Where Horror Lives
Has it really been a decade? Times flies by fast. Or maybe it’s just knowing that this will be the first decade without a Friday the 13th movie since the original. Indeed, it’s been 10 years since Jason Voorhees slashed his away across a movie screen. And the last time we saw him it was […]
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Thirty-nine years ago, on Feb. 8 1980, legendary horror film director, John Carpenter, released The Fog, his follow-up to Halloween (1978). A minor hit at the box-office (Box Office Mojo, n.d.), The Fog hasn’t received the same affection as other Carpenter films. Halloween is rightly held up as a classic of the horror genre. Over […]
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Canadian director, David Cronenberg, has a truly eclectic filmography. Though his films cross genres, Cronenberg has largely staked out his fame in horror and science fiction with movies like Scanners. Today, he is synonymous with ‘body horror’. Academic Philip Brophy coined the term, body horror, in an article entitled Horrality – The Textuality of Contemporary […]
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains a pivotal modern horror film. Tobe Hooper’s nihilistic masterpiece was a forerunner to the 80’s slasher craze. Yet as compared to the film franchises it inspired, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a pretty spotty franchise track record. There are bad Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Elm Street movies. But those […]
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When I decided to include a section of the blog entitled The Vault, the intent was to explore movies that have significantly impacted horror. In the last 25 to 30 years, has any horror movie had as much impact as Wes Craven’s Scream? Released on December 20, 1996, Scream is arguably one of the most […]
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Silent Night, Deadly Night boasts a history shared by few ’80’s horror films. Arguably its infamy far outreaches its quality. At its best, Silent Night, Deadly Night is a sleazy B-movie that hits the ‘so bad, it’s good’ switch. Many horror fans may just consider it plain bad. But when this Christmas chiller was released […]
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Fourteen years ago, Lionsgate Films released a small independent horror film by two unknown filmmakers. The filmmakers were James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Yes, the same James Wan responsible for The Conjuring and Insidious franchises. He’s also directing a little movie called Aquaman. And Leigh Whannell just directed one of 2018’s better genre films, Upgrade. […]
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“They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” And with that line of dialogue, Night of the Living Dead entered popular cultural lexicon. To date, Romero’s zombie masterpiece has produced five sequels and its own thriving horror subgenre. Earlier in 2018, horror collectors rejoiced with the Criterion Collection release of Night of the Living Dead on Blu-Ray. Even […]
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre premiered 44 years ago on October 1st, 1974. With the sequels and remakes, it’s hard to believe that Tobe Hooper’s original movie was banned in several countries. I grew up in the videostore era of the 1980’s, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was not a video cassette cover I readily recall. […]
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In his original review, Roger Ebert referred to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser as a ‘bankruptcy of imagination’. Despite Ebert’s role in elevating the art of film criticism, he most certainly got it wrong with Hellraiser. There may be many things wrong with the movie, but a lack of creativity is not one of them. Hellraiser premiered in […]
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