You’d be forgiven if you thought The Invitation was another quiet attempt at re-booting a ‘Dark Universe’ of classic monsters. The premise sounds like a contemporary spin on a ‘Brides of Dracula’ concept complete with its Gothic British manor setting. But this is a Sony Pictures release, not Universal Pictures, so if there’s vampires no […]
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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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Religious horror has a long history in the genre. An increased fascination with the occult in the 1970s – and the success of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist – saw Hollywood studios scaring North American audiences back into the pews. In addition to this pro-faith horror movement, filmmakers have often used the horror genre to […]
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No, not that Fallen. This isn’t that Denzel Washington “police procedural meets evil” from the 1990s. Not even close. Rather this 2022 Fallen is a an Italian export that recently made its way to some VOD platforms. With no advance buzz and few reviews, what we have are promotional materials that promise very different things. […]
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No, it’s not The Curse of La Llorona. And that interpretation of the La Llorona myth – adapted for The Conjuring Universe – didn’t set the world on fire either. But it’s one of the finest tricks of low-budget movie-making dating back to the ‘straight-to-video’ markets of the 90s. Take a popular movie, adjust the […]
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When legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese says something about movies, people listen. So when Scorsese ranked his scariest movies of all time, horror fans took notice. It’s an impressive list that includes noted classics like The Haunting, hidden gems (Night of the Demon), and one surprise entrant – The Entity. Ask horror fans to cite their […]
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Satan was alive and well in America during the 1970s and 1980s. On the heels of Rosemary’s Baby, religious-themed supernatural horror from The Exorcist to The Omen dominated horror for the next decade. As the 70s gave way to the 1980s and heavy metal, a new wave of Satanic panic took hold of Americans. All […]
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Maybe Child’s Play was the last truly good slasher movie of the 1980s. Certainly, the subgenre was in decline by the decade’s end and early 1990s. Slasher entries either turned cheesy and low-budget (Cheerleader Camp, Slumber Party Massacre II) or found increasingly bizarre premises to stretch the tropes. By the time the 1990s rolled around, […]
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