When it was released in 1967, Spider Baby (or the Maddest Story Ever Told) barely made a ripple. And that’s probably a generous assessment. Just about no one saw the Jack Hill-written and directed exploitation thriller. Even the presence of an older Lon Chaney Jr. (The Wolf Man) had little impact. Of course, Chaney was […]
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In the era of the Internet and social media, dissatisfied fans can lobby for re-releases and Director’s Cuts of favorite, but flawed, movies. Long before disgruntled superhero fans took to Twitter calling for studio executives to ‘Restore the Snyderverse‘, devoted audiences had to show their love for a movie by renting it over and over […]
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Today, German-born director Roland Emmerich is known as the ‘master of disaster’. He’s the movie-maker that blows up globally recognized landmarks. And he makes overwrought movies mixing science fiction with old-fashioned 70s disaster movie vibes. While Emmerich’s movies usually drum up big box office dollars, critics aren’t usually impressed. Occasionally, audiences aren’t too thrilled either […]
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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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