Nearly 20 years have passed since Rob Zombie’s directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses, released into movie theaters. That release date itself was almost three years removed from when the drive-in Grindhouse feature was ready for audiences. Teaser trailers were turning up as early as the fall of 2000 promising the kind of horror movie […]
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By the 1970s, horror found itself in a transition stage. Studios like Hammer Films and American International Pictures, which had dominated the genre in the previous decade, were looking pretty dated. That is, the Gothic horror of Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein series and AIP’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations struggled to compete with horror’s shift to […]
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At the time of its release, Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a risky venture. Coppola was coming off the disappointment of The Godfather Part III, which capped off his mafia trilogy on a somewhat sour note. And Dracula hadn’t been on the big screen since the moderately success 1979 adaptation starring […]
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In the first week of 2023, Shudder surprised horror fans by adding Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski’s cult classic, Possession. Starring a young Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, Possession’s story of a marriage dissolving set against the backdrop of Cold War West Berlin was met with an initially lukewarm critical response and backlash. It quickly found […]
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In a Jan 26 2006 New York Magazine article, David Edelstein coined a now familiar phrase – ‘Torture Porn‘. Though he was initially commenting on Eli Roth’s Hostel, Edelstein stepped back and identified what he saw as a new horror trend. Following Saw’s unexpected box office success in 2004, a handful of movies released in […]
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Few better ‘gateway’ horror movies exist than The Lost Boys. By ‘gateway horror’, of course, The Lost Boys was the perfect introduction to horror for early teens. It’s also a nearly perfect time capsule, warts and all, for the decade in which it was released. From its ‘Brat Pack’ casting to its MTV rock-infused soundtrack, […]
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Sometimes simple is better. For all intensive purposes, The Strangers is really just another home invasion thriller. Though critics were lukewarm on it, audiences turned out in larger than expected numbers. Over its theatrical run, The Strangers hauled in just over $80 million worldwide a $9 million dollar budget. Given that box office success, it’s […]
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When legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese says something about movies, people listen. So when Scorsese ranked his scariest movies of all time, horror fans took notice. It’s an impressive list that includes noted classics like The Haunting, hidden gems (Night of the Demon), and one surprise entrant – The Entity. Ask horror fans to cite their […]
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