When I was a kid, I used to love a scary movie. I remember catching the original The Haunting (1963) one night on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie when I was home alone. Before it was over, I had every light in the house on. When my mother got home she was screaming she’d been …
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.
With the eve when the veils between worlds is at its thinnest around the corner, it’s difficult not to think of the day’s most prominently featured figure: the witch. Below is an essential viewing list, ranging in genre and targeted age group, of filmic work that showcase witches (loosely defined for our purposes) and …
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 …
Grave Encounters 2 Directed by John Poliquin Written by The Vicious Brothers Canada/USA, 2012 Remember when The Blair Witch Project caused a bit of a kerfuffle back in 1999? Thanks to a potent concoction of viral and apocryphal marketing, the film caused a bit of a furor amongst the movie-going public, with heated debates over …
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, …
There have been very few satisfying horror movies in the last decade. As for most of those that were in theatres, I’ve literally sat there screaming “Don’t look under the bed!… Why are you going in the closet?! … Look, everyone heard the noise! You heard it, I heard it, the guy four rows …
Body Count: Volume 8 One of the many disadvantages of living in a place like New Hamsphire is that you have to live on the edge vicariously through the lives of people who live closer to the action through correspondence so it was a while before I got into the depths of crazy horror movies. …