REVERSEBLOG: the reverse shot blog

It’s commonplace to bemoan the sad reality that animation has been so long considered a children's medium. The limitless possibilities for expression and beauty and terror and surreality offered by the form make it frustrating that it has been co-opted by the gatekeepers of kids’ entertainment. Every once in a while, a Persepolis or a Waltz with Bashir comes along and reminds people that animation is, shockingly, not just for tots.

“Repression is the father of neurosis,” chides Patrick MacNee in the first clearly audible moments of The Howling (1981). Fortunately, Joe Dante’s never been one to hold it all in. This is, after all, the guy who unleashed not one but two sets of crazed Gremlins (and a squadron of homicidal plastic G.I. Joe knock-offs) on multiplex audiences, the guy who first made his named with something called The Movie Orgy. If the werewolf genre is all about giving over to the beast within, then movie-brat Dante would seem to be an ideal to candidate to helm an all-out howler.

East meets west on the high seas in Reverse Shot's first Talkie/Direct Address mutation. Watch as DA host Damon Smith and filmmaker Todd Rohal canoe Austin's Town Lake and grapple with even discussing his hilariously bizarre new comedy, The Catechism Cataclysm.

David Lynch is not often thought of as a director of horror films, yet for the past 30-plus years he has given us some of the most genuinely terrifying imagery in American cinema. Taking into account all the horror movies that have come and gone in the past decade, and all the momentarily effective genres that have had their moment to cast their long shadow (J-horror, torture porn, shaky caught-on-camcorder mockumentaries), was there a scene more pit-of-your-stomach-and-soul dreadful than the one set at Winkie’s diner in Mulholland Drive? It’s not merely the scene-punctuating emergence of the monstrous man lurking out back—it’s the entire buildup, which functions on a palpable dream logic better than any I’ve ever seen attempted in a film. The two mysterious men at the booth; the haunted-looking one letting the straight-arrow know he asked him here just to talk about his nightmares; the fear that the man of his dreams is out there and the vague declaration that “he’s the one who’s doing it” (doing what?! ); the camera that seems to haphazardly float around them as they talk; the moment when the straight-arrow’s specific position when paying his bill at the counter brings to fruition the man’s dream world; and finally the inexorable walk out back: we know he will be there. He pops out, ghost-like, the sound sucks out of the scene save a muffled pulse, and we feel we’re having a heart attack along with the terrified character.