Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is one of the greatest horror movies of all time. If you grew up in the ‘80’s, there’s a good chance you saw it for the first time at a sleepover party. This is a cult classic whose reputation literally grew out of basements. Simply put, it’s a testament to […]
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After over forty years of filmmaking, John Carpenter stands amongst the masters of the genre. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, Carpenter’s output includes Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York, They Live, and In the Mouth of Madness. Few horror directors can boast that kind of résumé. But even the best can have […]
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By all accounts, Wrong Turn is a minor entry in the horror genre. On its release in 2003, the cannibal hillbilly horror Wrong Turn impressed few critics. But the familiar story of hip, young urban folk running afoul of inbred backwoods maniacs did well enough at the box office to spawn a direct-to-video franchise. And […]
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Following Francis Ford Coppola’s successful updating of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s not surprising that Hollywood would go back to the same grave … or well. After all, this was the same decade that gave us two volcano movies and two killer asteroid movies. And so Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was pegged for a glossy, big budget […]
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Japanese horror, particularly during the aughts, set a high bar for horror movie creepiness. In the late 1990s, Hideo Nakata and Takashi Miike gave us Ringu and Audition, respectively. Only a few years later, Nakata followed up Ringu with one of the better supernatural horror movies that decade – Dark Water. Like Nakata’s Ringu, Kiyoshi […]
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For a brief period of time, Hollywood studios were obsessed with Japanese horror. What followed was a glut of J-horror remakes that quickly saw diminishing returns. Things started off promising with the successful, and very scary, The Ring remake in 2002. Though The Grudge remake made money at the box office, critics were less impressed […]
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Aside from John Carpenter, Hollywood has re-imagined George A Romero’s work more frequently than just about any other horror filmmaker. To date, we’ve re-visited Day of the Dead twice with diminishing returns (see Day of the Dead: Bloodline). Zack Snyder got more right than wrong with his “fast zombies’” 2004 Dawn of the Dead. And […]
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Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes studio has produced a handful of successful original horror movies (A Quiet Place, The Purge series). However, horror fans primarily know the studio for its assembly line of 2000’s remakes. Over the course of the decade, Platinum Dunes tackledThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, The Amityville Horror, and even VHS […]
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