Niche Film Writings

The Descent (2005), image courtesy of Lionsgate and Annihilation (2018), image courtesy of Skydance media. Neil Marshall’s The Descen t and Alex Garland’s Annihilation are similar in concept and plot, though they take different approaches when exploring the theme of grief and trauma. Both films follow a group of women exploring potentially dangerous unmapped terrain; in The Descen t, we focus on thrill-seeking cave divers who want to claim a new cave system as their own, but who soon discover that they are not alone in the darkness, while Annihilation revolves around five scientists venturing into the mysterious “Shimmer”, an unexplained, seemingly radioactive area of swampland causing disturbances in the local nature, from which no previous research team has returned. The unknown environments in both films clearly represent the process of undergoing a severe trauma or loss; indeed, both protagonists have suffered a significant bereavement prior to the film’s main action. H...

Hell is a Teenage Girl: Megan Fox as Jennifer Check in Jennifer's Body. Courtesy of Fox Atomic. Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body is a sharply witty horror-comedy with all the ingredients for a genre film success. It follows a high school girl, Amanita 'Needy' Lesnicki, whose best friend, Jennifer, becomes possessed by a demon and starts preying on and eating fellow high schoolers, and was written by Diablo Cody only two years after she received an Academy Award for best original screenplay for her 2007 film Juno.  Starring Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox, both fresh out of box office blockbuster hits ( Mamma Mia! grossing $615 million in 2008 and Transformers  grossing $709 million in 2007, respectively), Jennifer's Body should have been a successful Halloween-time release for Kusama, a relatively unknown director looking for a chance to break through. Horror films are infamous for their money-grabbing, superficial tendencies, doing anything for a quick prof...