Where Horror Lives
By the mid-2000’s, audiences were wise to horror rules and conventions. Wes Craven’s Scream pulled the curtain on tired tropes and re-invigorated the genre. But Hollywood was slow to change and the slasher-lite renaissance that followed recycled the same narratives without Craven’s self-awareness. And remakes and ‘Torture Porn’ characterized horror for most of the aughts. […]
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For a brief period of time, Hollywood studios were obsessed with Japanese horror. What followed was a glut of J-horror remakes that quickly saw diminishing returns. Things started off promising with the successful, and very scary, The Ring remake in 2002. Though The Grudge remake made money at the box office, critics were less impressed […]
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They can’t all be Friday the 13th, Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. To fill the void between A-list horror franchise releases, you need some B-list franchises – Child’s Play, Final Destination, or Resident Evil. Even Hellraiser had few decent theatrical sequels before churning out discount bin straight-to-video “hell” crap. And then there are […]
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Years before the ‘Killer Clown‘ moral panic from Fall 2016 and Twisty the Clown from Season 4 of American Horror Story, there was Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Author Stephen King popularized the ‘evil clown’ in mainstream circles with Pennywise from his novel, It. Of course the idea of killer clowns has a long history going […]
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Kids are evil. Anyone who has stepped on a random LEGO piece or been forced to watch Paw Patrol knows this to be true. Okay, kids aren’t really evil but there’s certainly something creepy about children doing terrible things. This in part reflects our attributing innocence to childhood. As such, the corruption of innocence is, […]
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Few things scream the 1990’s as much as HBO’s anthology series, Tales from the Crypt. Based on William Gaines’ 1950s shock pulp E.C. Comics, Tales from the Crypt ran for several seasons. With the John Kassir-voiced Cryptkeeper bookending episodes, the series mixed dark humour with campy kitsch. As the show developed a following among horror […]
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At this point, no one could fault you for assuming that the horror genre had exhausted the zombie. Just about everything under the sun has been done with the undead monster. Slow-moving, fast-moving, horror comedies, romantic comedies, and social commentary on a range of social ills – the zombie has been played out. Or has […]
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When police arrested Charles Manson and his “Family” members for the Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, it triggered a public fascination with cults that has endured. Never a genre to miss an opportunity, cult-themed horror movies began popping up almost immediately in the early 1970s. One of the 2019’s worst movies, The Haunting of Sharon Tate, […]
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Aside from John Carpenter, Hollywood has re-imagined George A Romero’s work more frequently than just about any other horror filmmaker. To date, we’ve re-visited Day of the Dead twice with diminishing returns (see Day of the Dead: Bloodline). Zack Snyder got more right than wrong with his “fast zombies’” 2004 Dawn of the Dead. And […]
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Since its resurrection in the late 2000s, Hammer Films has quietly re-established itself in the horror genre. Though Blumhouse Productions has eclipsed the British studio in quantity and, arguably, overall quality, Hammer has a delivered a few memorable projects. Most notably, Let Me In and The Woman in Black were hallmarks of the studio’s atmospheric […]
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