Author | Critic
Mike Thorn was one of ~839 critics to participate in the 2023 Beyond Sight & Sound poll hosted by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?
Poll criteria: max. 100 films, none that received any votes for the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, minimum length of 1600 metres (5,200 ft / 58 mins. @ 24 FPS).
Check out the full list of authors below:
“The Canyons and The Counselor represent an America unmoored from its own self-aggrandizing mythologies — the capitalist dream as nightmare of anxiety and violence. The films are haunted by symbols rather than subjects, made nowhere clearer than in McCarthy’s naming The Counselor’s title protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender) after his profession — he is a nameless intermediary, a metaphor.”
Pre-2023 releases only, chronologically organized.
Top twenty
La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
Margie (Henry King, 1946)
Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)
They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949)
Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
See No Evil (Richard Fleischer, 1971)
Trilogy of Terror (Dan Curtis, 1975)
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)
Pauline at the Beach (Éric Rohmer, 1983)
A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)
Patty Hearst (Paul Schrader, 1988)
Jade (William Friedkin, 1995)
Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995)
Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996)
Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999)
Ju-On: The Curse (Takashi Shimizu, 2000)
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (John Hyams, 2012)
Other standouts
After Death (Yevgeni Bauer, 1915)
Satan’s Rhapsody (Nino Oxilia, 1917)
Warning Shadows (Arthur Robison, 1923)
A House Divided (William Wyler, 1931)
Safe in Hell (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Night at the Crossroads (Jean Renoir, 1932)
A Night on Bald Mountain (Claire Parker & Alexandre Alexeieff, 1933)
From Mayerling to Sarajevo (Max Ophüls, 1940)
The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)
The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir, 1947)
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949)
Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)
A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956)
Interlude (Douglas Sirk, 1957)
The H-Man (Ishirô Honda, 1958)
I Bury the Living (Albert Band, 1958)
The Flesh and the Fiends (John Gilling, 1960)
Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961)
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (Roger Corman, 1963)
The Collector (William Wyler, 1965)
The Birthday Party (William Friedkin, 1968)
Secret Ceremony (Joseph Losey, 1968)
Claire’s Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)
The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971)
Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)
Legacy of Satan (Gerard Damiano, 1974)
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)
The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine, 1977)
The Pied Piper (Jiří Barta, 1986)
The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)
Def by Temptation (James Bond III, 1990)
Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992)
The Tempest (Stanislav M. Sokolov, 1992)
Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993)
Affliction (Paul Schrader, 1997)
Forever Mine (Paul Schrader, 1999)
In the Bedroom (Todd Field, 2001)
Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, 2002)
Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2004)
Universal Soldier: Regeneration (John Hyams, 2009)
Nas: Time is Illmatic (One9, 2014)
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (Andrew Jarecki, 2015)
Beware the Slenderman (Irene Taylor Brodsky, 2016)
Sick (John Hyams, 2022)
Tár (Todd Field, 2022)
I read 101 books in 2023. Here are my favorite first reads (pre-2023 releases only).
The top twenty are organized chronologically (I restricted myself to one per author). The rest are organized by authors’ last names.
Top twenty:
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins (1860)
Roderick Hudson, by Henry James (1875)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891)
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James (1904)
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton (1905)
The Listener and Other Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1907)
The Subjugated Beast, by R. R. Ryan (1938)
Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)
The Hounds of Tindalos, by Frank Belknap Long (1946)
Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil (1947)
The Road Through the Wall, by Shirley Jackson (1948)
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin (1956)
The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever (1957)
The Collector, by John Fowles (1963)
Julia, by Peter Straub (1975)
The House Next Door, by Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)
The Ceremonies, by T. E. D. Klein (1984)
Soul/Mate, by Joyce Carol Oates [as Rosamond Smith] (1989)
Paradais, by Fernanda Melchor (2021)
Other standouts:
Poetics, by Aristotle (335 BCE)
Inner Experience, by Georges Bataille (1943)
Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text, by Brad Baumgartner (2021)
Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica (2017)
The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1906)
The Lure of the Unknown: Essays on the Strange, by Algernon Blackwood (2022)
Drop City, by T. C. Boyle (2003)
The Hungry Moon, by Ramsey Campbell (1986)
The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares (1940)
The Wapshot Scandal, by John Cheever (1964)
Falconer, by John Cheever (1977)
Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi (2019)
A Short History of Decay, by E. M. Cioran (1949)
The Vet’s Daughter, by Barbara Comyns (1959)
The Juniper Tree, by Barbara Comyns (1985)
Americana, by Don DeLillo (1971)
The Names, by Don DeLillo (1982)
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria Jr. (1972)
The Lost Daughter, by Elena Ferrante (2006)
The Magus, by John Fowles (1965)
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill (2005)
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh (2016)
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, by J. Jack Halberstam (1995)
Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris (1981)
Last Summer, by Evan Hunter (1968)
The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson (1949)
Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951)
The Bird’s Nest, by Shirley Jackson (1954)
Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, by Stephen King (2000)
The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle (2016)
The Moral Essays, by Giacomo Leopardi (1832)
Hieroglyphics and Other Essays, by Arthur Machen (2022)
Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (1973)
The Beetle, by Richard Marsh (1897)
A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell (2020)
A Garden of Earthly Delights, by Joyce Carol Oates (1967)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates (1993)
The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, by Joyce Carol Oates (2003)
Jack of Spades, by Joyce Carol Oates (2015)
The Anthrobscene, by Jussi Parikka (2014)
Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, by Paul Schrader (1972)
EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2013)
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, by Clark Ashton Smith (2014)
Motley Stones, by Adalbert Stifter (1853)
Marriages, by Peter Straub (1973)
Koko, by Peter Straub (1988)
Sides, by Peter Straub (2007)
After Life, by Eugene Thacker (2010)
Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles (2021)
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff (2018)
“Over the past few years I’ve had the privilege of enjoying an ongoing dialogue with one of my major creative influences, award-winning writer Kathe Koja. Two years ago, she and I discussed genre and process during the virtual launch for my second short story collection, Peel Back and See. Last year, we discussed our work’s relationship with cinema for In Review Online. While brainstorming about topics for future conversations, we decided to pursue the concept of numinosity: its permutations in literature in film and the role it plays in our own creative projects. This article is the result of our email thread on the subject.”
Film adaptations of Stephen King’s work often suffer from genre misidentification. This isn’t to say that filmmakers mistakenly read King’s work as horror fiction — much of it undoubtedly is horror fiction. The primary shortcoming of many adaptations — including Andy Muschietti’s 2017/2019 It duology — is a limited perception of what the horror genre is, what it can do, and how it interfaces with other literary and cinematic traditions. It (1986) might well be King’s most horrific novel, its title representing the numinous and multifaceted object of fear itself. It’s as replete with monsters and grotesquerie as anything the author has written, but it also might be his most thematically and structurally ambitious work.
“What sets Eli Roth apart from other contemporary American horror directors is his unique braiding of current issues with high genre literacy. This holds true for his latest effort, Thanksgiving, an anti-consumerist holiday giallo that traffics openly in reflexivity.”
Shepherd asked 949 authors and super readers to select their three favorite reads of 2023. Read Mike Thorn’s thoughts on his choices here.
Mike Thorn 