biteho.com

A dysfunctional family isn’t a particularly original source of horror, and Hereditary doesn’t blow the genre open with some revolutionary new take. It’s just gripping, white-knuckled, old school horror that never, over more than two hours, lets you get comfortable for long, despite the familiarity of its themes and tropes.

How do you deal with grief? It’s different for everyone, and if you’ve never experienced a major loss, you can’t really know how you’ll respond. Some people blame themselves; others lash out at loved ones; some people close up and just try to keep it together. The reactions of the Graham family–Toni Collette’s Annie, Gabriel Byrne’s Steve, Alex Wolff’s Peter, and Milly Shapiro’s Charlie–run the gamut when Annie’s mother (Peter and Charlie’s grandmother) dies. The tragedy slowly unravels them, but it’s not the only factor, and they’re not free from blame themselves.

Hereditary takes its major cues from classic horror movies like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. In terms of contemporaries, it has plenty in common with The Babadook. The Grahams’ house, full of dark wood paneling and darker hallways, is impeccably designed for maximum claustrophobic horror. A treehouse glimpsed from bedroom windows, lit space heater red, resembles nothing more than a smoldering furnace, summoning thoughts of cremation. Like all great horror, Hereditary is full of tiny details, foreshadowing, and hints that give it a sense of inevitability. It will benefit from multiple viewings.

That’s if you have the constitution. Hereditary isn’t a gratuitous slasher or gore fest, but it will test your mettle nevertheless. Its structure is unpredictable for a horror movie; every time you think the build-up will finally give way to all-out terror, the movie instead dips into another tense lull. There’s no slow build to a chaotic final act, because it’s all build, and it never lets up.

Hereditary can feel slow at times, but it always snaps you back to attention. At one point in my screening, the woman sitting next to me screamed, “Oh, god, no!!” at the top her lungs–and that was in the first act. When it’s over, there’s no catharsis. You won’t gratefully let out a huge breath you didn’t know you were holding. You’ll still be holding it as you leave the theater.

The horror doesn’t come from jump scares, of which there are very few. It’s more the sense of reality coming undone–of forces beyond control manipulating the characters into acts of self-destruction. Hereditary isn’t overly concerned with its own metaphors, but it does leave things open to interpretation.

Nuanced performances from the leads sell every moment of it. Wolff turns in a very different performance than in last year’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, while Milly Shapiro hides a lot of complexity behind her distinctive mask of a face. She plays a 13-year-old girl, but you’re never quite sure how much she knows–whether she’s in on the overarching plot, or simply another victim of it. Ann Dowd supports by doing what she does best–layering meaning and menace under things that sound benign on the surface, much as she does in The Handmaid’s Tale. As the bereaved family matriarch, Collette plays out all possible versions of the story at once: Is this all really happening, or is it a grief-induced breakdown? Does she love her family, or hate them, or a little bit of both?

As the supernatural scares become more prominent, those questions get harder to answer. But it’s a gradual shift. Afterward, you won’t know quite how to process what you’ve just seen. But if you love great horror, you’ll be dying to see it again.

Hereditary hits theaters June 8.

In professional wrestling parlance, a “squash” is a blatantly lopsided match. Usually short in length and painful looking, a squash establishes the winner as an unbreakable monster. Often, a booker will place a title contender in multiple squash matches to demonstrate that he or she is a legitimate threat to the champion.

As for the loser of a squash match? His job is to look like a chump; the worse he looks, the better his opponent looks. And some wrestlers, like the Brooklyn Brawler, have made a career out of consistently losing and putting over their opponents.

Here are 7 of the most embarrassingly one-sided matches in WWE history. We’re not including the matches where the loser showed some resilience and grit, like John Cena vs. Brock Lesnar at Summerslam 2014. We’re also not including matches like Daniel Bryan vs. Sheamus at Wrestlemania 28 or Goldberg vs. Brock Lesnar at Survivor Series 2016; these should have been competitive, back-and-forth fights, but they ended in some flukey, auspicious manner.

The matches in this gallery are the humiliating ones–the matches that already looked horrible on paper–where the loser was reduced to a joke.

When it comes to figuring out how successful a movie was with audiences, the box office returns are normally a pretty good thing to research. However, once upon a time, there was another way to figure out how big of an impact your film had.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a slew of movies were adapted into cartoons to further appeal to kids. After all, if your movie becomes a cartoon, you can make more toys to sell, and more toys equals more money. And while most of the animated series made perfect sense–of course Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures made a great cartoon–others were a bit questionable. The very idea of a Rambo cartoon is puzzling.

GameSpot dug back through cartoon history to dig up the best and craziest cartoons based on old movies for your viewing pleasure. How many of these did you watch? And what did we miss when it comes to your favorites? Sound off in the comments below!

It was a rough year to be a TV fan. The 2017-2018 TV season left the streets littered with the bodies of characters you both loved and hated. Whether it was iconic villains that finally put up their final fight or the heroes viewers have been cheering on for years, seemingly nobody was safe.

In the end, though, these are the stories that get told on TV. Not everyone makes it out alive in most action and drama series. If the stakes aren’t real, it’s a lot harder to get invested in the journey. GameSpot went back through the year in TV to pick out what we believe are the 30 biggest TV deaths this season. Some made us cry, other made us cheer. And yet, there were also some that simply left us scratching our heads.

Come along as we look back on a year of TV and say goodbye to the characters that have taken their final bow–at least for now. After all, there are some shows that kill people all the time, only to find ways to resurrect them later.

Twin Mirror is a new story-driven adventure game coming to PS4. It’s being developed by Dontnod Entertainment, the studio behind Life is Strange and Vampyr, so it’s no wonder the game will revolve around player choice as part of a branching narrative. The game has a dark tone and is described as a psychological thriller. Check out the reveal trailer above.

You play as Sam, who returns to his (desolate) hometown of Basswood, West Virginia to attend the funeral of his best friend. Sam is already having a pretty tough time; he’s also recovering from a bad break-up. Things take a turn for the worst when he wakes up with no memory of the previous night and discovers a blood-stained shirt in his hotel room.

Sam needs to recall his memories and search for clues to discover the truth in a mysterious investigation. Much like Life is Strange, the game will confront many heavy themes; he must come to terms with heartbreak in a place where “the line between truth and deception is blurred.”

Twin Mirror will release in 2019. This is just one of several pre-E3 announcements Sony is making, and we could see more about the game at Sony’s upcoming press conference. That takes place on Monday, June 11; here are all the details on how to watch Sony’s E3 2018 press conference. For the latest news and updates on Twin Mirror and other games, check out GameSpot’s full E3 2018 coverage.