I’m a psychiatrist who was terrified of horror films – until I learned about ‘cinematic neurosis’

Why do scary movies thrill some viewers and send others running for the hills? Our writer gets to the bottom of his fear of the genre – with the assistance of Freud, clinical researchers and his six-year-old self I am six years old, and I am watching a man turn into a werewolf. The film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy. I am staring up at our black-and-white TV fixated on the werewolf transformation unfolding in slow motion and I begin to scream so inconsolably that my parents must carry me upstairs to calm me down. That night was the beginning of my lifelong fear of horror films and of the supernatural, of darkness and of being alone in a house. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/nwdHRqF via IFTTT

Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

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