The Foxy Film Fan

Directed by Alexandre Aja and produced by the legendary Sam Raimi, Crawl  is the first movie to nearly give me a physical panic attack. Kaya Scodelario plays Haley, a swimmer who visits her estranged father (Barry Pepper) during a Category 5 hurricane to make sure he evacuates safely. Her rescue mission turns into the pair swimming, crawling, and climbing for their lives as they dodge the gaping maws of alligators which have made their way into the home's basement. Horror movies which spend the majority of their run-time in a single setting tend to grow old quickly, but Crawl chooses not to waste time (or scares). The CGI alligators have a real presence throughout the film, and with the movie's minimal soundtrack their every splash and snarl reverberates throughout the cavernous basement. I'm not claustrophobic, nor am I particularly scared of alligators (or at least I wasn't prior to seeing Crawl ), but Aja's sparing use of the camera flowing seamlessly unde...

Ouija (2014) For many years jump scares have been used as a tactic in horror, and when well executed a perfectly used jump scare can be the most memorable and effective scene in a wonderfully frightening film. However, this is not usually the case. Rather than carefully executing jump scares with precision and intense scares, they're wasted on useless instances meant to make the audience flinch or feel momentarily startled rather than deeply frightened. For example, how many horror movies have you seen where a character looks at something ominous, only to be violently startled by a friend jumping up from behind them yelling "hello" as a sound added in post production rings in loudly to make the audience flinch? It's a tactic which wastes the audience's tension on release rather than providing further tension, and it's a tactic which makes for cheap horror movies which end up being more irritating than they are truly frightening. Take, for example, hor...