Kritiken

It's really unlike any other horror movie. Bill Pullman turns an unusually charismatic performance as a curious skeptic, and unlike many of the films on this list, Craven keeps things ambiguous as to whether any supernatural forces are really at work. If anything, the film suggests what we think defies normal explanation may very well be real and rooted in the natural world, perhaps a far more disturbing prospect.

One of the great Wes Craven's creepiest and most sophisticated films... Craven's carnal and rough style stretches into the poetic, the symbolic, and the mad, moving him well outside of his usual zone of comfort: under his care the film becomes a politically savvy dreamscape of deeply physical, brutish fantasy of desire and horrible, unquenchable longing.

The fun begins with torture and escalates from there (framed for murder! buried alive! it's the worst-case scenario hit parade), and while the genre's usual shuffling, flesh-eating corpses are notable by their absence, that doesn't make the film any less horrific.