Before the zombie craze was fully under way, indie horror movie Splinter was enjoying a bit of critical buzz. It only saw a limited theatrical run in 2008, but still earned a Best Horror Movie nomination at the Saturn Awards. Since its release, however, Splinter has unfairly faded into obscurity. In addition to some good […]
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No, it’s not Ghost Ship. And no, Ghost Ship is not a remake. This is the largely forgotten 1980 thriller, Death Ship. If you’re a certain age, and grew up in the 80s, you may have caught this one on late-night television. Like the eerie 70’s cult classic, Shock Waves, Death Ship is another horror […]
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When crime rates and urban decay were peaking in the United States, the urban-crime thriller became a B-movie staple. Early 70s box office hit Death Wish proceeded a bevy of imitators. Movies like Fighting Back, The Exterminator, Bronx Warriors, Savage Streets, and Vigilante imagined major US cities as dystopian, crime-ridden hellholes. Even the relatively safe […]
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By the late 1980s, horror was spinning its wheels. Major horror franchises – including Friday the 13th – were running on fumes. As the slasher declined in profitability, horror increasingly found its way to the straight-to-video market. What followed was bizarre, cheapo horror movies like Slaughter High, Nightmare Beach, and Cheerleader Camp. Occasionally, some of […]
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We’re digging deep into the 80s horror library for this edition of The Obscuratorium. In total, the United Kingdom added 72 movies – mostly from the horror genre – to their ‘Video Nasties‘ list. This was part of a moral panic that saw sweeping hysteria over the perceived corrupting effect of horror on youth. Just […]
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Satan was alive and well in America during the 1970s and 1980s. On the heels of Rosemary’s Baby, religious-themed supernatural horror from The Exorcist to The Omen dominated horror for the next decade. As the 70s gave way to the 1980s and heavy metal, a new wave of Satanic panic took hold of Americans. All […]
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Arguably, the 1970s was one of the best decades for horror. As censorship and content standards relaxed, the horror genre – and movies in general – experimented with style and subject. It was also a decade where public interest in the occult hit a peak. Following on the heels of 1960s counterculture, new age movements […]
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Before New Line Cinemas struck gold with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, it was largely an independent film distribution company. By the 1980s, New Line was slowly breaking into producing its own original movies. Not surprisingly, one of its early successes was a small horror movie – Alone in the Dark. And no, not […]
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