After over 40 years, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains among the most influential horror movies ever made. Tobe Hooper’s classic is the rare example of a movie that has lost none of its ability to shock with time. Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street – each of these movies owes some debt […]
Cannibal Holocaust introduced grindhouse fans to the found-footage format. Two decades later, The Blair Witch Project took the format mainstream with its pre-viral marketing campaign and pseudo-documentary approach. A handful of found-footage horror movies would surface in the early 2000’s. Yet Paranormal Activity was the true follow-up box office hit that cemented the approach as […]
Spain has given us some memorable horror movies. In just the last few years, Veronica, The Platform, La Llorona and Tigers Are Not Afraid how impressed critics and audiences alike. Legendary director Guillermo del Toro is responsible for genre classics Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth. As the found-footage subgenre was gaining traction, Spanish […]
Sequels are going to happen. Like death and taxes, successful horror movies – even by modest standards – are going to spawn follow-ups. No expects these sequels to rival their inspirations. In most cases, fans just want to re-visit what made the first experience so much fun. Occasionally, critics and fans revolt against the Hollywood […]
It seems as though just about every horror movie that’s remotely successful gets a sequel. But the original was a self-contained story that didn’t lend itself to another movie? Doesn’t matter. Jaws, a horror classic that in no way required a sequel, produced three follow-ups. But your killer died at the end of the movie? […]
They can’t all be Friday the 13th, Halloween, or A Nightmare on Elm Street. To fill the void between A-list horror franchise releases, you need some B-list franchises – Child’s Play, Final Destination, or Resident Evil. Even Hellraiser had few decent theatrical sequels before churning out discount bin straight-to-video “hell” crap. And then there are […]
Somewhere in between ‘masked slashers’ and ‘insidious conjurings’, torture porn briefly reigned in horror. From Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects to Eli Roth’s Hostel and the ‘New French Extremity‘ movement, horror fans flocked to movies characterized by extreme graphic violence. However, it all started with James Wan’s Saw in 2004. The low-budget movie kickstarted a […]
The Child’s Play franchise may be the most interesting of the major horror franchises. Created by Don Mancini, the Child’s Play movies have never achieved the same level of love or reverence as the Halloween or Elm Street series. Poor Chucky has always been tucked firmly somewhere in between smaller horror series, like the Hellraiser […]