Though they’re not quite as scary as clowns, scarecrows have a small spot in Halloween lore. Aside from ‘Harold’ in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and maybe The Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, most horror movie scarecrows have popped up in straight-to-video fare. There’s no scarecrow equivalent of Pennywise the Clown. But scarecrows – […]
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Few horror fans have probably heard of The Dead Pit. If you’re old enough, you might have caught it on a local television station playing late at night. Or perhaps you saw its VHS cover with the glowing zombie eyes. But Brett Leonard’s (The Lawnmower Man) early directorial effort has languished in obscurity. Neither a […]
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Though it was considered a box office success, Brotherhood of the Wolf has mostly languished in obscurity. Twenty years after its global release, the French-made movie isn’t available on any streaming platform. And Shout Factory just gave the movie the Blu-ray treatment it deserved. Perhaps the movie’s ‘difficult to summarize’ story made it a tough […]
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Today, deformed hillbillies terrorizing big-city folk deep in the woods is old hat. Since ‘Dueling Banjos’ played for the first time in Deliverance, horror movies have exploited urban fear of the rural. Call it hillbilly horror, redneck horror, or rural, it’s a subgenre that includes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and Wrong […]
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By the mid-1980s, Hollywood studios were scrambling through Stephen King’s work to find the next big adaptation. When Cat’s Eye was released in 1985, eight movies based on King’s work had already made their way to the big screen. Even Children of the Corn – a pretty short story in King’s Night Shift collection – […]
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Peter Straub is a Bram Stoker Award-winning horror author. The Talisman – co-authored with Stephen King – is a classic. And Black House was another excellent collaboration between the two authors. To date, however, Straub’s work has rarely made it to the big screen. In fact, Hollywood has only adapted one Straub novel into a […]
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Do you like bad movies? Like really bad movies? Horror has plenty of them for the true aficionados of bad cinema. There’s the more obvious casual fan candidates – Nic Cage’s Wicker Man remake, Snakes on a Plane, and Deep Blue Sea. And then there’s the ones familiar to horror fans like Basket Case, Silent […]
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As 1970s’ exploitation and splatter horror gave way to the slasher era of the 1980s, horror movies occasionally straddled styles. The result was some tonally oddball movie like Nightmare Beach, Pieces, Humanoids from the Deep, Sleepaway Camp, and Madman. While these movies had recognizable slasher DNA, their atmosphere and aesthetics felt like spiritual descendants of […]
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