control. As she puts it to Thomas at one point, she wants to be perfect. So for as much as she wants to be perfect, there is also an itch to let go of that perfection – a clash of desires that does not fare too well for her. 

Over time not only does Nina’s rash on her back worsen, but she also starts imagining gruesome wounds. One scene shows her pulling at her finger, as if there is some sort of pain taking place. When she’s in the bathroom later, she sees the finger is somewhat damaged; upon pulling at the skin around the nail, she tears a long strip of flesh from the nail down to her hand. But the wound is not real. 

The Nina duplicates serve to taunt her, hinting at something darker that exists within. They work to get under her skin by either appearing in unsettling ways or being part of some lurid fantasy – one example being when Nina comes across a duplicate stripping off her clothes and readying herself to have sex with Thomas. In these moments, Nina panics, running away to catch her breath and find some ground in the real world. There are more violent hallucinations that overtake her as well, with one involving a scene where she watches a former dancer stab herself, for Nina to then run out of the room and find she’s holding a bloody weapon. 

As the pressure surrounding the performance builds up, Nina’s grasp on reality weakens. However, the panic shifts into a whole new gear once Lilly (Mila Kunis) becomes a greater presence in her life. 

Lilly is a foil to Nina. Unlike Nina, Lilly is more outspoken, takes more of the lead in her social interactions, and has a chill, not give a shit attitude. She gives off a flirtatious vibe that contrasts with Nina’s awkwardness with other men. Lilly is kept at a distance at first; the camera will slip into brief moments of her talking to someone or dancing, but doesn’t give too much attention outside of some glances Nina sends her way.

Eventually the two do connect and Lilly invites Nina out. The two share drinks, Nina does some drugs, and they go dancing. The evening ends with the two returning to Nina’s to make out and Lilly goes down on her (all before Nina sees Lilly transform into another one of her duplicates). It is revealed shortly after that scene that Nina and Lilly did not make out or do anything sexual. Nina then begins to grow suspicious of Lilly, believing that she may be trying to steal the role of Swan Queen. Seeing Lilly practicing for the role with Thomas intensifies her anxieties. 

Towards the end of the film, as Nina has become more aggressive with her mother, she undergoes a brief physical transformation, her legs inverting into the shape of swan legs. This transformation is in-line with another hallucination that Nina has been experiencing throughout the film – that of becoming a swan. The rash on her back begins to develop a swan-like flesh around it; overtime, this flesh spreads to other parts of her body. She even finds a small black feather sprouting out of her. These moments of transformation provide hints of what is to come in the film’s final act.

For all the struggle that Nina goes through, the conclusion to Black Swan is somewhat uplifting(?). Though she has been under so much mental and emotional torment, Nina comes to embrace her whole being, her psychological journey coming to a marvelous, heartbreaking finish.

As Nina heads to the company for the opening of Swan Lake, determined to do her best, her head is not in the most stable place. She takes to the stage as the White Swan, giving an excellent performance until, in her state of nervousness, her fellow dancer drops her during the act. She recovers and finishes the segment, but the mistake flushes her with embarrassment. She returns to her dressing room, knowing that the Black Swan portion of the show is about to start, and finds Lilly in her chair. The two fight and Nina stabs her with a shard of glass. This is the final step needed for Nina’s transformation to complete.

Entering the stage as the Black Swan, she gives a dazzling performance. As she dances, her body undergoes a massive transformation; her black dress morphs into a body of black feathers, her arms growing into giant wings. As her dance concludes, the room stands up and roars in applause. She has mastered the Black Swan.

Nina returns to her room and shuts the door, panicking as to what to do about Lilly. Then there’s a knock at the door – and it’s Lilly. Nina checks the bathroom where she thought she left Lilly’s body to find nothing. Upon looking at the broken mirror near her, she realizes that the person she stabbed is herself. And in poetic irony, she takes to the stage for her final part where her character dies. As she stands atop a structure, looking down to the stage and into the crowd, she jumps and embraces the moment. She lies down as the room explodes again with applause. Thomas and all the dancers run over to congratulate her, but then they notice she is gushing blood. As the screen fades to white, the crowd still applauding and those around Nina frantic, she says that the performance was perfect.

From the moment the viewer meets Nina, they know her goal is to be the Swan Queen and give a solid performance – and damn is she astounding. There’s much to find in Black Swan’s conclusion that is tragic; the hell this young woman endured, from the pressures of the role to the people around her who continued to burden her. But against all the odds, she pushes through and achieves her dream. That said, even in her success, I feel Black Swan is more of a grim experience. Nina’s repression of herself is brutal to witness at times. Her desperation to be perfect and to excel at her craft are admirable, but they are also drives that end up devastating her psyche.  

Black Swan was one of the first films I ever saw wherein, while creepy visuals were present, the true horror was that of the character’s mind. The story has a consistent rhythm of anxiety; as Nina pushes herself and strives to keep everything together, the viewer is present in worrying for her. Portman’s acting is superb throughout, being a key factor in selling Nina’s declining mental state (as well as providing some chilling moments). In its exploration of duality and repression, Black Swan stands a decade later as a thrilling work of psychological horror.

The post Repression and Duality of the Self: The Horrors of ‘Black Swan’ [Unveiling The Mind] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Wes Craven, George Romero, Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter, and Guillermo del Toro are but a few of the countless figures within the horror genre that have contributed to horror’s rise in the film industry and the genre has consistently turned a nice profit in sales thanks to their mostly cheap productions and strong connections with thrill-seeking audiences. People love a good scare and even if some never quite get one, they’re willing to give it a try with the countless horror offerings each year.

But when horror rises to the level that it has, sub-genres within horror manifest, leading to horror being viewed as a genre with different levels to it. There’s “elevated” horror (more of a societal observation than an actual sub-genre, but worth mentioning) like The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, and Get Out. “Elevated horror” is often pointed out through aspects such as an overly serious tone, almost akin to a drama rather than full-on horror, and loud and emotional performances from the cast not so much embracing the horror, but more so going “above it”, hardly allowing for anything “silly” to come through.

These “elevated” horror films can sometimes cross over with blockbuster horror like the It franchise and the Conjuring universe, which are both examples of serious scares and dramatic acting blending with a more playful tone, akin to a horror event. This blend often appeals strongly to general audiences who tend to recognize certain qualities from major blockbusters in these respective horror films, leading the blockbuster horror genre to commonly produce franchises and sequels of the same cloth and formula.

Away from those two is the world of B-horror, which contains a pulpier atmosphere and plot and is often seen as low budget fare that doesn’t quite steer into complete arthouse, but is too DIY to be considered a blockbuster; an example being the Sharknado series. Despite those limitations, B-horror has still amassed a large following, partially thanks to the filmmakers placing their emphasis on shock, awe, and entertainment over “serious horror”. The entire history regarding B horror is a full article for another day, but to save time, these movies aren’t likely to ever receive Oscar glory, but their popularity remains steadfast with midnight audiences and gorehounds looking for a fun fix.

Despite their vastly different markets within the horror genre, they’ve all found loyal audiences over the years, forming followings that have helped dictate exactly what kind of movies they want to see – a classic supply and demand situation. B-movies aren’t popular with “arthouse” audiences, but people craving a pulpy time at the theater will happily fill that void and the inverse is true with B movie audiences tending to stray away from “intelligent” horror, leaving general moviegoers to fill that void instead. Horror blockbusters try to have the best of both worlds, but their strongest audience is one of casual moviegoers, a strong market on its own.

But what about the horror movies that don’t necessarily fit in any of those categories? The cavalcade of horror films that are not quite shlocky enough to be considered B-horror, not appealing enough to be blockbusters, and a little too off-center and weird to be part of the “elevated horror” category? Arthouse horror, as it’s commonly called, finds itself at a strange impasse where it’s difficult to see exactly what kind of audience the subgenre is appealing to. Exactly how can arthouse films turn over a profit while remaining true to the filmmakers’ intent?

A24 is the answer that we didn’t have a decade ago.

Distributing its first film back in 2013, A24 has always existed as the “voice of the indies” company that it’s viewed as today. Films like Spring Breakers, The Spectacular Now, and The Bling Ring are the types of films that can be difficult to buy the rights for if the intention is to turn over a profit in release. Sure, they’re not terribly expensive, but how exactly would these films be promoted to a wider audience? A24 took charge and offered themselves as a viable alternative to a big studio release that likely would’ve tanked the film upon release.

Instead, the three films have managed to stay in the limelight even today thanks to A24’s continued support for the films and their respective cult followings. A24 played up the idea of these movies not being of the “norm” and considering the star power of the likes of Emma Watson, James Franco, Selena Gomez, and Vanessa Hudgens was present to bring more eyes to the projects, A24 took advantage in advertising these films as the types where your potential favorites act in something never-before-seen.

This same tactic was employed with the immense popularity of Scarlett Johansson in 2014 when the Oscar-nominated star joined A24’s filmography a year after its distribution debut to deliver us the atmospheric horror-drama, Under the Skin. A slow and immensely disturbing story about a literal man-killer, Under the Skin plays into that same “never before seen” feeling, touting its popular lead actress as the draw to a film that’s seemingly unlike anything she has ever done and grabbing the attention of more casual moviegoers.

Under the Skin still wasn’t a box office success and for the first few years of its inception, A24 still weren’t considered box office juggernauts of any kind. Their film catalog was niche and perhaps too off-center for most moviegoers and even the most critically acclaimed of the bunch couldn’t find immense success right away. Even the first few films from A24 mentioned earlier didn’t light up the box office, with Spring Breakers being the most financially successful film at about $31 million worldwide. There was notoriety, but not much else to prop the company up as THE best alternative for art house horror and indies.

2015 represented an important milestone year for A24, becoming the year where not one, not two, but three of A24’s most successful films walked away with an Oscar at the next year’s ceremony. Room earned Brie Larson a Best Actress win, Amy snagged the Best Documentary Feature award, and Alex Garland’s science fiction thriller, Ex Machina, nabbed the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The latter is by far the most interesting case purely for the fact that it plays out like a weird futuristic horror-thriller, the likes that are bound to be snubbed by both major awards and big distribution companies.

Ex Machina’s surprising Visual Effects win jumpstarted the sort of standards that many people would eventually hold A24 up to in the future. Garland’s sci-fi thriller proved pivotal in A24’s eventual reputation as the place to go for weird and niche films and the very next year, Robert Eggers’ The Witch broke new ground for the company, becoming the highest grossing film in their entire catalog at the time with over $40 million earned worldwide.

Best of all? The movie that broke box office milestones for A24 was a rich, complex, and incredibly inaccessible horror film that dove into the deep end of its setting, with its time period accurate language, lack of “high tension thrills”, and cinematography that used natural lighting to coat the film’s aesthetics in gray, white, and black. There’s no telling just how disastrous it could’ve been had a larger company acquired the film and heavily edited it to appeal to a wider audience and while that could be somewhat true for A24, it seemed clearer than ever that A24 was now becoming the place to go to if you wanted to check out horror films that were different and/or provocative.

The success of The Witch and Ex Machina simultaneously proved that not only is A24 a feasible alternative choice for indies and arthouse films to even be released, but that a market actually exists for these movies. A24 certainly wasn’t the first distribution company to take a chance on arthouse horror films, but the past decade has seen a rise in popularity and success for smaller and more artsy horror films. In 2017, only a year after The Witch, Trey Edward Shults broke out with his incredibly divisive horror-drama, It Comes At Night, two years after his feature-length debut, Krisha, was also released by A24.

Shults isn’t the only filmmaker to benefit from A24’s new market for transgressive horror, as directors like Robert Eggers, Ari Aster with both Hereditary and Midsommar, Yorgos Lanthimos, Alex Garland, The Daniels, Gaspar Noe, Claire Denis, Kevin Smith, and more have had some of their latest (and weirdest) films distributed through A24, increasing their profiles as the company continues to build its stock with more Oscar wins and box office success.

It isn’t a guarantee that an A24 horror film will automatically be successful as a result, but the company’s profile has undergone several new stages of popularity, now being highly touted as one of the most reliable film companies for “non-mainstream” features. But with their growing popularity, it’s difficult to even call them an “indie” company now, which may sound like an insult, but this new stage for A24 has put even more eyes on their film catalog than ever before.

With this rise in popularity, A24 has now found its market for their slate of films. Art house crowds may not rival that of the MCU fandom, but their vocal support for A24 films have sent waves throughout the public eye, as films like Hereditary, Midsommar, and most recently The Lighthouse went on to experience the kind of success that might’ve not been possible if released through another distribution company.

A black-and-white film like The Lighthouse, spoken in a near-incomprehensible dialect and filled to the brim with long and garbled monologues about lobsters, timber, and fart fatigue, was as popular as it was not only because A24 already made Robert Eggers a recognizable name with arthouse horror fans, but the company made strides in touting the film as one of their “marquee” releases of 2019. If a company has no faith in its film, it shows, and A24 is no exception with some releases, but the films it does tout are the very type that would be swept under the rug regardless by most bigger studios.

A24, in the midst of this horror blockbuster boom in the 21^st century and specifically in the past decade, has managed to carve out a spot in the horror market by distancing itself from the trappings of large studio-mandated film productions and appealing to its own niche audience interested in arthouse projects. Studios like IFC Midnight and Neon have led by similar strategies, but A24’s gradual rise in popularity helped transform the tactic into something mainstream.

Trailers with the A24 logo now have their own set of expectations as to what we can expect, which normally boils down to something a little weird and perhaps unappealing. Either way, A24 has slowly progressed into becoming a relatively popular term in the film industry. They may not be a household name, but the possibility exists with the studio’s strong slate of films coming in the future, including their next horror release by director Rose Glass, Saint Maud.

While Saint Maud is currently postponed at the time of this writing thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, it was slated to be A24’s next big horror release in the vein of Hereditary and Midsommar, building the studio’s catalog of films and contributing to the expanding field of arthouse/indie horror films being granted time in the limelight with other big releases. It’s a risky strategy, but A24 has built up enough of a reputation to release their films, specifically their horror selection, against mainstream events, a la Midsommar’s release against Spider-Man: Far from Home. The Lighthouse managed to gross nearly $20 million despite being released in a mostly limited format against the likes of Jojo Rabbit and billion-dollar society flick, Joker.

A24, for all their faults regarding their treatment of some of their smaller and more obscure films, have practically nailed their strategy for their art horror films, such as their humorous and often quirky marketing on social media, unique merchandising, and an overall laid back vibe that drastically contrasts the bot-like marketing present in films from larger companies. A regular studio asking you to watch their trailer pales in comparison to A24’s cheeky wording with their marketing. Even if the film seems destined to fail at the box office, there’s extra effort on the marketing team’s behalf to go down swinging. And this strategy has helped endear the company, and now a good chunk of its films, to a wider general audience.

Times may seem strange and unclear for now, but the magic of movies will always be there to help distract and for audiences that crave more off-kilter content, A24 has now built a brand capitalizing on the appeal of arthouse/indie films to success. Whether A24 will keep playing to their strengths or expand into new horizons in the future will remain to be seen, but the budding horror filmmakers chipping away at their respective horror stories may only be a few calls away from having their unfiltered vision be spread on a potentially grander scale with the art horror market A24 has popularized.

The post From Niche to Mainstream: How A24 Created a Unique Market for Transgressive Horror appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

In case you missed our announcement back in January, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Horror Queers podcast! We’re still writing one article a month, but we’re releasing one podcast episode each week! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, or RSS.

***SPOILERS for Black Swan follow***

Synopsis: Nina (Natalie Portman), a committed dancer, wins the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” only to find herself struggling to maintain her sanity.

Queer Aspect: Nina begins having sexy/paranoid dreams and delusions about her (perceived) competitor, Lily (Mila Kunis).

Joe

We’re back in written form for another month and I’m honestly really excited to talk about Darren Aronofsky’s compelling psychosexual ballet film, Black Swan (aka the craziest ballet movie not called Suspiria).

I remember seeing this film in the theatre back in 2010 and it was a really surreal experience. The audience was really diverse, so there was a nice mix of different types of folks, but the silence throughout the entire film was deafening. And then – I’ll never forget this – the literal second the credits began rolling, these two septuagenarians sitting behind my boyfriend and I loudly and immediately exclaimed: “Well I didn’t get it, and I didn’t like it!” Lol.

In retrospect, that commentary – ludicrous as it is without even a second of reflection or contemplation – could be the description for a lot of Aronofsky’s films, which can sometimes feel distinctly confrontational or off-putting (see also: mother!). And yet, rewatching Black Swan for this piece, I was kind of struck at how straight-forward the film is and how well it shows its hand. Aronofsky isn’t trying to disguise the fact that Nina is slowly losing her mind and imagining things, up to and including a lesbian make-out scene with her rival, Lily. It’s all front and center, tellingly telegraphed and then clarified after each incident.

For me, what makes Black Swan such a compelling film is Aronofsky’s use of the camera to really get into Nina’s headspace. The handheld, rotating camerawork is disorienting and occasionally even abrasive, but it’s so tied to Nina as she makes her way through the world of the theatre, the NY subway, and her claustrophobic shared living environment with her manic-depressive mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) that it feels like we, the audience, are slowly going crazy with her.

Of course, the film would be nothing without its symbolic doubling – up to and including the extensive use of mirrors and the likeness between the two lead actresses. The symbolism isn’t subtle: Lily is quite obviously Nina’s own personal black swan, a corrupting influence who compels her to drink, do drugs, fornicate and (accidentally?) stab herself in the gut, but it IS effective. I love how freaky the mirror reflections are in the last act as Nina plummets towards exhaustion, paranoia and insanity – it’s just the right mix of horror movie tropes and FX movie magic.

Trace, what’s your history with Black Swan? Does the film’s paranoia get under your skin like a dirty little rash? And how much do you love a dirty talking Winona Ryder as ousted diva Beth?

Trace

It’s so funny that you mention your theater experience with Black Swan, because I couldn’t stop thinking about mine the entire time I was re-watching it.  Up until this week, my only viewing experience was in theaters 9(!) years ago and while I liked the film back then, I remember feeling deceived by the marketing, which made the film look more like a body horror film than it actually was. When it turned out to be an “it was all in her head” film, I was disappointed. I still liked the film, but the fact that it wasn’t what I expected lowered my opinion just a bit.

This turned out to be perfect timing for re-watching Black Swan, since we recently discussed how expectations can shape initial viewings of films in our podcast episode on Happy Death Day 2U. In 2010 I let my expectations affect my viewing of this particular film. In 2019, I’d like to think that I’m a little better at judging a film for what it is, rather than what I expected/wanted it to be.

And you are absolutely right: it’s so obvious that this is all in Nina’s head from the get-go. This isn’t a third act twist we’re talking about. Black Swan even mirrors the actual plot of Tchaikovsky’s ballet so closely, albeit with several, understandable adjustments, that characters are even credited as their ballet counterparts (i.e., Mila Kunis is credited as Lily/The Black Swan). This makes the narrative that much clearer. By the time the film ended, I was so upset at my 2010 self for letting my disappointment over Black Swan’s cerebral narrative affect my opinion of it.

I can imagine how this would be frustrating for casual viewers to watch, though. Aronofsky’s films are anything but simple. The film is primarily told from Nina’s perspective, which automatically calls into question all of the events in the film. She is an unreliable narrator, after all. I suppose it could be argued that the entire film is a fever dream of Nina’s (though I wouldn’t go quite that far myself). My big questions regarding what is real and what isn’t were: When did the reality of Nina’s outing with Lily end (I believe it was when she left the bar)? And also, did Beth actually stab herself in the face with that nail file? Or did Nina imagine it? Did she even go see Beth at all?

Of course, questions about what is real and what isn’t aren’t meant to be asked when viewing Black Swan. You’re just supposed to go along for the ride. Black Swan is meant to be experienced, not picked apart. I fully realize the irony in writing this as we are picking it apart right now, but I digress. Viewed as a visual representation of a fever dream, it’s a near-perfect film (my only real knock against it is that Winona Ryder is criminally underused).

The lesbian sex scene between Nina and Lily is a bit confounding. On the one hand, it would be easy to view the scene as exploitative, but on the other it provides a fascinating look into Nina’s psyche that is a bit underdeveloped.

Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan serves as a metaphor for her burgeoning sexuality (and also her ability to relax, but let’s focus on the sexual aspect). Thomas (Vincent Cassel) asks Nina at one point if she is a virgin and she says she isn’t, but it’s not an entirely convincing answer. He then asks her to go home and touch herself, but of course, she isn’t able to come because she realizes her mother is sleeping in the corner mid-masturbation.

It isn’t until she’s alone with Lily (er…her hallucination of Lily) that she’s able to let go and give into her impulses. Sure, she’s got a bunch of MDMA in her system, but she’s also clearly into everything that Lily is selling. Does this mean that Nina is repressing some lesbianism or bisexuality? This sequence implies that, but the film never digs deeper into that aspect of Nina’s psyche, so we’re left with that question unanswered. Unfortunately, if you look at the film as Nina descending into madness because of her repressed queerness, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Obviously, you’d have to take into account the way she was raised by Erica, the absolute worst type of Dance Mom.

Joe, are you buying into my theory on Nina’s queerness? Or am I, as so many commenters like to say, “reaching”? What did you think of Thomas? Did you find him as creepy and inappropriate as I did? And I didn’t even get to discuss the ballet sequences. Weren’t they stunning?

Joe

One of the elements that I love about the film (which I’ve also come to appreciate more on the rewatch) is how fluid the “illusions” (for lack of a better term) are interwoven into Nina’s actual experience. Aronofsky shoots the entirety of Nina and Lily’s debaucherous drunken and MDMA bar experience – and subsequent make-out – as though it’s just all unfolding in a time-lapsed stupor. I agree with you that it seems as though Nina left the bar solo and Lily’s exploratory fingering in the cab is the start of her hallucination.

Whether Lily is actually symptomatic of Nina’s queer repression is tricky because, as you’ve suggested, there’s a lack of clarity. The entire eating out sequence is obviously imagined and can be read in two ways: in one, Nina’s desire for Lily is explicitly embodied by her imagination, but in the other Lily is simply a symbolic representation of her need for (sexual) release. Judging from the other aspects of the film, I’m inclined to lean towards the second reading EXCEPT that when Lily gently mocks Nina about having a “lezzo” dream about her, Nina clearly becomes upset. It could simply be her embarrassment about acknowledging sexuality of any kind in public (she’s clearly also uncomfortable with Thomas’ advances, rightfully so), but it could reflect desires that she hasn’t acknowledged for a member of the same sex. It’s ambivalent…but open to interpretation!

Whether or not this is lesbian desire, all of these interactions are obviously tied to Nina’s sexual immaturity, which is what Black Swan all boils down to. Every figure in Nina’s life (the dance teacher, the predecessor, and the rival) has a role to play in helping her to “blossom” into the title character; these external factors are required because Nina starts the film in such a (sexually) infantilized condition. One look at the pink butterflies in her bedroom, in addition to the control issues that are imposed on her time, space and body by her mother Erica, reinforce that Nina is trapped in a child-like status, which is not that different from what we know of real life dancer’s bodies and training regimen (another reason why Black Swan works so well for an examination of this particular material).

Sidebar: one darker reading suggests the possibility that Erica has sexually abused her daughter, hence the self-inflicted scratches, the icky masturbation scene and the uncomfortable scene when Nina licks icing off her mother’s fingers when she scores the coveted lead role – fingers she later smashes in her room’s door frame, the physical barrier marking the boundary of her personal freedom. I’ll confess that before reading that I had never considered Erica an abuser beyond the more obvious controlling emotional stuff (see: threatening to throw out the cake when Nina doesn’t play along), but upon closer inspection there is enough evidence to warrant a reading of sexual abuse here.

It’s interesting that you enquired about Thomas because he definitely took up a lot of my mental bandwidth this time around. I find Vincent Cassel to be a fascinating performer, particularly in English language films, where he’s often asked to play these kinds of slightly off-kilter sexual creeps. This performance is pitch-perfect to me because he tows the line so carefully between predatory older man abusing his authority to solicit sexual favours and overly hands-on boss massaging a creative break-through from his ingenue performer.

Obviously, this is a difficult character to see in any kind of positive light in a post-Weinstein, #MeToo era, but I’ll confess that I left the film genuinely uncertain about Thomas’ perception of his actions. Is he just a perv or does he genuinely think that he’s helping Nina to unlock her potential and become the best Black Swan she can be? Nina’s hallucination of him sleeping with Lily clearly aligns the pair in “deviant, dangerous” sexuality territory, and yet…I imagine him rationalizing his advances on Nina as part of some creative process (which still smacks of crossing the line).

Which brings me to your final point: the ballet numbers. I know next to nothing about dance, so I can’t say much aside from the fact that I appreciated the artistry of the movement and Aronofsky’s capacity to shoot it in a way that captures its kinesthetic vitality and urgency, particularly when Nina fully transforms and lunges at the camera. I’m tempted to revisit the way Guadagnino shoots the Volk sequence in Suspiria just to see how the movements compare.

Two other like-minded “out of the box” texts also came to mind that I wonder if you have any comments on. One is Centre Stage, which cast real dancers in the roles of actors to produce some really exciting routines and some really stilted dramatic scenes. The other is…Showgirls, one of my ALL-TIME favourite films, which similarly uses a rags-to-riches, All About Eve approach to tell a narrative about an aspiring dancer who is willing to do nearly anything to steal the limelight.

Trace, any thoughts on Erica as an abusive mother or Thomas overstepping his authority? Where does this film fall in the pantheon of twisted psychological dance movies for you? And can you imagine substituting out Portman’s Nina for Elizabeth Berkeley as Nomi Malone, defending her lack of blowjobs to Beth (now played to perfection by Gina Gershon)?

Trace

You pose a lot of questions, Joe, so I’ll just run down the list:

I confess that I didn’t read any sexual abuse from the Erica/Nina relationship, but I wouldn’t reject that reading. It’s entirely possible that sexual abuse is a part of their backstory, but I just didn’t pick up on it.

This isn’t to say that Erica isn’t a despicable character. She absolutely is, but there is a moment in the film when I didn’t view Erica as a complete and total villain: when she tried to keep Nina home on the opening night of Swan Lake. You can view this as genuine care for Nina’s well-being or as a way to prevent Nina from becoming the successful ballerina that she never could be (Erica clearly resents Nina for ending her career early). I choose to view it as the former, if only because of the look of tearful joy that Erica gives Nina as she watches her dance in the final scene. You can see that she is truly happy for her daughter.

As a whole, though, the relationship between Nina and Erica is pitiful. You are right in that Nina is stuck in an emotionally stunted childlike state. She never fully appears to be emotionally capable of anything beyond the maturity of a 12-year-old. I can’t tell you how many times I nearly yelled at my screen “SPEAK UP! STAND UP FOR YOURSELF!” Nina is an incredibly frustrating character, so when she finally does defy her mother and go out with Lily, it’s one of the film’s only moments of triumph for this meek character (as is her retort to Beth when she asks if she sucked Thomas’ cock. Her reply? “Not all of us have to.”)

As for Thomas…I’m leaning into the “he’s a sexual predator” mindset if only because Beth’s words seem to imply that this isn’t the first time he’s used sex to get a performance out of his dancers. I don’t think there is any time where he doesn’t come off as a total creep. I’d like to consider myself a fairly open person when it comes to discussing sexuality, but when he asks Nina to go home and touch herself, I think I made an audible “blech” sound. There is never any circumstance where it is okay for a person in a teaching capacity to say something like that to one of their students.

Finally, how I never thought to see the parallels between Showgirls and Black Swan is beyond me. It makes so much sense! Imagine if Aronofsky had cast Gershon as Beth! Holy moly. I love Ryder, but that would have been simply fantastic (and lest you think Gershon doesn’t have the dramatic chops to pull it off: watch Bound). We need a triple feature of Showgirls, Black Swan and the Suspiria remake as soon as possible. As for Center Stage, my sister adored that movie growing up so I’ve seen it more than a few times. I never cared for it much, so the only thing I remember from it is the sequence where the dancers are tearing apart their ballet slippers (there is a similar scene in Black Swan). That isn’t a vital piece of information to this discussion, but I thought you should know because reasons.

We’ve gone on for a while, so I’ll close with this: it’s a bit surprising that after all of this, we haven’t even touched on the body horror elements in the film. There are times where it really feels like David Cronenberg could have directed Black Swan. From the plethora of nail trauma (both of the finger and toe variety) to the webbed feet to the scratches on her back, Black Swan is littered with cringy moments of grotesque body horror. And even if the CGI hasn’t aged particularly well, Portman’s transformation into the Black Swan is mesmerizing.

I’m so glad we chose this for our next monthly article, if only because it made me appreciate a film I already liked even more (it definitely moved from “like” to “love” territory on a second viewing). Cross out Black Swan!

Next time on Horror Queers: We’re headed into Cabal territory with Clive Barker’s Nightbreed!

Black Swan is available to stream for $3.99 on Amazon.

And don’t forget to catch up on our previous Horror Queers articles here or check out our podcast page here.

The post [Horror Queers] Lesbian Hallucinations, #MeToo And Sexual Repression in ‘Black Swan’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Peele’s Us, we thought it’d be timely to look back at some of the most iconic uses of doubles in horror, and how the visual and narrative tool is used to convey psychological distress, societal tension, generational anxiety, and the ol’ crippling fear of death.

The Stepford Wives (1975)

The women in Stepford, Connecticut are uh, unrelatable. Not just a few, but all of them relish in their roles as housewives — cleaning, cooking, and pleasuring their husbands on the daily with a genuine smile on their faces.

A staple of feminist horror, Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives imagines a community in which real living, breathing women are eradicated and replaced by robotic doppelgangers, i.e. the “perfect wives” to a gang of controlling husbands that form the town’s secretive men’s society. The double in question here represents the patriarchy’s pigeonhole understanding of what women ought to be, but The Stepford Wives also plays into our internalization of gendered social codes — wearing makeup, shaving our legs, the whole shebang — and demonstrates it as a final showdown between doubles. Because sometimes being a woman does feel like being strangled to death with a pair of pink pantyhose by a version of yourself that men prefer.

Lost Highway

David Lynch loves to tinker with doubles– reality and fantasy, the light and dark sides of human nature, the strange and the mundane– in order to create his signature dream-like worlds. In Lost Highway, Lynch buries us in the disturbed psyche of jazz musician, Fred (Bill Pullman), who a third of the way through the film is convicted of murdering his wife, Renee (a brunette Patricia Arquette). What follows is a disembodied jailbreak, the manic rupture of space and time, and Renee’s reappearance in the form of bombshell Alice (Patricia Arquette again, but with old Hollywood bright blonde hair). Creations of Fred’s deranged purview, Arquette’s dual roles embody two feminine archetypes, the devoted wife and the sexy vixen; two figures that Fred is unable to reconcile as one person but that begin to collapse into one another as Fred increasingly loses his shit. In the end, in a final mad dash from the cops along a pitch black highway, Fred’s head literally splits into two, as if to say one body can’t sustain so many conflicting realities in the same tank.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Philip Kaufman’s 1978 adaptation of the Jack Finney novel The Body Snatchers is a gritty alien invasion story that offers the sort of atmospheric paranoia and uncertainty that would characterize John Carpenter’s The Thing a few years later. Is it a friend you’re speaking to, or an inhuman replica? Horror movies often set up the doppelganger binary as a fight between good and evil, but what makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers so downright creepy is the way its alien invaders recalibrate what “normal” actually means. When a bunch of jelly aliens are kicked off their planet, they come to Earth and assimilate really efficiently into society by switching out people with manufactured look-alike bodies. As the swaps take over San Francisco, actual humans become the minority– and that pesky human tendency towards emotion will make you stick out like a sore thumb.

Possession

First thing’s first: this movie is batshit insane.

But then I guess that’s what they say about marriage. Andrzej Żuławski 1981 cult classic is a monster movie, a domestic drama, a psychological thriller, and a black comedy all rolled up into one surreal package. Isabelle Adjani plays Anna, a wife and mother who announces upon her husband’s return from abroad that she wants a divorce. Distraught husband Mark (Sam Neill) hires a private investigator to see what his wife’s up to and from then on a series of bizarre discoveries snowballs into madness complete with nervous breakdowns, self-mutilation, bloody miscarriages, murder, shootout, and beastiality. Where do doubles come into play, you might ask? Long story short, Adjani does double duty as the quaint Helen, her son’s school teacher who steps in to babysit the young boy while his parents are…doing their thing. Meanwhile, Anna keeps an oozing tentacled creature as a lover/pet in her apartment, and get this – it’s slowly transforming into a replica of Mark! So flattering. What to conclude from Żuławski’s dead ringers? Perhaps that what we desire in our romantic partners is often characterized by horrifying contradictions.

It Follows

Catholic guilt won’t stop the best of us from getting it on before marriage, but a cursed STD might do the trick. The titular “it” of It Follows isn’t any one particular thing, it’s a manifestation of random people — from complete strangers to family members and friends — as the eternally recurring evil spirit that hunts down those unfortunate enough to catch the clap. Playing into the gothic trope of the doppelganger as an abject human, Jay (Maika Monroe) encounters entities that look wounded, sick, or diseased; they’re harbingers of fate should they ever manage to catch up with our hero. “It’s” ability to assume the likeness of grandma, dad, or any everyday person walking the streets, conveys shame — the notion that everybody knows and judges your secrets — and elevates it to a source of terror.

Black Swan

Natalie Portman’s Nina is a soft-spoken, delicate little thing when she lands the coveted lead role in her ballet company’s production of Swan Lake. Depicting the white swan comes easily to the virginal good girl, it’s tapping into her buried inner black swan that will prove as horrific as the final climactic performance is virtuosic. As Nina progresses in her quest to master the role of the black swan, she begins to see a dark apparition of herself, and coincidentally starts hanging out with her enemy black swan alternate, Lily (Mila Kunis). Tortured by the desire to succeed and perfect her role, which demands the union of two contrasting feminine personas (the virgin and the whore), Nina essentially loses it, undoing herself to the point of schizophrenia and self-mutilation. Her two halves destroy one another, but leave artistic perfection in their ruin.

Sisters

If the patent on doppelgangers could go to only one filmmaker, Brian DePalma might very well have the strongest claim. With a filmography bursting with body doubles, the iconic director has proven he has quite the obsession with dueling manifestations of replicated bodies (see what I did there?). But if I had to pick one representative, the sash would go to DePalma’s phantasmagorical riff on Hitchcock– Sisters. Starring Margot Kidder as both halves of a pair of formerly conjoined twins, this tightly executed slasher has Danielle, the normal or “good” twin, wrestling with the deranged demands of “evil” twin, Dominique — all captured with the disorienting pizzaz of DePalma’s split-screen compositions. A voyeuristic glean activates this 1973 classic with erotic energy and a touch of humor, a tension that moves us forward as we get to the bottom of just how interdependent and fucked up these sisters really are.

Black Sunday

Grandpa might find it flattering, but it’s mostly creepy when family insists you look like a dead relative. Consider it a warning if said member of the fam was burned at the stake or punctured to death by having a spiked metal mask pushed into her face. In Black Sunday, the horror godfather, Mario Bava, puts an occult spin on the family curse with this tale of doomed reincarnations. A maleficently styled Barbara Steele does double duty as both Asa, the 17th-century witch with a bone to pick, and Asa’s targeted descendent, Katia. Bava toys with our expectations by making the damsel in distress indistinguishable from the killer; one particularly provocative scene has corpse-Asa draining Katia, who ages as the other assumes her youthful appearance. Rule of thumb: there’s only ever room enough for one of a kind.

Dead Ringers

If I were having sex with an identical twin I’d insist on leaving some sort of identifying trail mark — hicky, bite mark, anything! — to ensure I wasn’t falling for the ol’ switcheroo male twins in movies seem to always pull on unsuspecting young women. David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers is one of the most distinctive “double” movies in history, a showcase for a young Jeremy Irons who plays a pair of twin fertility doctors with interdependent means of getting laid. Elliot seduces patients and then passes them down to the introverted Beverly when he grows tired of them, a cycle of give and take that maintains the twins in perfect harmony. When Beverly, also the more sentimental of the two, falls in love, this balance is fatally disrupted and presented in signature  Cronenberg fashion: with drug abuse, manic depression, and delusions of mutant genitalia.

Lake Mungo

This indie breakout isn’t exactly premised on the idea of the doppelganger, but the film’s climactic scene — admittedly one of the scariest reveals I’ve seen in the past decade or so — makes use of the trope in an unexpected way. When Alice Palmer is found dead and washed ashore, her family struggles to find closure and soon discover that Alice was leading a double life — as mistress to a couple she used to babysit for. Like Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, Alice’s fraudulent lifestyle was cause for insecurity and mental instability. Lake Mungo takes a mockumentary approach to solving the mysteries behind Alice’s existence, showing the members of her grieving family as they try and put the pieces together to who exactly Alice was prior to her death. After somewhat of a scavenger hunt, they unbury a cell phone Alice kept hidden, which contains footage of her walking at the beach alone at night. The film is mostly restrained and devoid of jumpscares, so when Alice’s recorded beach walk ends with the encounter of a doppelganger corpse of herself, the result is jarring — a nightmare image that prophesies things to come…

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Treat yourself to hours of frightful fun with this exclusive Halloween Collection of 19 thrilling, chilling films with limited-edition art packaging by renowned artist/illustrator Orlando Arocena. Utilizing vibrant colors and a fervent imagination, Arocena’s striking cover art creations add a perfect touch of terror to these haunting horror titles. Choose your favorite Halloween hits, featuring Hollywood’s biggest stars, and start planning a killer movie night that’s sure to be a scream. It’s an eye-popping, spine-tingling collection to die for!

The below titles will be available at major retailers nationwide for a limited time and while supplies last beginning on September 12, 2017. Fans who purchase any of the films at Walmart will also receive an exclusive coloring book featuring all 19 of Arocena’s designs!

Films available in the exclusive Halloween collection include:

• 28 Days Later
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
• Black Swan
• Carrie (1976)
• Child’s Play
• Devil’s Due
• The Fly (1986)
• From Hell
• The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
• Jeepers Creepers
• Jennifer’s Body
• Joy Ride
• Killer Klowns from Outer Space
• The Other Side of the Door
• Poltergeist (2015)
• The Return of the Living Dead
• Victor Frankenstein
• Wrong Turn
• Young Frankenstein

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That’s not to say that we (or filmmakers) need validation from mainstream festivals and golden statuettes in order to respect the horror genre, but the yearly snubbing of amazing horror films is doing a disservice to the careers of the artists that make the genre worth watching in the first place. Some less-informed critics might argue that the reason horror movies remain absent from the spotlight is that ‘modern horror’ isn’t as good as it used to be, but anyone who’s kept up with the genre in the last few decades knows that these critics just haven’t been watching the right movies.

From the amazing performances in Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects to the flawless cinematography of David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, you’ll have a hard time finding a single year without at least one Oscar-worthy horror film that didn’t get the recognition it deserved. There was, in fact, a time when the genre was more present at the most prestigious of awards ceremonies, even if most of the nominations were relegated to minor technical awards.

That’s why I’ve compiled this history of Horror at the Academy Awards, in an attempt to recall a time when Hollywood took our favorite genre a little more seriously. While there are a great many films from several genres that regularly get snubbed at the Oscars, there’s a certain stigma attached to the more gruesome productions out there, one that both audiences and critics might benefit from getting rid of.

At this point, it’s common knowledge that only two “pure” horror films have ever been nominated for a Best Picture award: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs. Only the latter managed to actually nab the illusive statuette (not to mention the Best Actor, Actress, Director and Adapted Screenplay awards on that same evening), but the nominations alone were enough to attest to the seriousness of these films. While these run-ins with the Academy can be considered some of the genre’s crowning achievements, they’re far from the first time horror has left its mark on the event.

As far back as 1932, when the awards were still a private ceremony, Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde was already an Academy favorite, accumulating nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor in a Leading Role. While Mamoulian’s film only managed to win in that last category (and even then, tied with Kidor’s The Champ), it’s still largely considered to be the first horror film to garner mainstream attention during the awards season.

Sadly, the Motion Picture Production Code would soon deliver a serious blow to the horror genre, as the censors would routinely butcher scary movies in order to make them more palpable for Christian audiences, often with disastrous results. James Whale’s Frankenstein is a notable example of a film bogged down by censorship, with the state of Kansas memorably demanding that nearly half the film be cut in order to be distributed. All this moral hullaballoo contributed to the demonization of horror movies, which no doubt influenced Hollywood’s decision to keep them out of the awards ceremonies.

With a few exceptions in minor technical categories, it would be decades until the Academy would once again honor a horror movie. Thankfully, with the sudden rise of Hitchcock, scares became fashionable again, and his groundbreaking 1960 film, Psycho, was nominated in four categories: Best Actress, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction. Ultimately, the film didn’t win any of these nominations, but it was a return to form for the genre, proving in the public eye that horror could be so much more than just schlock and supposed anti-religious propaganda.

Hitchcock’s next film, The Birds, would receive a single nomination in the special effects category, and we would only see the Academy recognize another serious horror movie at the end of the Motion Picture Production Code, with Roman Polanski’s 1968 thriller, Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski’s film would go on to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay, winning the former. It can be said that this ushered in a new era for horror movies, as they would receive much more positive mainstream attention in the years to come than they ever had before.

With movies like the aforementioned Exorcist, Spielberg’s Jaws, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, and Ridley Scott’s Alien, the 1970s cemented horror filmmakers as serious masters of the craft in the Academy’s eyes. So far, this is arguably the best decade of horror on nearly all fronts, and possibly the last time that the genre was rightly perceived as an equal. Nevertheless, these nominations helped further the career of many talented artists who are now considered Hollywood legends, and helped shape the landscape of everyone’s favorite decade of entertainment.

The 1980s started off well, with Rick Baker’s phenomenal work on John Landis’ American Werewolf in London being recognized with a nomination in the brand new Best Makeup category. In fact, the horror genre would soon become quite familiar with this category, as most of this decade’s nominated horror movies would end up winning that award. James Cameron’s Aliens would break the mold with its seven nominations and two technical wins, but Hollywood’s love affair with horror movies was dissipating.

Fortunately, the 1990s had quite a few notable wins and nominations, with Rob Reiner’s Misery starting the decade off on a good note, providing Kathy Bates with the coveted Best Actress award. This was soon followed by Silence of the Lambs’ historic win, but the line between thriller and horror was starting to blur, and the Academy had an obvious preference for the former rather than the latter. Strangely enough, it was a great period for vampire films, with Francis Ford Coppola’s peculiar adaptation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, garnering four nominations (and one win), and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire garnering two.

This was also the decade that introduced us to M. Night Shyamalan and his breakout feature, The Sixth Sense, which just so happened to be nominated in six categories. These included Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay and even Best Picture. While this is a feat in and of itself, it also marks the last time that a conventional horror film would ever take home so many nominations. The worst part is that this was almost two decades ago!

Although some debate that Aronofsky’s Black Swan is the Academy’s last true horror sweetheart, that ultimately depends on your definition of a horror movie. Either way, that’s one hell of a gap between award-winning scary movies, so what happened? The 2000s may have initially been saturated with remakes and a few duds, but for every generic ghost story there was an artistically inspired production like Mary Harron’s American Psycho or even Ti West’s House of the Devil. That’s not even mentioning the amazing horror movies produced outside of the United States that could have easily populated the Best Foreign Picture category.

In these last couple of years alone, we’ve already been gifted with extraordinary cinematic gems like Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Fede Álvarez’s Hitchcockian Don’t Breathe, and there’s simply no excuse for these films not to be appreciated by the Academy. That being said, I’m well aware that the Oscars aren’t as important an event as the media makes them out to be, but it’s still disrespectful to exclude the countless men and women working in the horror genre from these events due to outdated notions that they only produce ‘B’ movies.

Of course, there’s a lot of politics going on behind the scenes at these awards ceremonies, so artistic merit isn’t the only thing to be considered. Nevertheless, we now live in a world where Suicide Squad has won more Oscars than most of our favorite horror movies, and you can’t fault someone for getting pissed off about that. In time, as more and more amazing horror films hit the big screen, perhaps we’ll get lucky and the Academy will realize the error in its ways. Until then, all we can do is support and enjoy our favorite genre until Hollywood respects it as much as we do.

The post [Editorial] A History of Horror at the Academy Awards appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

***SPOILERS and NSFW imagery for many films below***

Pus

I’ve talked about my issues with pus before and specifically mentioned two of the three scenes listed below. Give me all the blood and gore you want, but the second pus gets involved I’m done. Gross!

Hostel

Few things are worse than losing an eye, but what about losing an eye and then having pus spew out of your eye socket? That’s what happens when Paxton (Jay Hernandez) snips off Kana’s (Jennifer Lim) eye in Eli Roth’s Hostel.

Dead Alive

Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive is lauded for its excessive amounts of gore, but it’s all so silly that it’s never really that disturbing. The same cannot be said about the scene in which Lionel’s (Timothy Balme) decomposing mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody) attempts to eat a bowl of custard during a dinner party. A boil on Vera’s cheek bursts and squirts pus into a guest’s custard bowl and he eats it. It sets the standard for gross-out moments in horror films.

Demons

Poor Rosemary (Geretta Giancarlo) never stood a chance. After getting her face nicked by an evil demon mask, the wound slowly becomes infected. When it becomes too much to handle, Rosemary runs to the bathroom to give it a closer look. I’m sure you can guess what happens next. PUS EVERYWHERE. Then a demonic transformation for good measure.

Nails

Imprint

Takashi Miike’s (Audition) entry into Showtime’s Masters of Horror was pulled from the first season due to concerns about the film’s graphic nature. Yes, Imprint was too graphic for Showtime(!), and no scene is more indicative to why as much as the infamous fingernail scene. A young prostitute (Michié) is tortured after being accused of stealing a jade ring from her Madam. She is burned and has needles driven into her gums, but nothing is as difficult to watch as seeing more needles driven under her fingernails. It is one of the most disturbing moments in horror history.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Marcus Nispel’s remake of Tobe Hooper’s classic tells you in the first scene that something is  going to happen to someone’s fingernail, but you’re still not prepared for it when Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) carries Andy (Mike Vogel) down into the basement. Desperate, Andy claws at the wall to stop Leatherface, losing a fingernail or two in the process.

P2

First, P2 is underrated. Second, it features a really grotesque sequence in which protagonist Angela (Rachel Nichols) detaches a fingernail and is forced to pull it off of her finger. Trapped in the garage of the office building she works at, Angela manages to escape her captor Thomas (Wes Bentley) and make it to the exit g ate. After squeezing her hand through the gate with her cell phone in an attempt to get a signal, she drops the phone. Just out of reach, she claws at the ground to try to grab it and loses a fingernail. Watching her pull it off is simply cringeworthy.

Black Swan

There are a lot of disturbing body horror moments in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, but non quite as shocking as Nina (Natalie Portman) pulling her cuticle back, only to lose even more skin off of her finger. It hurts just thinking about it!

Eyes

A Serbian Film

One could argue that everything about A Serbian Film makes you want to turn away from the film. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that they “enjoyed” it. It’s more of a movie you endure. Still, it does feature one shocking moment (of many) in which Miloš (Srđan Todorović) literally fucks a man’s eye-socket to death.

Zombie

This one is a little cliché if only because it always pops up whenever someone talks about disturbing eye scenes in film, but it pops up so often for a reason! Paola (Olga Karlatos) manages to escape a zombie’s grasp and slams the door on its fingers, only for the zombie to break through the door and pull Paola eye-first into a large wooden splinter.

Mouth

Oldboy

Chan-Wook Park’s masterpiece of revenge features one graphic scene in which Oh Dae-Su severs his tongue in a last-ditch effort to appease his enemy. It doesn’t work, but the moment the scissors touch the tongue you can’t help but look away. Shockingly, Park doesn’t even show the tongue cutting, but the mental image and very real sound effects make it difficult to stomach.

Bug

Bug is one of the rare films to receive an F CinemaScore from audiences. This is probably due to the fact that it was marketed as a killer big movie. It’s not a killer bug movie. Rather, it’s a tale of a paranoid schizophrenic (Michael Shannon) who believes that microscopic bugs were planted inside his body by the government. In one memorable scene he pulls his tooth out when he thinks a colony of bugs is living inside it.

Genitals

Antichrist

Also known as the movie where Charlotte Gainsbourg cuts off her clitoris with a pair of scissors and Willem Dafoe ejaculates blood. Need I say more?

Hostel: Part II

Alright, so this one may not really be a head turner, but it sure is funny. For most of Hostel: Part II, we are led to believe that Todd (Richard Burgi) is the psychotic one and his pal Stuart (Roger Bart) is the shy, reserved one. Turns out that is not the case and Stuart is a raging psychotic. This makes it even more cathartic when Beth (Lauren German) cuts off his penis and feeds it to a dog.

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The film, which is directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, is set in the 1930’s and follows Portman and Rose Depp as sisters who, “…are believed to possess the supernatural ability to connect with ghosts. They cross paths with a visionary French producer while performing in Paris.”

According to the site:

The political context of “Planetarium” will have a modern resonance with the current crisis and rise of extremism in Europe. The character of the producer is freely inspired by Jewish producer Bernard Natan, one of the biggest French film industry figures of the ’20s and ’30s, who eventually died in Auschwitz.

The film is expected to be released in May, 2016.

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The song comes from their Hot Sauce EP, which you can purchase on Beatport.

Got any thoughts/questions/concerns for Jonathan Barkan? Shoot him a message on Twitter or on Bloody-Disgusting!

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Got any thoughts/questions/concerns for Jonathan Barkan? Shoot him a message on Twitter or on Bloody-Disgusting!

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The original script, by Mark Heyman (Black Swan), has been around for a while now so it’s good to see this project gathering some steam. Nolfi will supervise a rewrite by Heyman, which sounds like some kind of strict overbearing thing until you realize it’s just the natural collaboration between a writer and director that happens on any project.

Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain, Black Swan) and Michael London (Sideways) will produce XOXO through their respective shingles Protozoa Pictures and Groundswell Productions.

The film is described as Fatal Attraction for the digital age and “follows an on-the-rise exec who’s engaged to be married but enjoys flirting online. He meets an alluring woman on Facebook and the two begin a virtual relationship, but the protag soon discovers that his Internet romance is seeping into his actual life in a deadly way.

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Malcolm Lee will helm the latest franchise installment where Ash will play a friend and rival dancer to Tisdale’s character.

Scary Movie 5 will spoof: Black Swan, Paranormal Activity, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and 127 Hours.

David Zucker, who wrote and directed both Scary Movie 3 and 4, will also be returning to co-write and produce the fifth installment alongside Lee.

Still no word on if Anthony Anderson, Regina Hall and Kevin Hart are officially returning, as we previously reported.

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Surface wise, Black Swan takes on the same visual presentation as The Wrestler‘s grainy, voyeuristic cinematography but Matthew Libatique’s approach improves upon it greatly, adding a graceful quality to it that mirrors the play’s whimsical choreography. Frequent Aronofsky collaborator and composer Clint Mansell created a score that works hand-in-hand with the film’s traditional horror sound design, contemporizing Swan Lake’s compositions with darker ambiance without losing its classical performance hall beauty.

Most impressive about the film, however, is the script by Mark Heyman and Andres Heinz, which is comprised of everything from psychological and body horror to sexual awakenings and self-preservation. It’s clear early on that Black Swan isn’t beholden to any one genre, never giving viewers an opportunity to confidently predict what sort of terrible hallucination or actual event will befall Nina. As her perception of reality degrades, nothing can be concretely identified as an actual occurrence, even after it seems it has been. The four main female characters in the film all act as different parts of Nina’s personality, as if her mind has been broken from the stress of perfection, a mental instability previously explored by Aronofsky in Pi. Nina, the subdued and innocent perfectionist, is only part of a greater construct, sharing equal space – but not necessarily screen time – with Lily, her dark side that tries to steal the spotlight; her well-intended but often domineering and controlling mother (Barbara Hershey), who gave up her career and is living vicariously through her daughter; and Beth, who struggled to retain her star status after her fifteen minutes were up, a scenario Nina fears will be happening to her sooner than expected. Nina’s psyche, or what of it that may or may not exist, intermittently makes everyone she crosses paths with her enemy, even herself.

Fox’s 1080p MPEG-4 AVC encode is extremely faithful to its theatrical presentation, which is good news for me and bad news for people who hate grain. Black Swan is a beautiful looking film, but the cameras used – Canon DSLRs and a 16mm Arriflex – tend to give everything a documentary-type look. That’s all fine and dandy except that the 16mm is extremely grainy and the DSLRs are 1080p high-def cameras, so there’s a lot of contrast throughout the film. The transfer is exceptional in the sense that it perfectly captures that – and the dual visual presentation could also be attributed to the dual personalities in the film – and there’s no noticeable DNR or edge enhancement to give it a glossy look, which was clearly not the intention of Aronofsky and Libatique. The DTS-HD 5.1 mix works really well across all channels, retaining the film’s ambiance without overusing bass or overblowing Mansell’s score, which is one of Black Swan‘s highlights. Aside from the absence of a commentary track, the special features cover all the film’s bases and are informative.

Those expecting the nightmarish, hallucinatory journey of Suspiria because of the film’s setting won’t have their wish fulfilled, but should be equally enamored with Aronofsky’s cautionary tale of pushing yourself to the limit that shares more in common with Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy and the early works of De Palma and Cronenberg than any performer-centric film. Portman’s turn as Nina is poetically haunting and quite possibly the greatest – and most demanding – performance of her career. Moments into Black Swan, it’s obvious that this is just as much a passion project as it was for Aronofsky, resulting in a collaborative team perfectly suited for exploring the duality of human nature and the struggle of good and evil in a film that is as beautiful as it is harsh.

Special Features

Metamorphosis (48:55) – Running almost an hour in length, this behind-the-scenes doc focuses on the process of making the film from the crew’s perspective and not the actors’ – though, they do have some interviews spliced in throughout. What’s really impressive about Metamorphosis is that Aronofsky and the producers talk about how small the budget was and how they worked around certain limitations, but nobody ever sounded like they were complaining and a lot of making-of features leave me with that sour impression. They cover a lot of bases here (cinematography, shooting in NY in the middle of winter, choreography, sFx) so there’s plenty to dig into and appreciate.

Ballet (2:33) – This featurette is kind of deceiving. Sure, they talk about the ballet itself, but it’s more a brief EPK for the film that pales in comparison to Metamorphosis.

Production Design (4:00) – After trying to court production designer Therese DePrez for years, Aronofosky finally succeeded with
Black Swan. DePrez discusses the abstract nature of the stage design, as well as the childlike and warm appearance of Nina’s bedroom.

Costume Design (3:55) – Like the previous vignette, this one features a brief chat with costume designer Amy Westcott and goes over a few points, such as the appearance of the black vs. white swan.

Profile: Natalie Portman and Darren Aronofsky (6:04) – Short interviews with both of the major names involved with the film that are fairly meaty. Portman focuses on the rigorous nature of her training and how she prepared, mentally and physically, for the role, while Aronofsky discusses the genesis of the project, starting with a script he was handed as Requiem For A Dream was wrapping up, and some of the director choices he made dealing with how to shoot the film.

Conversation: Preparing For The Role and Dancing With The Camera (5:28) – An interview piece where Aronofsky grills Portman about her background in dancing (she attended jazz, ballet, etc. classes when she was younger) and how she applied that to her “re-training” and performance in the film. It’s a nice, friendly conversation between the two, and it got a chuckle or two out of me.

Fox Movie Channel Presents: In Character With Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel, and Direct Effect Darren Aronofsky (22:56) – Some floating head interviews with the cast and director that were aired at some point on The Fox Movie Channel. The pieces with Ryder, Cassel, and Hershey are worth watching since they don’t have a strong presence on the disc otherwise, but the chats with Portman and Aronofsky have a fair amount of overlap with other featurettes on the release.

Film: 5/5

Blu-Ray: 4/5

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