Horror is often most potent when it touches a nerve. Yes, jolts and jumps make for good popcorn horror. But when a movie pulls back the curtain on social anxiety or ill, it has the power to disturb. By now most of us have heard somewhere that millennials will be the first generation to fare […]
Sometimes movies just fall through the cracks. When it hit theaters in 1981, Dead & Buried barely made a ripple at the box office. One can even forgive older horror fans for missing this one in the VHS years. Despite making the UK’s ‘Video Nasty’ list, Dead & Buried went against the grain for 80’s […]
Happy Canada Day! To celebrate the nation’s birthday, we’re re-visiting The Great White North’s contribution to the ‘Golden Era’ of slasher horror. Most horror fans know the original My Bloody Valentine was a Canadian export. Shortly after My Bloody Valentine scared horror fans, another Canadian slasher made its way to theaters – Happy Birthday To […]
Another month, another possession horror movie on Netflix. Maybe the streaming platform needs to call an exorcist. We’ve seen no shortage in demonic thrillers popping up over the last couple of years. Mark of the Devil, The Crucifixion, Soul to Keep, Paranormal Investigation, etc., etc. Maybe you’ve seen some of these titles. If so, there’s […]
Kids are evil. Anyone who has stepped on a random LEGO piece or been forced to watch Paw Patrol knows this to be true. Okay, kids aren’t really evil but there’s certainly something creepy about children doing terrible things. This in part reflects our attributing innocence to childhood. As such, the corruption of innocence is, […]
Since its resurrection in the late 2000s, Hammer Films has quietly re-established itself in the horror genre. Though Blumhouse Productions has eclipsed the British studio in quantity and, arguably, overall quality, Hammer has a delivered a few memorable projects. Most notably, Let Me In and The Woman in Black were hallmarks of the studio’s atmospheric […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A close cousin to ‘Creepy Kids’ horror, high school horror movies have always enjoyed a small niche in the genre. After all, most people would agree that high school is generally pretty awful. And the angst, brooding, and narcissism that characterizes adolescence makes it fertile ground for horror. From the dark snark of Heathers and […]