Good haunted-house movies should fill you with a sense of looming dread about homes and their nightmares, as in Edgar Allan Poe's landmark story "The Fall of the House of Usher".
Good haunted-house movies should fill you with a sense of looming dread about homes and their nightmares, as in Edgar Allan Poe's landmark story "The Fall of the House of Usher". By contrast "The Condemned" is uncanny only in its resemblance to a television soap, with acting as flat as the lighting and scenes that end with the kind of cliffhanger moments that otherwise announce commercial breaks.
The rare scenes that appear to portray some sort of relaxed domesticity or a relationship not colored by apocalyptic foreknowledge are all colored by looming dread, the viewer's knowledge that this person is lying or the expectation that this person will wind up dead.
Like a workhorse-star of the studio system, he keeps slogging away, partly for the dough and partly, one suspects, to keep some looming dread at bay.
The playoff chase in American sports will never match the exceptionally unhealthy thrill of watching your team momentarily alleviate your intense sense of looming dread when they climb three points further above the crowded relegation pack in League One.
The only horror movie that remotely nears scaring me is the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even then it's just the hollowness, the lack of humanity, the acute and rasping nihilism that creates the looming dread.
With cameras watching sleeping infants and apps for tracking baby weight gain becoming the norm, the sense that everything is being recorded, observed and accounted for has created a looming sense of dread.
It was nearly impossible not to feel a looming sense of dread, mixed with a lot of anger and sadness.
People today sometimes feel that way in their jobs, their schooling or their relationships, and these kinds of dreams articulate their fears of a looming shadow of existential dread.
Either way, with the Twittersphere dreading a looming #Srirachapocalypse and capsaicin-crazed fiends terrified that the plant might close for repairs (or for a move), the good news is that an 18-month supply of Sriracha is reported to be available to hold off the hordes of crazed spice-fiends.
I ask Craig Blinderman, the director of the Adult Palliative Medicine Service at Columbia University Medical Center, who says he doesn't think anyone can claim this without testing it on people who have a serious illness, and whose death anxiety is not an abstract existential dread, but a looming reality.
