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Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The Seaside Gothic of I Know What You Did Last Summer

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With its themes of the past returning to haunt the present, emotional and psychological turmoil, the exhumation of dark secrets, and bloody revenge from beyond the grave, teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) is deeply entrenched in the Gothic. Based on the YA novel by Lois Duncan, and adapted for the screen by Kevin Williamson, it tells of four teenaged friends – Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Barry (Ryan Phillippe) - who, one year after dumping a body into the murky depths of the sea to cover up their involvement in an apparently fatal car accident, find themselves stalked by a mysterious fisherman wielding a large hook. From its opening images of surf crashing upon a rugged coastline to its tautly knotted climax aboard a fishing boat, I Know What You Did Last Summer is also awash with aesthetic and thematic notions of the ‘seaside gothic’, as it contemplates the shifting boundaries between past and present, l...
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7 Days

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2010 Dir. Daniel Grou aka Podz Middle-aged surgeon Bruno Hamel (Claude Legault), his wife Sylvie (Fanny Mallette) and their eight-year-old daughter Jasmine (Rose-Marie Coallier) live a happy, uneventful life in the suburbs of a quiet town. When Jasmine is brutally raped and murdered by a local man, Anthony Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil), Bruno hatches a meticulous plan to make him pay for his crimes. He will kidnap and torture Lemaire for seven days before executing him and then turning himself in… Directed by Daniel Grou ( Vampire High, Big Wolf On Campus, The Hunger ), aka Podz, and adapted for the screen by author Patrick Senécal ('5150 Elm’s Way,' 'Evil Words') from his best-selling novel, ‘Les sept jours du talion,’ 7 Days is an intense and disturbing French-Canadian thriller that has been described as ' Saw directed by Michael Haneke ( Funny Games ) or Lars von Trier ( Antichrist ).’ Coldly filmed in a stylish, yet detached manner, 7 Days is a harrowi...
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Poison for the Fairies (1986)

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When Flavia is enrolled at a new school she is befriended by Verónica, an unpopular orphan who lives with her ailing grandmother and whose nanny regales her with tales of witches, fairies and spells. What begins as an innocent enough friendship soon turns coercive, as Verónica confides to Flavia that she is a witch in disguise, making Flavia a reluctant accomplice in several acts of wickedness. As the line between what is real and what is imagined begins to blur, Flavia descends into a terrifying spiral of magic, manipulation, petty jealousy, and murder. Written and directed by Carlos Enrique Taboada, and part of a rich tradition of Mexican Gothic horror cinema - which includes such titles as The Witch’s Mirror (1962) and The Curse of the Crying Woman (1961) -  Poison for the Fairies unfurls as a complex study of the fraught and intense friendship between two impressionable girls whose dabbling in witchcraft and descent into occultism leads to tragedy. While it quite comfortably...
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