A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master Written by Robert Shaye and Rachel Talalay Directed by Renny Harlin USA 1988 The first death of the fourth film in the Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise is one of the scariest for me personally because I have an irrational fear of cars. Kincaid, one of …
Julia Written & Directed by Matthew A. Brown USA, 2014 Not all movies have a grand message or thought-provoking theme. Some movies are satisfied with being a beautiful orgy of sex and madness. Matthew A. Brown’s debut film, Julia, is a stylized bloodletting that pushes the limits of good taste and tests your allegiance to …
After last week’s action extravaganza, “Strangers” is unsurprisingly a much quieter episode of The Walking Dead. Written by comic creator Robert Kirkman, “Strangers” follows the entire group traveling side by side, and introduces us to a new character (the mysterious Father Gabriel played by Seth Gilliam). The group takes shelter in a church, before making a decision about Abraham’s proposed plan for D.C.; meanwhile Bob discovers a new horror lurking in the woods. Gareth and his Terminus buddies are back for more disgusting cannibal mayhem.
Archie comes have gotten a little weird at times. Like the gang meeting the Punisher, a recent critically acclaimed zombie version, and even the recent death of the title character earlier this year. Things are about to get even weirder with a new four issue miniseries in the spring of 2015 when Archie, Betty, Veronica, …
This could either be a very interesting experiment or it could go horribly wrong. Eli Roth joins the remake of his 2002 directorial debut, Cabin Fever, as executive producer, Variety reports. Cameras start rolling this weekend and this time around the film with be directed by Travis Zariwny, who has a feature in post-production called Intruder …
It’s almost Halloween, so chances are many of you have or are gearing up to watch George A. Romero’s classics Night of the Living, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and/or even Land of the Dead. Before you watch those, check on this new crowdfunding project on Indiegogo from the famed director’s son G. …
Lakeview Cabin Hypnohustler PC Private island. Peaceful cabin. Perfect weather. These hardly seem like the elements of a horror game, but Lakeview Cabin manages to turn this scenic vacation spot into the stuff of nightmares. It’s impossible to talk too much about this horrifyingly comedic puzzle game without ruining the plot, so, SPOILERS AHEAD! You have been …
Sleepy Hollow, Season 2, Episode 4, “Go Where I Send Thee…” Written by Damian Kindler Directed by Doug Aarniokoski Airs Mondays at 9pm (ET) on Fox After a few weeks that were heavy on constructing the season’s arc, “Go Where I Send Thee…” is a more conventional—if such a term can ever be applied to …
It’s not even a week old, but Scott Snyder and Jock’s horror comic Wytches already has a film in the works Deadline reports. Snyder and Jock will be executive producers and Brad Pitt’s Plan B will produce. Image describes the series as: Across the globe, century after century, men and women were burned, drowned, hanged, …
Family can be a mysterious and dangerous matrix of locked doors and supressed secrets, with loving family members willing to do almost anything to preserve a thin veneer of moral unity. That’s the central premise of Shrew’s Nest, another gory, effective entry in the recent plague of Spanish shock cinema which has infected markets beyond the Iberian motherland. Restricted to one expansive apartment in a post-civil war Madrid, the film unfolds as an interlocking cavalcade of cause and effect, leading to a the illumination of a family’s most brutal and buried secrets.
Over the years, Canadian film and television has gotten a reputation for being something that leaves a lot to be desired. It’s often depicted as low budget productions with mediocre acting, and a film grain to make you cringe. Except more and more, outstanding Canadian cinema is making headlines in Hollywood for being cutting edge, artistic, meaningful, not to mention downright funny. From the classic Quebec film C.R.A.Z.Y., the franco-anglo production Bon Cop Bad Cop to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Canadian films are more than just bad film stereotypes; they’re innovative, imaginative, and a joy to watch.
The highest-rated scripted show on television returned tonight, as The Walking Dead Season 5 kicked off with “No Sanctuary,” written by showrunner Scott Gimple and directed by special effects guru Greg Nicotero. Season 4’s finale left us on a cliffhanger, and “Sanctuary” picks up the action right in Terminus, giving us tons of answers about the place and its inhabitants.
This past week I had the pleasure of interviewing Jacob Semahn, the writer on the upcoming supernatural mystery series Goners from Image Comics. Before working on Goners, Semahn was a producer on American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. He is currently working in animation for Man of Action and has written screenplays for Marvel’s Avengers Assemble and Ultimate Spider-Man shows. The basic premise …
The fourth season of American Horror Story starts off with a stunning cold open amidst a quaint farmhouse. After stumbling upon a gruesome crime scene, a milkman makes an even more shocking discovery in a rural home. It’s difficult to remember an episode of AHS in which the camera work is so effective as it is here. “Monsters Among Us,” directed by show creator Ryan Murphy, prefers to keep things hidden off-screen, and rather than show the audience what it is, we instead get a series of gasps, startling sound effects and a series shots that are framed to hide the dark mystery. “Monsters Among Us” keeps viewers guessing until after the spectacular opening credits before it pulls the curtain up on conjoined twins Dot and Bette Tattler. Ever playful, Murphy’s visuals are also concealing, and yet telling.
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.
When Resident Evil arrived on the scene in 1996, it changed horror gaming forever. The almost unheard of genre known as survival-horror exploded into the stratosphere as one of the industry’s greatest success stories, and one of gaming’s most well-known franchises was born. Even as the original title was a fantastically unique and incredibly frightening experience though, it also had a shortlist of readily apparent problems. From the meme-worthy cheese of the voice-acting and dialogue to the ill-advised live-action opening at the game’s outset, Resident Evil in its first iteration lacked the confidence and clarity of vision to reach the true heights it was capable of. All of that would change in 1998.
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 …
Late nights. We’ve all had them. Working long after the rest of the world has gone to sleep. Rushing to finish a project before the deadline. But are you really alone at your desk? One Late Night would like to remind you that the answer is no.
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.
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.
Few shows are returning this fall with higher expectations than Fox’s Sleepy Hollow. What appeared last year to be an inexplicable pickup turned into the season’s most engaging new series, managing to successfully balance its utterly ridiculous concept with strong character work and a clever sense of humor. It was a win for quality that also translated into a ratings win for Fox, who made the interesting choice of bypassing a back-nine and ordering a second season right away. All of this was encouraging, but continued to raise the question of how long its brand of lunacy could be sustained, or if whatever energy the writers had grappled onto would dim in between seasons.