Where Horror Lives
Don’t confuse it with Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. That’s 1970’s surrealist horror. Let’s Scare Julie is the latest indie horror with a trick up it’s sleeve looking to fill 2020’s void in the absence of theatrical releases. First-time writer and director Jud Cremata pulls a trick out of Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook. In his 1948 […]
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Over the course of his multi-decade filmmaking career, William Friedkin has amassed an eclectic resume. Of course, horror fans know Friedkin best for The Exorcist – his 1973 masterpiece remains among the best horror movies of all time. To date, Friedkin has successfully dabbled in crime dramas (The French Connection), action-thrillers (Sorcerer), neo-noir (Killer Joe), […]
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Well, that didn’t take long. Not even a full year into the COVID-19 pandemic and we have our first Zoom-centric horror movie. Yes, Shudder’s newest original movie – filmed during the 2020 lockdown – one up’s Unfriended by setting its story entirely in the latest in cloud-based conferencing technology. Host, a supernatural techno-horror, shares a […]
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Though Stephen King is still the ‘Master of Horror’, Clive Barker is an undeniably unique voice in the literary genre. And as a filmmaker, Barker’s directorial efforts are marked improvements over King’s one-shot directing gig, Maximum Overdrive. Behind the camera, Barker directed both Hellraiser and Nightbreed, both uniquely classic additions to horror. After Nightbreed failed […]
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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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Horror movies often work best when they place extraordinary events in relatively ordinary settings. Halloween scares because its inexplicable evil just happens. It has no motive or reason, and it happens right next door. The family in Poltergeist could be your family. And the neighbours in Rosemary’s Baby seem so damn ordinary. As the “Master […]
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British author Henry James published his Gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw, in 1898. Though Hollywood has adapted the source material several times, Jack Clayton’s 1961 movie The Innocents still stands as the definitive cinematic version. Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others isn’t really an adaptation, but it shares common DNA. Earlier in 2020, Universal Pictures […]
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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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Following The Exorcist and The Omen’s successes, Hollywood abruptly attempted to cash in. In turn, several supernatural and/or Satanic-themed horror movies quickly found their way into theatres. There were box office successes, like The Amityville Horror, along with middling releases that included Burnt Offerings and The Sentinel. As horror rode this occult wave, a few […]
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Found-footage horror, The Gallows, was a minor hit in 2015. Neither audiences nor critics liked it very much. Yet for some reason, Blumhouse Productions greenlit a sequel pretty quickly. Call it buyer’s remorse, but someone wasn’t in a rush to release The Gallows Act II. After collecting dust for two years, Lionsgate dumped the sequel […]
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