Today, Robert Englund is horror movie royalty. The Universal Monsters era gave us Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. And Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing anchored Hammer Films, while Vincent Price enjoyed a productive working relationship with Roger Corman. Early in his career, Englund popped up in supporting roles in horror movies Eaten […]
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas rightly have earned acknowledgement as early slashers paving the way for John Carpenter’s Halloween. Though it’s a much smaller entry in the horror genre, the 1976 The Town That Dreaded Sundown is something of a proto-slasher itself. Based loosely on a series of 1946 killings in the small […]
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Sixty years after its release, Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House remains a horror classic. In addition to Wise’s haunted house chiller, author Shirley Jackson’s Gothic novel provided the source material for the critically acclaimed Netflix series. Somewhere in between those two interpretations, action director Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) delivered […]
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Found-footage, Torture Porn, J-horror, and remakes defined horror in the aughts. Not surprisingly, the remake craze eventually moved on from 80s slashers to the hot Japanese horror market. Things started off well enough as Gore Verbinski’s American update of Ringu proved to be a great horror movie in its own right. And The Grudge – […]
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Nearly 40 years have passed since Children of the Corn stalked cineplexes. Among Stephen King adaptations, the 1984 mix of supernatural horror and slasher basics falls slightly on the lower end of the scale. Yet somehow Children of the Corn has become a B-horror movie franchise similar to the Hellraiser and Puppet Master series. To […]
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John Carpenter is a modern ‘master of horror’ so it’s not surprising that Hollywood eventually pillaged a handful of his movies for the remake treatment. While the Assault on Precinct 13 remake was decent and Rob Zombie’s Halloween update has its fans, the 2011 update of The Thing was pretty underwhelming. However, each of these […]
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When Americans remake Asian and European thrillers and horror movies, the results are often predictably bad. Every once in a while you get an American version of a foreign classic, like The Ring, that understands what made that concept work. Typically, you get something like the American remakes of Martyrs, Inside, or Pulse. These tepid […]
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Some movies just don’t need to be remade. Jaws, The Godfather, Goodfellas – these are just a few examples of movie that work every bit as well as they did upon release. Amongst the better horror movies of the 21st century, Austrian creepfest Goodnight Mommy wasn’t crying out for a remake either. Subtly unsettling, atmospheric, […]
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