Black Christmas and Halloween didn’t just kick off the slasher subgenre – they turned filmmakers on to holiday-themed horror movies. Following on the heels of Halloween, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, Graduation Day, and Uncle Sam all capitalized on the calendar. Despite the extent to which it’s celebrated, New Year’s Eve […]
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October is just around the corner now, so cue the haunted attractions-based horror movie for this Halloween season. Over the last several years, the genre has treated horror fans to deadly escape rooms (Escape Room), killer haunted attractions (Haunt, Hell House LLC, The Houses October Built), and chilling fun houses (The Fun House, The Fun […]
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Just how bad of a state was the slasher subgenre in by the mid-1990s? In between Candyman and Scream, we got movies like Doctor Giggles, Leprechaun, Jason Goes to Hell, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and Ice Cream Man. To say the slasher had run out of gas at that time would have been […]
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The Black Phone has taken a bit of a winding road to get to theaters. Filmed amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the Blumhouse production was twice delayed before getting its release today. It’s also worth noting that director Scott Derrickson jumped on this project after leaving the Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness production. Based […]
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Sometimes a late night with a cheesy horror movie isn’t a bad thing. Wooden acting, mindless story, choppy editing, visible boom mics – the kind of movies you’d find at the bottom of a $5 DVD bin in a grocery store. The 1980s defined itself with these sorts of B-movies you’d find on video store […]
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On the surface, writer and director Lee Ann Kurr’s debut feature-length movie, Student Body, looks like just another slasher. High school students trapped inside a posh prep schools certainly doesn’t sound like it deviates much from expectations. At least Student Body isn’t another entry in a growing line of meta-slashers. And Kurr looks like she […]
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Before Scream, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and In The Mouth of Madness, a small slasher movie called Popcorn experimented with meta-horror. Today meta-horror is common enough to sometimes wonder if straightforward horror wouldn’t be more revolutionary. But in 1991, Popcorn was just taking a risk daring to recycle tired slasher tropes. Adopting films-within-a-film was a […]
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before … four strangers wake up chained and imprisoned in a grimy basement? A mysterious captor subjects the groups to a series of increasingly cringeworthy tortures? No, it’s not 2007. The Dare is just Netflix’s latest addition to it’s horror library. A throwback ‘Torture Porn‘ movie, The Dare, […]
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