The final chapter of the Paranormal Activity franchise, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, was released in theaters on October 23rd. My friend and I planned on catching a late showing the previous night, but to our dismay discovered it wasn’t actually playing anywhere near us. How could the final film in a cash-printing horror franchise …
Although it seems they are synonymous with found-footage horror, low budget movies that will still be financial successes if audiences stop turning out in droves to see them, Blumhouse Productions are arguably something far more interesting. Their prolific output can easily be read as an updating of Roger Corman’s low budget exploitation aesthetic for the 21st century, albeit one that reflects pop culture’s increasingly low standards when it comes to genre filmmaking.
Every year the movies seem to be dying. The writing is on the wall with attendance numbers and box office receipts and the Golden Age of TV. Will people still go to the movies if they can now watch high quality, HD programming from their own home? Theater chains themselves have been reluctant to give …
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.
This year saw the release of the fifth entry in the Paranormal Activity franchise with Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, a much better than expected film that was being called a spinoff. Though it was the fifth film in the series, Paranormal Activity 5 proper, was still in the works. It looks like in order …
Not two weeks ago, famed auteur and Pacific Rim director Guillermo Del Toro set the internet ablaze when he announced the confirmation of a follow up to his 2013 robots vs. monsters film Pacific Rim and dated Pacific Rim 2 for April 7, 2017. The biggest surprise wasn’t the official announcement of the sequel though, …
They’re back!!! Sam Raimi and Gil Kenan are remaking the horror classic Poltergeist, and not even Hollywood rumors about a deadly curse are enough to stop them. What makes the original 1982 version so terrifying? Let’s recap. An average everyday family, living in a run-of-the-mill suburban house, begin to notice some strange things are happening in …
There’s a wonderfully maddening moment early on in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining where Danny Torrance is perusing the corridors of the Overlook hotel on his tricycle. He swings round corners, the camera obsessively following him in a locked in third person perspective angle. The skin crawling score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind swells up …
Warning: following contains mild spoilers for The Conjuring and plenty of other horror movies. Anyone who saw the most recent horror flick The Conjuring, which came out today, was undoubtedly thinking the same thing I was: “This is good and creepy and all that fun stuff, but what if this were to run up against another …
A Haunted House Directed by Michael Tides Written by Marlon Wayans and Rick Alvarez USA, 2013 Opens Jan. 25 in Toronto Have you ever opened up a history textbook and found that every single image of Josef Stalin was defaced with some sort of phallic or scatological graffiti? Or that his pictures were accompanied by …
Special Mention: The Fake Trailers from Grindhouse (2007, USA): The four fake trailers featured in the otherwise disappointing Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double-feature: Machete by Robert Rodriguez, Werewolf Women of the SS by Rob Zombie, Thanksgiving by Eli Roth and Don’t by Edgar Wright-are all very entertaining trips down horror/exploitation film memory lane and are …
Sinister Directed by Scott Derrickson Written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill USA, 2012 Voyeurism is at the heart of most great horror films, a virus pervading protagonists like Norman Bates in Psycho or Mark Lewis in Peeping Tom. The basic idea of featuring characters who watch ghastly acts onscreen serves to mock, condemn, …
It has been speculated if there was going to be another installment of the latest horror franchise after the release of the 2nd sequel Paranormal Activity 3 last fall which managed to scare $54 million out of its audiences opening weekend and a worldwide gross of $202.2 million (which every media outlet is quick …
Today is October 1st and like every year I spend the majority of the month watching as many horror movies as I possibly can. So I decided to take it upon myself to list off the greatest horror movies ever made. I felt the need to break up the list into several categories. You see, …
Two decades before The Blair Witch Project, the 1980 Italian exploitation film Cannibal Holocaust, directed by Ruggero Deodato, broke traditional cinematic conventions while creating major controversy following its release. Filmed in the Amazon Rainforest, the movie tells the story of four documentarians who journey deep into the jungle to film indigenous tribes. Two months later, …
Before I get to number 49 I feel the need to list fifty honorable mentions. This is a very personal list and I am confident that I could have easily chosen 100 foreign language films or 100 independent art house films and skipped out on all the Hollywood flicks, but I decided to go with …
Any independent filmmaker had to lament, even if only in a small way, the closure of several boutique “art house” divisions from the Hollywood honchos (read: studios) over the last few years. Paramount Vantage (Virgin Suicides, There Will be Blood, Babel) is no exception, however…it looks like chairman Brad Grey is making a promise to …
Paranormal Activity Directed by Oren Peli There’s nothing more terrifying than things that go bump in the night while we lay awake helpless under our bedsheets. Writer-director Oren Peli obviously recognizes this, as he expertly exploits this fear to create the genuinely frightful paranormal thriller Paranormal Activity. Adding to the fear factor, Paranormal Activity opens …