Stephen Bjork

Five years before directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein pointed their sights at the world of fantasy role playing games with the delightful Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, they took aim at the broader gaming culture in general with Game Night—and they took a few pot shots at David Fincher in the process, too. That’s due in no small part to the fact that writer Mark Perez’s story for Game Night is a pretty blatant riff on John Brancato and Michael Ferris’ script for The Game. Yet while Fincher had used their idea of a live action role-playing game run amok as a vehicle to explore personal trauma, familial guilt, and rampant paranoia, Daley and Goldstein stripped away the layers of metaphor and took the concept at face value. Game Night is a tale of deception set in a world where deception is an inherent part of good gamesmanship, so it openly celebrates the ability to take others by surprise. All’s fair in love and war, but anything goes when gaming sessions are involved.

Dario Argento has long been renowned as one of the master visual stylists in the horror genre, with his prowling camerawork and elaborate color design working together in his own trademarked fashion. Of course, he’s also a master aural stylist, making use of driving prog rock scores from the likes of Goblin in order to support these distinctive visuals. With Argento, sound and image work together in perfect harmony. While that harmony hasn’t always extended to the thematic level, it did so just as perfectly in his 1987 film Opera (aka Terror at the Opera). It’s a story that revolves around a production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Teatro Regio opera house in Parma, Italy, yet it’s as much focused on the act of seeing as it is on the act of listening. It’s also focused on the act of Becoming, but more on that in a moment.

While there have been plenty of horror films throughout cinematic history that have been landmarks of the horror genre, only a few of those can be considered as broader cultural landmarks that have transcended genre and tapped into something more universal. The Exorcist is one such film, since its cultural reach far transcended the bounds of typical horror fandom. While Warner Bros. had no faith in the film (no pun intended) and tried to dump it in late December on a small handful of screens, The Exorcist quickly became a phenomenon that lasted for a whopping 105 weeks at the box office, forcing the studio to expand its release in order to keep up. Audiences were lining up around the block to see it, quite literally so, regardless of how unpleasant that the winter weather may have been. The Exorcist was the “It” movie of 1973 that remained an “It” movie for the next two years as well. Yet to understand why this religious-themed horror film touched that kind of cultural nerve, you need to turn not to original novelist William Peter Blatty, but rather to Stephen King. We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s start with Blatty first.

Clint Eastwood was one of the biggest global box office draws during the Seventies and the Eighties, but at the time, he never quite got enough credit for his willingness to explore different kinds of material. Even when he stayed within familiar genres, he freely pushed the envelope of his own persona; the likes of Ben Shockley in The Gauntlet and Wes Block in Tightrope couldn’t possibly have been farther removed from his signature character of “Dirty” Harry Calahan. Yet while he was frequently associated with cop movies and westerns, he never let himself get limited by genre. From The Beguiled to Paint Your Wagon to Bronco Billy and Honkeytonk Man, he wasn’t quite as easy to pin down as some people thought that he was. While he never really looked back after making his auspicious directorial debut with Play Misty for Me, he was still willing to take a chance on working with other filmmakers, arguably never more so than when he gave the young writer/director Michael Cimino an opportunity to make his feature film debut with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

On April 10, 1952, Elia Kazan sat down before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in order to provide amended testimony. He had first appeared before the Committee back in January, but while he admitted that he had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1934-1936, he refused to name any other members. His resolve broke quickly, and just three months later, he returned to deliver a sworn affidavit that named eight other former members of the Group Theatre collective (including Clifford Odets and Paula Miller). He also implicated several party officials and a few members of other groups like the League of Workers Theaters and the Theater of Action. He didn’t stop there, either; two days later, he took out a defiant ad in the New York Times that offered the following justification: “I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts (about communism) has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency.”

When Ti West and Mia Goth traveled to New Zealand in order to shoot X, they never intended it to form the foundation for a trilogy. The misadventures of the ambitious Maxine Minx (Goth) while filming an adult movie in rural Texas during the Seventies was supposed to be a self-contained story, with Maxine barely escaping the gruesome fate faced by her fellow filmmakers. Yet Maxine’s elderly nemesis Pearl (also Goth) proved to be a compelling (if somewhat cryptic) character, so West and Goth decided to explore her backstory with the prequel Pearl. That film helped to establish parallels between Maxine and Pearl that went far beyond just having the same actor playing each part. They both shared dreams of stardom as well as a willingness to do anything in order to overcome any obstacles that were in their way. What they didn’t necessarily share was success in achieving their dreams, so after the yin and the yang of these dual personalities clashed in X, it was perhaps inevitable that West and Goth would collaborate on a follow-up that explored the impacts of this conflict in MaXXXine.

In William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the young Prince of Denmark is feeling tormented by the actions of others, with events beyond his control buffeting him from all sides. So, he devises a play of his own as a trap for his deceptive uncle Claudius, declaring that “the play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Three centuries later, Robert Bolt inverted that formula in his play A Man for All Seasons. The king in this case was Henry VIII, a man who lived a life completely untrammeled by the dictates of conscience. Instead, Bolt’s play was the thing that captured the conscience of one of the king’s subjects, Sir Thomas More. More held true to his own conscience against the capricious wishes of the king, and it ultimately cost him his head.

One, Two, Three is a sadly neglected Billy Wilder treasure that deserves its own place in the pantheon of his other much more revered comedies. A box office failure on its original release, it ended up falling victim to its own topicality. The Berlin Wall went up overnight while it was being shot on location in Germany, forcing the production to move to Munich and the budget to go way overboard. Despite the otherwise innocuous nature of its story about Coca-Cola executive C.R. MacNamara (James Cagney) trying to work out a deal to market the soda in the Soviet Union, growing tensions between East and West made the political undercurrents a bit too uncomfortable for audiences to laugh at in 1961.

After the successful run of The Muppet Show on television, it was perhaps inevitable that co-creators Jim Henson and Frank Oz would take their lovable gang of misfits and make the leap to the big screen. They did just that with The Muppet Movie in 1979, releasing it while the series was still on the air. The Muppet Movie was also a major success, so they quickly turned around with a sequel The Great Muppet Caper, which opened shortly after the final episode of the show aired in 1981. The Great Muppet Caper was a bit more experimental, trading in the freewheeling Hellzapoppin’ nature of the series and the first film for a relatively linear narrative. Clearly, Henson and Oz were looking to stretch their legs a bit after having done the same thing for many years, and while The Great Muppet Caper was a less successful than its predecessor, they decided to double down creatively with their next project. The result was a film that was quite unlike anything else that had ever been seen prior to that point, at least as far as mainstream filmmaking was concerned: The Dark Crystal.

After the behind-the-scenes chaos of David Fincher’s flawed but fascinating debut feature Alien3, he rebounded with a vengeance three years later by reinventing the serial killer genre with Se7en.