Cabin Fever, which was something of a surprise box office indie horror hit, marked an interesting development in horror. At the time of its release, the neo-slasher revival kickstarted by Scream was running dry by the early 2000s. Across the globe, the New French Extremity was about to kick off while Rob Zombie and the […]
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Eli Roth occupies something of a precarious position among horror fans. Like Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie, Roth finds much of his inspiration from a specific time period and style of filmmaking – 70s Grindhouse thrillers. Most of Roth’s filmography recalls the Grindhouse visual and narrative styles. Eventually Roth directly indulged his filmmaking tastes when […]
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Years before the ‘Killer Clown‘ moral panic from Fall 2016 and Twisty the Clown from Season 4 of American Horror Story, author Stephen King popularized the ‘evil clown’ in mainstream circles with Pennywise from his novel, It. Of course the idea of killer clowns has a long history going back as far as the Italian opera, […]
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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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Across Quentin Tarantino’s impressive filmography, most critics and fans consider Death Proof to be his most inconsequential work. Even Tarantino himself ranks it at the bottom of his directorial efforts. Originally, Dimension Films released Death Proof as part of a double-bill alongside Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror under the moniker, Grindhouse. As far as gimmicks go, […]
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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. Fast forward several years and Zombie turned in a half a good movie with his Halloween remake. Though Zombie flashed some cool ideas with the sequel, his tendency towards ugliness overpowered the […]
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Following on the heels of his cannibal exploitation redux, Green Inferno, Eli Roth released another ode to 1970s cinema – Knock Knock. While the movies were available within weeks of one another, they couldn’t be more different. The former was clearly more in Roth’s wheelhouse – a grotesque homage to Italian cannibal movies of the […]
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Currently, we’re living in scary and unprecedented times. As countries across the globe lockdown and we increasingly practice social distancing, our health care professionals are heroes on the front-lines of a war to curb COVID-19. Meanwhile, many of us are either working from home or looking for ways to pass the time. Inevitably, horror fans […]
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