About

About Lair of the Boyg

The Boyg, Peer Gynt! the one only one.
It's the Boyg that's unwounded, and the Boyg that was hurt,
it's the Boyg that is dead, and the Boyg that's alive.

The Boyg is a creature in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, my favourite play. Encountered in total dark, all we know if it is from Peer's assessment: slimy and formless, like one of Lovecraft's eldritch terrors. Its formlessness and frightfulness struck me as an ideal symbol for the project of writing about independent genre cinema.

The idea of Lair of the Boyg is, like the slimy, formless Boyg himself, to somehow be two contradictory things at once. With this site I want to both delight in the exciting and exploitational elements of the 'great trash' genre cinema occasionally turns out and engage the same films intellectually wherever possible. To fall too far on either side is to become self-parodical.

My name is Jared Roberts. I studied philosophy at the University of Ottawa and undertook writing reviews only because I felt I had something to say about the movies I was watching. This film discussion site began as a means of preserving the short reviews of classic horror films that I had written for friends on a message board. As I began to write more reviews and essays of higher quality, I saw the need to transform what was once an archival blog into a more professional film discussion and review site. Many of the older reviews remain on the site and I do occasionally like to address an older film.

However, the focus is now on recent, independent films. While the horror and thriller genres are without a doubt the essence of this site, I do sometimes look into other genres or even arthouse pictures that are not getting much attention. I try to give special attention to Canadian and Quebec cinema, being from Quebec myself.