Joe Dante’s The Hole is a throwback to the 1980s, the heyday of Spielburgian, scary-fun horror, when kids played the heroes and men like Dante owned the genre. One of the earliest images in this movie is of a station wagon pulling into Anytown, U.S.A.—after the camera has been spit out of the tail pipe—and, really, when’s the last time you actually saw anyone driving one of those? In the car are Chris Massoglia (teenager) and Nathan Gamble (pre-teen), playing brothers; behind the steering wheel is their single mom. They’ve fled Brooklyn for Bensonville, moving into a new house with a padlocked-shut hatch in the basement. The kids pry off the locks, of course, and find a mysterious abyss, a hole without a bottom that’s home to fear itself: it (somehow) discovers what gives you the creeps and unleashes it upon you.

Having already seen and loved Let the Right One In, my enthusiasm for Let Me In is probably more muted than it should be—probably because it's so faithful to its predecessor. Regardless, Let Me In stands a decent chance of remaining the best U.S. horror movie of the year, and it's being done in by a mixture of completely indifference at the outset and, I'd imagine, having seen the movie at a screening and read anecdotal accounts, some fairly hostile crowds expecting a creepy-kid-creature movie and getting a slow, creepy, meditative, beautifully shot actual movie.

This got me thinking about audience reactions to horror movies, which I see in theaters fairly often.

• Jesus that's a narrow poster.

Will we ever tire of noir? Unlikely—it's their time-and-place particularity, rising like mushrooms from the decaying roots of postwar culture, that makes them sing even today. Though you'd think by now that has-been is definitely the new never-was, the noirs live on in iconic resonance, because, ironically, they're a nostalgist's hot-coffee-in-the-face reality check, reminding us in no uncertain terms that the past we often idealize and dismiss was just as beset by misery and ruin as today. Maybe more so. Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall is a near-forgotten, fast-cheap-&-out-of-control sweat session, in which the hulking yet quivering Aldo Ray hits the Big City on the run from something very very bad, and crosses paths in a bar with Anne Bancroft, a used-abused waif with the defensive posture of squirrel among dogs. Soon enough Brian Keith, as a bloodspilling bank robbing anti-Aldo (they were both thick-necked Pacific-theater vets and look it), emerges and pushes the action back to the great wide open of Wyoming, where an oil rig becomes an impromptu torture appliance. Little of the David Goodis-based film is actually very dark; it's the lawless, wintry mountain wilderness that generates more anxiety, and the forecast the film delivers of the Coen bros' Fargo has been duly noted. Sans the Orphic torque of Tourneur's Out of the Past, the movie still radiates a fight-or-flight inquietude that itself could serve as a mid-century axiom, a kind of feel-bad story America couldn't stop telling itself.

These are the only words spoken by an Israeli soldier to peace activists in Rachel, a documentary about Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist crushed by a bulldozer operated by an Israeli soldier on the Gaza strip in 2003. These words ring throughout Simone Bitton’s film, running through Thursday at Anthology Film Archives. “It’s my problem,” says the state of Israel, represented by an Israeli Defense Force spokeswoman, the former head of military police investigation, an Israeli state medical examiner, and a representative former Israeli soldier who remains anonymous.

But the others—the peace activists who worked alongside Rachel with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the Palestinian citizens of Rafah who knew Rachel, whose homes she protected from demolition at the hands of Israeli military—believe it is not just Israel’s problem.