With the Oscars this weekend, I was reminded that The Silence of the Lambs is now in its 20th year. Amazingly enough (to me, at least), I have students in my class who have not yet read or experienced Thomas Harris's  1988 novel or Jonathan Demme's 1991 film adaptation, reminding me that the cultural importance of this film needs to be cultivated to pass on to a new generation of gothic/horror readers and viewers. The Silence of the Lambs was released twenty years ago this month, amidst the first Gulf War, on February 14th, 1991. It would be another thirteen months before it won the to

In recent years, Hollywood has returned to its begrudgingly necessary bedfellow, the horror film, in order to finance other blockbuster projects onscreen. While I firmly agree with the BBC’s film critic Dr. Mark Kermode, who, vocally and repeatedly, blames the success of films by Michael Bay (Transformers (2007), Pearl Harbour (2001), Armageddon (1998) etc.) for the lobotomy of intelligent cinema in exchange for special effects and pyrotechnics onscreen, my ire is significantly stoked when such special effects directors cast their eyes onto horror classics in order to recapitalise upon t

After experiencing the much anticipated Black Swan, the idea of gothic hybridity and transformation in the cinema of Darren Aronofsky has returned to me again and again. The film’s popularity, compounded  by the recent Oscar nominations and the apparently “insane” ending (according to film reviewers in Ireland and the UK at least), has led me to think critically not only about the increasing mainstream interest in the transformative body onscreen, but also in a continuing focus in director Darren Aronofsky’s films to date. In a myriad of ways, Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (200