Following the success of Wes Craven’s Scream, the mid- to late 90s saw a surge in teen horror. These movies included neo-slashers (Urban Legend, Cry Wolf), thrillers (Disturbing Behavior, Teaching Mrs. Tingle), and even some sci-fi horror (The Faculty). Among the most successful of these movies not called Scream was I Know What You Did […]
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Early in the summer of 2003, rural slasher Wrong Turn became a modest box office hit. Like most horror movies from the late 90s and early 2000s, it boasted a young, attractive cast of up-and-comers. And it carried on a long-tradition of hillbilly horror dating back to the 1972 classic Deliverance. Critics didn’t really like […]
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Nostalgia for 80s slashers isn’t new. When Scream hit theaters in 1996, it re-ignited a brief slasher-lite phase. Plenty of other horror movies have tried to specifically replicate the grainy and seedy retro-aesthetics of ‘Golden Era’ slashers such as Steve Mena’s Malevolence or Dude Bro Party Massacre III. Now Dark Sky Films and director Jay […]
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Somewhere between the 90s classic Candyman and the recent, equally good remake of the same name, two Candyman sequels made their way to the direct-to-video market. Neither of these sequels generated much in the way of positive buzz. However, the first of those sequels, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh at least had some positives, earning […]
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Like the Children of the Corn and Leprechaun movies, the Puppet Master franchise has quietly chugged along on the straight-to-video market for about 30 years. Since the first Puppet Master released in 1989 there’s been a total of 14 sequels and/or reboots. In fact, just last year, the latest spin-off movie, Puppet Master: Doktor Death, […]
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Few horror franchises – or any franchise for that matter – can produce quality outings the further along they go. Both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street were running on fumes past their fourth outings with the exception of the occasional course correction. When Wes Craven resurrected his Scream series with Scream […]
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Once Paramount Pictures resurrected Jason Voorhees with lightning in Jason Lives, the franchise was running out of options for subsequent sequels. But increasingly ridiculous sequel setups weren’t the biggest problem for Friday the 13th. Audiences were losing interest and, as a result, Jason Takes Manhattan saw declining box office receipts. By 1993, New Line Cinema […]
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If Silent Night, Deadly Night is something of a Grindhouse cult classic, its sequel inexplicably became a belated meme classic. What you may not know is that the sequels kept coming. Like other B-level horror franchises, Silent Night, Deadly Night lived on with a handful of straight-to-video sequels. Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects) turned up […]
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