31 Days of Horror

A young couple moves into their new home in a well-to-do neighborhood in San Diego. This would be the happy ending to most films, but unfortunately for Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloan) it is just the beginning of their troubles. Shortly after moving in bumps, whispers and general disturbances at night keep the couple awake at night. Rather than shrugging these odd occurrences off, Micah decides an investigation is in order. If this presence is active in the middle of the night as they sleep, then that is when Micah will record.

John Carpenter has produced an impressive body of work as a composer, director, producer, editor, and occasionally as a scriptwriter. He was a lifelong fan of science fiction novels, horror comic books, and classic westerns, he has managed to integrate thematic elements of all of these things into his work. Even though he’s experienced financial …

In the 1950’s, at the birth of the atom age, the content of horror films shifted from the supernatural horrors like Dracula and the Wolf Man, to science-based atrocities. Frankenstein’s monster, which was a patchwork of body parts given life by the mysterious power of lightning, became the Colossus of New York, a giant robot with the brain of a brilliant scientist who goes mad. The gypsy curse that turned Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot into a Wolf Man becomes a medical experiment that transforms Michael Landon’s Tony Rivers into a Teenaged Werewolf. The monsters were no longer mythological creatures but scientifically created horrors to reflect the place science had taken in our lives.

Even before Emma Watson took the stage at the UN to give a speech about feminism, and before the video was shared by everyone you know on Facebook, and everyone was talking about her and whether she should be the face of modern feminism…before all that, she was still our boss ass witch. Throughout all eight Harry Potter films, Watson played Hermione Granger, the female member of the Holy Trinity that also included Harry and Ron Weasley. Though Harry is ostensibly the hero of the series, considering it’s named after him, Hermione is the ingenious character and the one that saves the day more often than not. Many have pointed this out, but it’s worth saying it explicitly: Hermione Granger is the hero of the Harry Potter series.

Night of the Creeps Writer/Director: Fred Dekker 1986, USA Otherwise titled, “Finding Value within an 80s B-Movie Horror.” Night of the Creeps (available currently on Netflix) kicks off the first Halloween Tombstone Tuesday, aka Zombie/Back From the Dead flicks. Although the film maintains the standard plot line, dialogue and scenario, it manages to add to …

Taboo Tuesday is an exploration of some of the most outré sides of horror cinema. Thoughtful, discriminating horror fans face a dilemma: We abhor the hypocrisy of a mainstream society that takes offense at fictionalized violence in a world full of the real thing while relishing the outsider freak cool that comes with being a …

The first in Roman Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” (preceding Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant), Repulsion is a landmark psychological horror film, whose influence can be seen from Fat Girl to Black Swan.

When looking at horror films, there’s something about Canadian horror that helps it stand out and apart from its American counterpart. While most of the blockbusters out today depend on cheap thrills and scares alone, Canadian horror aims to make you think while trying to scare the pants off you. Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral (2012) is one such film that doesn’t try to scare you by having monsters jump out at you at every turn, but lets the audience’s imagination do all the work.

It’s hard to nail down the personification of the ultimate evil. The Prince of Darkness deserves to be more than just a cackling, dark figure in the background or an over-the-top sleaze.  This is an angel who has been cast out of Heaven and carries a major grudge. Neglecting the depth of his pain or not seizing …

The instant I heard about 31 Days of Horror, I knew I wanted to write about Bigfoot movies. The idea came to me so quickly that it seemed to exist almost without genesis, as if I had somehow plucked the idea from some endless, ageless chthonic crypt populated with nothing but amorphous spirits built of …

Music and hell have been closely associated since at least the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church strictly controlled the use of the tritone, or Devil’s Interval. A wide range of musicians, from Nicolò Paganini to seminal bluesman Robert Johnson, are among those said to have made Faustian bargains to attain their talent and fame. These stories are, by now, so familiar as to be clichés.

Three film students go out to Burkittsville, MD to make a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch, who supposedly haunts the area. Heather (Heather Donahue) is the director, and accompanying her on the trip is cameraman Josh (Joshua Leonard) and Mike (Michael Williams) does the sound. As they go about asking the locals about the witch they get a tip about the cemetery up in the hills where the seven children who disappeared after outing Elly Kedward as a witch are supposedly buried.

It’s hard to imagine that the house of Usher actually acts as a “house”. There’s very little in terms of warm, domestic quality about it: the halls are long and foreboding, the rooms are empty and grand, and it doesn’t seem accustomed to guests. Rather, its ornate decorations and intense lighting suggest something more of an Arthurian castle, full of fairy-tale supernatural qualities lurking in its grounds.

A word of advice: If your significant other loves creepy dolls… run! And you should always avoid letting a murder doll babysit your newborn child. Sadly, these aren’t the stupidest things you will see in Annabelle, the prequel to last year’s wildly successful, The Conjuring. Inhabited by bland characters being terrorized by a bland demon, Annabelle blandly goes where all supernatural horror movies have gone before. You can count the number of original ‘scares’ on one finger. Which finger you choose is entirely up to your discretion.

In the spirit of October, this list will look at scary scenes, but not from the horror classics directed by Craven or Carpenter or even Hitchcock (I’m excluding him, though I argue most of his work isn’t exactly horror). These are from the films that aren’t really meant to scare you. At least, not at …

When someone hears the title The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they might just pass it off as just another inane slasher flick, but in fact Texas is much more; it’s a relentlessly agonizing, bleak masterpiece of horror cinema. Texas isn’t merely interested in scaring its audience; it’s an intelligent and visceral experience which examines the darker impulses found in people, a movie where unspeakably horrific acts take place mostly outside of the frame.

Wes Craven intended Nightmare to be an exploration of surreal horror as opposed to just another stalk-and-slash horror movie, and not only did Nightmare offer a wildly imaginative, inspired concept, but it was a solid commercial genre entry for the dating crowd. Elm Street was New Line’s first genuine mainstream cinematic venture (after Alone In The Dark), and made the company a huge pile of money. The film was shot in 30 days at a cost of roughly $1.8 million, but it made back its figure and then some on opening weekend. New Line Cinema was saved from bankruptcy by the success of the film, and was jokingly nicknamed “the house that Freddy built.” Perhaps the most influential horror film of the ’80s, Craven’s 1984 slasher about a quartet of high school kids terrorized in their dreams by a torched boogeyman in a fedora hat and dusty pullovers spawned countless sequels and even a TV series.

Suzy manages to hail a cab after arriving in Munich, rain pouring down like the gods are dumping giant buckets of it onto her. It sounds like the apocalypse is happening all around, not least because of Goblin’s typically menacing score, which we are hearing for the first time. A McDonald’s visible in the distance, she pushes her way through the rain in order to yell down a cab and get inside (after the driver refuses to come outside and get her bags). She wipes herself off, reds and blues washing over her and the car. She tells the driver where to go (with some difficulty), then she’s off to the dance academy, with many different vibrant colors flashing through the cab and the thunder crashing all around. This is our introduction to Suzy Bannion. This is Suspiria.

Writer Lee Gambin calls them Natural Horror films, other writers call them Revenge of Nature or Nature Run Amok films and writer Charles Derry considers them a type of Apocalyptic Cinema. Of course we’re speaking of one of the great horror subgenres for which we’ll employ writer Kim Newman’s tag: The Revolt of Nature. Since …

“For the love of beauty is a deep-seated urge which dates back to the beginning of civilization. The revulsion with which we view the abnormal, the malformed, and the mutilated is the result of long conditioning by our forefathers.” – Introduction, Freaks

Clowns, prom, pets, and family getaways have two things in common: we’re supposed to feel safe about them and, because of Stephen King, we don’t. Considered to be the master of modern horror, King takes our expectations of what it means to be safe and secure, and flips it on its head. So sit back and …

The French animated horror anthology Peur(s] Du Noir, or Fear(s) of the Dark, is all atmosphere, though it uses this to great purpose.
The film is surprisingly immersive, even as an anthology of six shorts with different animation styles, two of which are used as buffers between the other four, played in sequence.

Whenever Canadian horror is mentioned in the world of cinema, one can’t help but think of 1974’s Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark and starring Olivia Hussey. While the film was shot almost 40 years ago, the story is as relevant and frightening to viewers as it ever was. With characters that add depth to the slasher, themes and ideas that are still poignant today, and the movie’s ability to play with, and exploit, our expectations it’s no wonder that Black Christmas finds its way into Sound On Sight’s radar for our 31 Days Of Horror.