Where Horror Lives
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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Over the last 20 years, Hollywood has raided most major horror masters‘ closets for remakes. Romero (Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies), Craven (The Hills Have Eyes), Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) – each of these filmmakers has seen their work re-imagined with mixed results. It was only a matter of time before someone turned their […]
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Following the success of The Ring, Hollywood spent several years combing the J-horror catalogue for remakes. Most of these American J-horror remakes were, for lack of a better word, horrible. Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, a remake of his own Ju-On, didn’t wow critics, but got audiences into theatres. Now that Hollywood has remade just about […]
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Nearly two years after The Mummy failed to kick off the ‘Dark Universe’, Leigh Whannell (Upgrade) and Blumhouse Productions have resurrected the Universal Monsters. This isn’t the first time Blumhouse has re-ignited a dormant franchise. And Whannell is no stranger to mixing horror and science fiction. While The Mummy was a bloated combination of horror […]
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A horror legend, fans most strongly associate George A Romero with his defining ‘dead’ movies. Starting with Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s zombie films spanned an amazing five decades. But early in his career, Romero experimented with genres. If you dig through his filmography, you’ll even find a romantic comedy. Among those early works, […]
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Valentine’s Day is under a week away! Maybe you hate Valentine’s Day on principal. Perhaps you’re single. Maybe you don’t want to be dragged out for an expensive dinner just weeks after Christmas. Or maybe you’re just a rabid horror fan looking for an ‘alternative’ movie to curl up with on the couch. Fortunately, the […]
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To this day, Silent Night, Deadly Night remains one of the most controversial horror films produced. Of course, the controversy that swirled around the 1984 exploitation slasher was misguided at best. Nonetheless, the ‘Santa Claus Killer’ movie reached a similar level of infamy as the ‘Video Nasty List’ in the United Kingdom. And like many […]
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