Slow Burn
19 works in the index tagged SLOW BURN, across every medium we score — film, television, print, audio and objects.
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson · 1959 · Book
Whatever walked there, walked alone. The gold standard for restraint.
Rosemary's Baby
Roman Polanski · 1968 · Film
Nobody believes her, and everybody is in on it. Paranoia as pregnancy.
Don't Look Now
Nicolas Roeg · 1973 · Film
Grief edited like a premonition. The ending is a knife.
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979 · Book
Old men, an old secret, and a winter that will not end.
The Shining
Stanley Kubrick · 1980 · Film
A hotel doing slow arithmetic on a family. The dread is architectural.
The Elementals
Michael McDowell · 1981 · Book
Sand filling a house in the Alabama heat. Southern and unhurried.
Ringu
Hideo Nakata · 1998 · Film
A curse that spreads like media, because it is media.
Audition
Takashi Miike · 1999 · Film
A romance for ninety minutes. Then a very long ten.
The Ring
Gore Verbinski · 2002 · Film
The American one, and better than it is given credit for.
Paranormal Activity
Oren Peli · 2007 · Film
A fixed camera and a bedroom door. Shows less than almost anything in the index.
Lake Mungo
Joel Anderson · 2008 · Film
A mock-documentary about grief that hides its worst image in plain sight.
Let the Right One In
Tomas Alfredson · 2008 · Film
A vampire film about being twelve and alone in the snow.
Les Revenants
Canal+ · 2012 · Television
The dead come home and want their lives back. Almost unbearably sad.
The Croning
Laird Barron · 2012 · Book
Cosmic horror with a marriage at the centre of it.
It Follows
David Robert Mitchell · 2014 · Film
A rule you can't argue with, walking toward you at a constant speed.
A Dark Song
Liam Gavin · 2016 · Film
Ritual magic as tedious, exhausting labour. That is what makes it work.
Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch · 2017 · Television
Eighteen hours that refuse to be a season of television.
Hereditary
Ari Aster · 2018 · Film
Grief that curdles into something much older. Slow, then unsurvivable.
Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia · 2020 · Book
A crumbling house, a coloniser family, and something in the walls.
Tags are a blunt instrument. The axes are not.
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