Arielle Cruz '15 is only glowing with praise about the mysterious, clever horror film The Cabin in the Woods

Hannah Stamler '12 argues why Hitchcock's style of psychological terror trumps all else. 

Horror films and Hollywood have had a relationship that’s more like a romantic comedy. They met, they courted, there were ups, there were downs and then years of neglect and ball-and-chain treatment, and now no one even knows why they were even together in the first place … “I don’t even know you anymore!” says Hollywood. Horror Film replies: “You used to have taste! Now you’re this completely different person that doesn’t care about anything!” Leave it to the movies to be the Woody Allen character in the relationship.

Boy, are they remaking every horror movie classic or what? First The Hills Have Eyes and its pointless sequel, then Rob Zombie’s (re)take on Halloween, then Prom Night (ugh), and Black Christmas (blarf) and now the unholy goalie Jason Voorhees gets the treatment. What next? Elm Street again? Last House on the Left? Wait they are remaking those? Really? Why? Why?!

Visiting architect Peter Eisenman ’55 introduced a sceening of three short films by Michael Haneke on Wednesday including Funny Games.

In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a scene-by-scene Hollywood remake of Haneke’s own foreign feature, two effete young men who claim to be guests of the neighbors visit a family in their vacation home in order to borrow eggs. The shell of the family’s complacent bourgeois lifestyle quickly breaks open, however: The boys, named Peter and Paul, refuse to leave. Playing on the host/hostage dialectic, the boys subject the family to irrational games of “do unto others,” as if parodying the concept of Christian charity in the guise of a sadistic Tweedledee and Tweedledum.