Where Horror Lives
“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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With a new Halloween movie (and direct sequel) less than 50 days away, it’s almost hard to believe that just over ten years ago the franchise was getting rebooted. Following the dismal Halloween: Resurrection, a remake helmed by Rob Zombie promised a lot of upside for fans of the franchise. Few filmmakers could boast such […]
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Werewolves are a staple of the horror genre. Yet unlike other horror monsters, lycanthropes haven’t enjoyed the same resurgence in popularity. In fact, it’s difficult picking out more than a small handful of decent werewolf flicks released in the last 20 years. Perhaps it’s due to the lack of classic literary roots. Or maybe it’s […]
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The Lost Boys was the first real horror film I saw in a movie theater. I was 13-years-old when it came out and I can still remember clipping the newspaper review from my local paper. In many ways, The Lost Boys was the perfect introduction to horror and vampires for a kid growing up in the […]
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It’s hard to believe, but it has been almost 20 years since The Blair Witch Project haunted movie theatres. I was a graduate student doing a practicum in Ottawa when the first commercials starting airing on television. It’s one of the few films where I can still vividly recall seeing it for the first time. […]
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By the year 2000, the slasher-lite revolution ironically kickstarted by Scream was already running out of gas. Knock-off films like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend had already produced inferior sequels. A new cycle of horror, ‘Torture Porn’, was also just around the corner. There were undoubtedly a lot of mediocre […]
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Metal maestro Rob Zombie has a somewhat checkered history as a horror filmmaker. Critics complained that House of 1000 Corpses was too derivative. His Halloween remake was half of a good movie and the sequel’s ugliness overpowered some of its more interesting ideas. Released on July 22, 2005, The Devil’s Rejects is still Zombie’s best-received […]
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Universal Studios and their Gothic supernatural monsters dominated the horror genre for two decades. Following World War II and the dawn of the atomic age, horror films looked to the skies or science for frights. Science fiction and horror formed a mutually beneficial relationship across drive-in theatres in North America during the 1950’s. One of […]
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