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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Today, it’s easy to pick out something frightening about the Internet. The Dark Web, conspiracy websites, identity theft, data-mining, online predators – take your pick. But back in the early 2000’s, long before SnapChat or TikTok, the Internet was still a nascent entity. Downloading a single song could take an entire day. And people really […]
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Metal maestro Rob Zombie has a somewhat checkered history as a horror filmmaker. Critics complained that House of 1000 Corpses was too derivative. Fast forward several years and Zombie turned in a half a good movie with his Halloween remake. Though Zombie flashed some cool ideas with the sequel, his tendency towards ugliness overpowered the […]
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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 […]
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Before Blumhouse was adapting teen party games like Truth or Dare and Seven in Heaven, IFC Films released Would You Rather in 2012. At the time of its release, the low-budget indie horror film didn’t make much of an impact. It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of relevancy. The movie’s story about a millionaire […]
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Technically, Millennium Film’s 2008 Train isn’t a remake of Jamie Lee Curtis slasher, Terror Train. That was the original idea. Apparently, writer and director Gideon Raff took the concept in a new direction. This is probably a nice way of saying that the producers took note of the box office receipts for ‘torture porn’ horror. […]
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At the peak of the 2000’s ‘Torture Porn‘ craze, Australian director Greg McLean (Rogue, The Belko Experiment) released Wolf Creek. Despite its modest box office success, critics were divided by the movie’s extremely graphic violence. Far removed from silly slasher violence, Wolf Creek shared more DNA with New French Extremity movies like High Tension, Martyrs, […]
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Eli Roth is one of the more divisive filmmakers in the horror genre today. Though his filmography is relatively small, Roth has had his hand in numerous projects, including AMC’s recent Eli Roth’s History of Horror. In the early 2000’s, Roth emerged alongside filmmakers noted for pushing the envelope of onscreen violence including Rob Zombie […]
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