After Dark Horror Fest 3: Third and final day (for us)

Theme of the day: Mirrors. Meh. It has been done. A lot.

Look, I love Lena Heady. She's hot and she can act. But she's not in her late 20s. In fact, part of the reason she is so hot is that her skin looks lived in. (Seriously, the whole botox thing evokes images of embalming.) So, you know, if there's no plot reason she can't be in her 30s, change the character to be in her 30s.

Oh, she is skinny though. It's funny to me that actresses are required to be super-thin to look good on film, and yet all they have to do to fit in a horror film is be lit to show the bones that must absolutely be visible for their non-horror work.

One last word on Lena: Nobody could've carried Broken. Not Dame Judy freakin' Dench. Not Anthony Hopkins. Not Zombie Jimmy Stewart. The movie was fundamentally, well, broken.

The Koreans are a beautiful people. This limits their ability to be scary.

Hey, cool: Korean moviemakers turn a hot chick into a cold braniac by putting a pair of fairly sexy glasses on her, just like everyone else.

Speaking of Koreans, they're pretty lax when it comes to people trying to kill other people. The police never seem to get involved. One girl gets a transfer to another school.

Apparently every low-budget horror filmmaker in the world has one of those cranes that allows you to raise up and look down on a shot. Well, except for these two guys. These seemed to be the only movies that didn't use that shot.

Eight movies is a lot for three days. In the previous years, the really dull films came on the first or second day, which helped. Broken didn't get any boost from making 90 minutes seem like two years when it was the seventh film we saw.

You can do "atmosphere" and you can do "tension" but you'd better bring 'em if you're not going to have some real scares through big chunks of your movie. When you think about it, Kubrick was the king of this stuff--and a lot of people find him insufferably boring.