Reviews
‘Door’ (1988) Is the Greatest Home Invasion Thriller That You’ve Never Seen
An overworked and underappreciated housewife, Yasuko Honda spends most of her days in a cluttered apartment, tending to the needs of her rambunctious son and typical working husband. With both of them leaving her alone throughout the daytime, her hours are occupied by housework and small talk over the phone. But soon, phone calls from a pervert herald a much worse threat: a maddened door-to-door salesman turned stalker named Yamakawa, who threatens Yasuko’s life and her family’s safety. The only thing between her and him? A front door that grows weaker to hold him back every day.
Screambox for as long as I can remember, and I say this with love, the scrappy underdog in the streaming world. With many larger services taking up the mental real estate of horror fans everywhere, it begs the question, what’s their strongest selling point? The answer to that question came up recently with the streaming premiere of the 1988 Japanese psychological thriller film Door.
ONCE FORGOTTEN, NOW VOD (COURTESY OF SCREAMBOX)
An overworked and underappreciated housewife, Yasuko Honda spends most of her days in a cluttered apartment, tending to the needs of her rambunctious son and typical working husband. With both of them leaving her alone throughout the daytime, her hours are occupied by housework and small talk over the phone. But soon, phone calls from a pervert herald a much worse threat: a maddened door-to-door salesman turned stalker named Yamakawa, who threatens Yasuko’s life and her family’s safety. The only thing between her and him? A front door that grows weaker to hold him back every day.
Directed by Banmei Takahashi, Door had a repertory screening this year at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which our lovely editor, James-Michael was able to catch, but I missed. I was delighted to find out, however, that Screambox has made the film available for a home release. This answers the question: if Screambox keeps putting up quality obscure titles like this, it has serious potential to become a repository for tons of great lost media that are currently being restored.
THE LONG SLOW DEATH OF ISOLATION
Door is best compared to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in that it’s a psychological horror trying to say something about the cinematic culture around it; being a weird psycho-sexual nightmare is sort of just the byproduct. As Haneke’s work commented on the violence of American media and the arms race of captivating audiences with atrocities, Door is about an ever-increasing push towards individualism, and the fear of that isolation’s effects on future generations.
Yasuko lives in a densely packed building, and a lot of the horror that comes from Door’s premise is that despite Yamakawa’s very loud and very visible attacks, her neighbors are little help. The building is more preoccupied with garbage codes than it is protecting its residents, and the police of the city do little to help. Door verbalizes a longstanding urbanist anxiety of being so close to the people around you while having no sense of community and in turn, no sense of protection. Yasuko is forced to keep her head down and shrug off the worst of her assailant’s offenses, because who does she really have in the end?
Moreover, Takahashi’s work was also especially prescient for a Japanese audience: it’s a foretelling of the much more dire conditions that would strike Japan’s Lost Generation, and the subsequent loneliness epidemic that plagues the nation today. With that loneliness epidemic spreading abroad, it’s frightening to think of how more relatable the film might become for Western audiences.
CAT AND MOUSE WITH A PURPOSE
As I mentioned earlier, the film also has a very overtly psycho-sexual angle, especially in the way the film represents the relationship between Yasuko and Yamakawa with objects rather than outright nudity, i.e., there’s a lot of blatant, smack-you-over-the-head phallic symbolism. Knives are penises. Newspapers are penises. Hands are penises. Everything is a penis.
This undoubtedly has something to do with Banmei Takahashi’s origins in the “pink film” boom of 1970s Japan. That trend involved a lot of sleazier fare, erotic thrillers made for dirt cheap, and playing up the scandalous nature of the stories as something to gawk at rather than analyze. But Door feels like an attempt to finally explore many of those films’ more salacious and violent aspects as the byproducts of a broken society rather than a source of cheap thrills.
Takahashi zooms in on how violent men like Yamakawa try to take advantage by exerting violence on the isolated. Sexual symbols here are more symbols of sexual violence. They’re on the nose, yes, but unmistakable in their intent; they show how Yamakawa is looking for control rather than any sort of sexual and romantic connection, and doesn’t mince its message on that.
Door’s climax (which I won’t spoil too much but will say involves a tiny chainsaw) is the most destructive and blatant example of this, and it’s captivating in how bizarre and long it is. It’s uncomfortable, rife for dissection, and a fascinating choice for a director whose style evolved quite a bit from humble origins.
FRAMING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL TRAPPED
Speaking of Takahashi’s directing, his camerawork here is incredibly efficient at backing up the thematic fears of the story. There’s a really effective contrast made between how Takahashi shoots Door’s interior and exterior shots. The exteriors emphasize openness with some expertly composed wides; outside, the camera often looks down from high up at Yasuko and her son Takuto, sometimes feeling like a voyeur viewing from a rooftop above and framing them perfectly. But inside the apartment, all that visual freedom is taken away to crank up the tension.
There is an unease in the Honda family’s home; it is cluttered, oddly shaped with a hard-to-pin-down layout, and cramped; those details add to the anxiety of it all. Door is, in many ways, a great crash course for anyone looking to see how influential shot composition can be, even when it’s something as simple as the furniture arrangement in a corridor.
Takahashi is able to build the maximum amount of fear with simple shots of unlocked doors and narrow hallways because everything feels claustrophobic without being outright close-ups. This factors most importantly into the aforementioned climax, where that tension pays off, and all hell breaks loose.
A SOUNDTRACK THAT DENIES YOU COMFORT
And what may be my favorite part of Door is its soundtrack. The music here can best be described as comforting and dulcet. It’s a byproduct of the booming music scene of late-1980s Japan and its focus on smooth jazz. It’s a gorgeous soundtrack composed by Gôji Tsuno, that has a sort of romantic lilt to it…
Until it simply isn’t.
Until it’s abruptly torn away, and a switch flips in your brain telling you something is wrong. The music cuts out at seemingly random intervals but is timed to disorient you. It leaves the viewer to listen to the sounds of struggle, the sounds of breathing, the aftermath of an attack, only to return and start the cycle over again. It’s a genius choice, and a highly underutilized one. It’s the first time in a while that a soundtrack wasn’t telling me how I should feel, but how I felt outright.
Door earned my fondness because Banmei Takahashi took a very common premise for a psychological thriller and imprinted his one-of-a-kind vision on it. To my knowledge, he was a bit of a hired gun in the pink film era who almost quit due to disagreements with producers, but persevered and went on to make a variety of films in many different genres.
Door marks one of those beautiful moments where a director reflects on their past works, and creates something wholly unique in the process. It’s a diamond in the rough (one that will likely land on my Hidden Gems of 2023 list early next year), so I hope you seek it out and enjoy it as much as I did.
You can stream Door (1988) on Screambox.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a movie simultaneously charged with and mired in ambition. It’s genuinely comical how overly ambitious of a first-time film it is for writer-director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate: a microbudget, shot on location in the mountains of Colombia, character driven psychological horror film meant to explore the very nature of good and evil while also tackling cults and misogyny.
So, it’s shocking how much of it works. Not all of it works, not at all, but it is cohesive enough to serve as a surprising experience with the colorful aesthetic it employs and incredibly dark places it goes to.
What Is Luz: Flower of Evil About?
After the death of their mother Luz, three sisters in a rural cult community find their faith waning. The three are the centerpiece of an elaborate theology crafted by their cult leader father, a man who is becoming more difficult to deal with by the day. So, when he brings a mute boy into town, chaining him up and claiming he’s the people’s messiah, an already tense situation devolves into outright madness. What ensues is the slow dissolution of the cult, and the torturous end of an already fractured family.
Let this usual synopsis section also serve as a content warning: the film does depict sexual violence very early on, about 25 minutes into the film. It’s not Irreversible levels of horrifically long, but it’s also not particularly brief and still graphic content by its nature. It can be difficult to stomach, so I’m mentioning it now for those who would rather avoid that sort of thing.
A Ponderous Arthouse Folk Horror About Good and Evil
The film has shocking moments, but it’s not very interested in shock value. This is first and foremost a slow burn, a piece of arthouse folk horror that is more about bleeding out than it is about a violent demise. The most obvious comparisons are to The VVitch and Midsommar, but even that feels like an inappropriate mix, even when it leans towards Aster’s commercial darling or Egger’s colonial nightmare.
Fundamentally, Luz is a study about people who mythologize suffering and cruelty and excuse it as being driven by outside spiritual forces rather than their own decisions. It’s about deconstructing harmful religious and cult mentalities, and it wears its philosophy on its sleeve (aggressively so). Alzate creates a visually and textually fascinating meltdown of his characters and the community they find themselves within.
I would say it’s a “descent into madness” if it didn’t feel clear that the characters were already in a tailspin right at the film’s outset. The script, especially through its second act, starts to feel repetitive and a little simplistic, with a somewhat anticlimactic ending and dialog that starts to feel less naturalistic and more tedious. But it’s an interesting dissection of a family, even if it’s rough around the edges.
Hyperreal Sense of Color, But Shaky Directing and Writing
The film’s most obvious and striking feature is its hyperrealist palette, bearing a rich Technicolor aspect that permeates throughout the entire runtime. Colorist Felipe Martinez U paints the mountainous countryside with such vibrancy, a simple but very effective contrast to the dying days of a cult the story centers on; bleak, muddy times, punctuated by vibrant nature all around. Aesthetically, it’s pretty clearly visually inspired by the early works of Pedro Almodóvar and the visual warmth of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.
Even the naturalistic tendencies of Terrence Malick make an appearance here, though how much of that is just in the gorgeous location scouting and how much is actually emulated by Alzate is up for debate. All around, the film lacks polish. The camerawork is amateurish in some ways, slightly cramped and occasionally uninspired in its framing. Sometimes the oversaturated look of the film can feel a little saccharine and heavy, but the pop of color here feels purposeful enough that I can forgive it as being highly stylized rather than trying to mask the weak points of a first-time director.
Is Luz: The Flower of Evil Worth the Watch?
In the search for great Latin American horror, Luz was an odd duck to stumble upon to be certain. But I’m a champion of strange birds with a lot of character, so you do the math.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a struggle of a film, hard to watch at points despite how visually appealing it can be. It’s a brutal, bleak piece of psychological folk horror that certainly has a thin audience and will test the patience of even those the premise appeals to. But it does have as much substance as it does style, even when it treads into murky waters, and for that I think it’s worth the watch.
If you’re not watching Indonesian horror, you’re missing out. The region is producing some of the craziest genre movies around right now, thanks in no small part to the efforts of writer-director Joko Anwar. His latest, Ghost in the Cell, which celebrated its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026, combines everything we love about the filmmaker’s work—supernatural scares, inventive kills, and gnarly gore—along with a strong vein of comedy and political satire.
What is Ghost in the Cell About?
Ghost in the Cell centers around Dimas (Endy Arfian), a journalist whose life falls apart after he tries to run a story on corporate corruption and mysterious worker deaths. Wrongfully convicted of the horrific murder of his boss, Dimas finds himself with a one-way ticket to Cell Block C, where he quickly meets a colorful cast of prisoners—the good, the bad, and the seriously nasty. Among the good guys, there’s Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya), who is constantly getting into trouble for defending fellow inmates, and Six (Yoga Pratama), who claims he can see people’s auras.
As if Dimas’ situation couldn’t get any worse, his arrival seems to trigger a series of brutal killings in the prison. Bodies are showing up mangled beyond recognition and displayed in positions that wouldn’t look out of place in Hannibal. It soon becomes clear that Dimas isn’t behind the murders, which begs the question: what did he bring in with him?
Anwar Embraces Horror-Comedy Whole-Heartedly
Prison is a scary place, and Anwar makes great use of the setting, with the action moving from the dingy showers where predators lurk to the bleak cellblock where inmates are at the mercy of their captors and the cafeteria where rival gangs eye each other up with ill intent.
But for all the human misery contained within the film, Ghost in the Cell is ultimately a horror-comedy, one that isn’t afraid to lean into broad slapstick and quippy dialogue when it wants to raise a chuckle. The tonal shifts can take a little while to adjust to, especially if your previous experience with Anwar comes from his more serious horror outings like Impetigore. This might be a problem if the film wasn’t actually funny, but Ghost in the Cell has enough laugh-out-loud moments to make you forget about any whiplash.
Ghost in the Cell Is a Genre-Bender to the Max
Comedy isn’t the only new flavor that Anwar has tossed into the mix. In Ghost in the Cell, dance sequences and martial-arts fight choreo sit side-by-side with some of the most extreme gore scenes seen outside a Terrifier movie in recent years. Then there’s the eerie way the spirit presents before it kills (trypophobia sufferers, beware) and the extensive critique of political corruption, power, and inequality. It’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that shouldn’t work on paper, but under Anwar’s assured hand, it does.
It helps that for all the slapstick, the film lands a surprisingly earnest message, amplified by its vast ensemble cast. Dimas and Anggoro at times feel like main characters, but everyone in Ghost in the Cell has a big part to play, and that’s the point: in seemingly impossible circumstances, there’s strength in unity.
Ghost in the Cell Is an Endlessly Entertaining Blend of Goofiness, Heart, and Gore
If you’re looking for nonstop scares, you won’t find them in Ghost in the Cell. What you will find is a delightful blend of horror, comedy, and action that is apt to leave you grinning from ear to ear.
The film doesn’t skimp on the gore, throwing flesh and fluids at every surface. But it’s also charmingly goofy, with a cast that doesn’t take itself too seriously and a script that’s all too happy to devolve into a comedic dance scene when it feels like the spirit might strike. In every sense, Anwar is doing the most, and the end result is a film where there’s nary a dull moment in sight.
