Horror

For a comic whose publisher regularly bills it as “the horror event of the year,” Providence has until this point been rather light on the scares. Sure, it’s had its close encounters.

SOMA Developed by Frictional Games Published by Frictional Games Available on Windows, OSX, Linux, PS4 Exploring the mechanics of horror seems to be Frictional’s mission given the almost complete stylistic backflip they have taken with their latest game, SOMA. The majority of SOMA is set in and around the futuristic underwater research facility PATHOS-2 after …

Part ghost story, part social commentary, director Marcin Wrona’s ‘Demon’ offers plenty of appeal while remaining frustratingly elusive.

Baskin is a fantasy/horror film out of Turkey by director Can Evrenol. The movie centers on a group of police officers who respond to an assignment that unwittingly takes them into a hellish dimension.

The Green Inferno Written by Guillermo Amoedo, Eli Roth, and Nicholas Lopez Directed by Eli Roth USA, 2013 The notoriously lurid and savage films of the 1970s evidently served as Eli Roth’s primary inspiration for his latest playful excavation into the squealing recess of the human body, the elder of which is the infamous Cannibal Holocaust, whose …

When people think of a film festival’s must see flicks, most are geared towards the films with the largest following and the biggest marketing campaign. But then again this is Fantastic Fest. The final frontier of rebel festivals that goes against the grain of all that mainstream hoopla. A great example of the Fantastic spirit, …

Robert Egger’s feature film debut The Witch, is a terrifying exploration of a puritanical family’s descent into hysteria. Eggers is stingy with the film’s supernatural elements, preferring to force the audience to decide what is real versus what is a manifestation of the character’s anxieties.

‘The Visit,’ filmed on a modest budget, takes a ton of chances and offers, perhaps, the most unrestrained vision we’ve seen from M. Night Shyamalan.

The August bank holiday weekend in London is always cause for celebration for horror fans as the FrightFest horror and genre film festival rolls into the city’s Leicester Square for four days of blood-spattered cinematic mayhem. This year saw the arrival of horror icon and star of Re-Animator and You’re Next, Barbara Crampton, as the …

When Twilight debuted in the aughts everyone assumed that the copycats would last forever. Forever only lasted about four years, but the lasting impact was made by low-key fare like Let the Right One In. Taking a cue from that 2008 film, When Animals Dream places emphasis on atmosphere and dread, rather than buckets of blood.

This is the best issue of Providence yet. It’s entertaining, it carries some emotional weight, and gives you a full, diverse understanding of the world it’s building. Hopefully this series continues to be as challenging and provocative moving forward. Hopefully the creators have more surprises up their sleeves. If this is the best it gets, well, that’s a little disappointing, but I can live with it. Because this issue here at least lets you know that you can hate a creator and love their creation. It is possible — as long as you’re willing to take it back from them. Art is too important to leave in just anybody’s hands. And that message is good enough.

The 1980’s were inarguably a “golden era” for the subgenre of monster horror flicks. This decade saw a variety of brave experiments on the silver screen involving ghoulies and ghosts, as well as some amazing plotlines. Here are five films from the era that succeeded at turning the truly bizarre into some bloody good entertainment. …

The Interior Director: Trevor Juras Runtime: 80 minutes It’s always refreshing to see a filmmaker try something new with the horror genre even if the full package isn’t wholly unique. Enter The Interior, a low-key first feature from Canadian filmmaker Trevor Juras that is split into two very distinct acts. Set in Toronto, the first …

The Blue Hour is a beautiful, dark and mysterious ghost story from Thai filmmaker Anucha Boonyawatana. Tam (Atthaphan Poonsawas) is a gay teen who doesn’t fit in at school or within his family. He arranges a meeting with the dashing Phum (Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang) at an abandoned swimming pool. Their hook-up quickly develops into something more serious as they find comfort and safety in each other’s friendship. As their relationship progresses, Tam’s life becomes increasingly confused as he struggles to differentiate dream from reality.

Taking cues from late ’70’s /early ’80s horror (primarily director Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery and John Carpenter’s The Fog), writer/director Ted Geoghegan’s directorial debut We Are Still Here doesn’t break new ground, but serves as a suspenseful and well-crafted old-fashioned ghost story.

New Zealand hasn’t produced many horror films over the years, but those it has given birth to are remarkably strong entries. The late ’80s and early ’90s witnessed the rise of Kiwi director Peter Jackson who made a name for himself with the Bad Taste (1988) and Dead Alive (1992). Jackson helped shine a spotlight on the countries genre offerings and his success no doubt opened the door for a new generation of Kiwi genre filmmakers. The latest of these films to make its way Stateside is Jason Lei Howden’s outrageous debut feature Deathgasm about a group of suburban metal heads who summon a demonic force.

The Marquis de Sade wrote, “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image”. Georges Bataille latched onto this idea, arguing that without death there is no desire. Factors of procreation and beauty play a role in sex, but true desire is rooted in our mortality: we want to fuck because we know we will die. The link between death and desire is at the heart of the Blaine brothers’ debut feature, Nina Forever.

Providence #2 continues the cycle of using a pastiche of Howard Phillips to comment upon the man’s works, and then turning around and using a pastiche of his works to comment upon Howard Phillips, the man. It’s literate and it’s dense, but it knows how to tell a classic horror story, as well. Burrows draws a damn horrible monster, and Moore knows how to indulge a horror cliché — here the “you must have bumped your head and imagined some monsters!” — to masterful effect. Providence #2 keeps the series in its place as one of the best new titles of 2015, and is putting up a good fight for some of the best stuff of its creators careers — it’s just that good.

Few comics sit at the intersection of “fan beloved,” “industry defining,” and “absolutely impossible to acquire” the way the EC Comics library does. For a while they almost felt like Comics’ very own Holy Grail. On one hand, you’ve got the Tales From The Crypt brand itself, which has left an indelible mark on pop culture with films, cable TV series, Saturday morning cartoons, and a line of revival graphic novels from Papercutz — a proud legacy, to be sure. But on the other hand, you enter into the more nebulous region of pop cultural osmosis, and it’s there that the legend of Bill Gaines’ little comic line that could grows to gargantuan levels. The baby boomers that ate his ghoulish “mags” up in the early ‘50s eventually grew into the genre fiction movers and shakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s — from cult directors like George Romero and Joe Dante, to lit legends like Stephen King, to blockbuster cinema wunderkinds like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Carpenter (Carpenter actually provides a disappointingly brief intro to this volume). You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone whose imagination hasn’t been touched either directly or indirectly by the macabre yarns from the Crypt-Keeper, the Vault-Keeper, and the Old Witch. With all that and their notorious place at the forefront of the Seduction of the Innocent controversy that practically sent the comics industry into the Dark Ages, you’d think the existence of a prestige line of EC Comics trade collections would seem like a given, right?

Ted Geoghegan’s directorial debut takes the haunted house thriller to new and exciting places while still honoring the genre conventions that we love.

Writer-directors Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione mix satire, horror, and science fiction into an irresistible social experiment that puts all of us under the microscope in ‘Circle.’

The first story arc of Wytches concludes an unexpectedly resonant note from the author. Although Scott Snyder has made no secret of just how personal this book has been to him, issue #6 conveyed the depth of Snyder’s attachment to the story. This is not like any horror comic you’ve read before.

Poltergeist has become legendary for two major reasons other than being a great film: First, there are rumours that co-producer/co-writer Steven Spielberg took over as director midway through production. Secondly, its young co-star Dominique Dunne was murdered just before the film hit theatres. Over 30 years after its release, the film is regarded by many …