In between the release of Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel, Oz-ploitation flick Wolf Creek put itself at the forefront of the Torture Porn cycle of the early 2000s. Writer and director Greg McLean (Rogue) shocked and divided critics with his brutal and loose take on Aussie backpack serial killer Ivan Milat. Though it was a […]
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Belief can be a powerful – and frightening – thing. In part, belief is what makes cults both compelling and the kind of subject matter ripe for horror movies. The charming and manipulative cult leader, apocalyptic visions, and self-destructive tendencies that characterize cults have produced real-life atrocities that have made their way into dozens of […]
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Love hurts. Scottish rockers, Nazareth, got it right in the 1970s. And nothing’s worse than teenage love. All those raging hormones … a broken heart in your teens can feel like the end of the world. And just how many teen movies have played out these stakes at the grandest tradition of high school – […]
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Killing for your art. Or your art killing you. Since The Picture of Dorian Gray the horror genre has occasionally dabbled in the world of artists killing for their work (Bliss, Velvet Buzzsaw). Earlier in 2021, writer and director Alex Noyer premiered his debut Sound of Violence at SXSW. Critics were a bit mixed on […]
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Like haunted attractions or amusement park ‘dark rides’, the escape room fad was tailor-made for horror movies. Not surprisingly then, a handful of recent horror movies have released in the last few years exploiting the trend. But what were the odds you’d have two similarly-themed horror movies with the exact same title? Of course, odds […]
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Thought The Hunt had a hard time getting to theatres? Over a decade earlier, the found-footage serial killer movie The Poughkeepsie Tapes premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. But distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) suddenly got cold feet. Given its disturbing content, MGM pulled it from the release schedule. Several years later, The Poughkeepsie Tapes saw a […]
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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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To date, the year 2019 has given us several strong theatrical horror outings. We’re only halfway through the year, and Hollywood has released Jordan Peele’s Us, Escape Room, and Happy Death Day2U. What’s been seemingly missing are the low-key indie horror flicks. A few gems have popped up here and there, but too few and […]
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