We hear a lot about being haunted around Halloween. It’s a word often used to reference ghosts, and what they do when they’re stuck between planes of existence; it’s also how certain movies make us feel, especially when their specters loom over our psyche long after the end credits have rolled. This is why terminology is important: Juan Antonio Bayona’s superior ghost story The Orphanage is only scary intermittently (although when it does aim to scare, watch out), but it […]
Pass the Popcorn!
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 11: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Yesterday, I made the case for two less-than-stellar films ( When a Stranger Calls and Amusement ) that nevertheless contained standalone sequences amounting to miniature genre essentials. As atonement for directing you towards two films so hit-and-miss, I’ve decided to toggle the order a bit and spend today focusing on a dyed-in-the-wool horror classic: Wes Craven’s near-perfect A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Also, quite frankly, there are a few kind of daffy choices coming up in the next week, and I want to harvest some goodwill […]
Pass The Popcorn: “E.T.” Comes Home on Blu-Ray
One of the great films of our generation makes its Blu-Ray debut, and we’ve got a review!
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 10: When a Stranger Calls // Amusement
It often seems as though each modern horror movie can at least muster up one virtuoso sequence, something better than the sum of its parts. Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors is often staid and unremarkable, but there’s a moment in there where Amy Smart’s character performs an act of self-mutilation stunning in its gory, go-for-broke visual flair; we can even go back to 2002’s three-alarm snoozer Ghost Ship, which opened with a stunningly gross prologue that belongs in the horror kills hall […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 9: A Tale of Two Sisters
The appeal of horror cinema is often ephemeral. The pleasures of the genre aren’t always fleeting, of course — what horror fan can’t remember the first time they fell in love with the feeling of being scared? — but I’d argue that we horror fans often watch movies just because they’re horror movies. We do this because there are certain earmarks of the genre that we rigidly respect, and even when those earmarks aren’t pulled off very well, we’re excited […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 8: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
As with a full-fledged horror movie, a horror-based comedy doesn’t quite need to reinvent the wheel. It merely needs to appeal to horror nerds and comedy fans alike — a shockingly delicate balancing act to maintain. Look at perhaps the most famous examples of the genre: the Scary Movie franchise. To the creators of the Scary Movies, merely pointing out obvious horror benchmarks is high comedy. It doesn’t appeal to a majority of horror nerds, because it simply puts the […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Days 6 & 7: Night of the Living Dead // Dawn of the Dead
First things first: I apologize deeply to the ten or so horror-starved souls out there who went unfulfilled yesterday. It won’t happen again, and today, we have a delightful Halloween twofer for you to make up for it. Zombies are fashionable. Werewolves and vampires have lost a bit of their cache since they became heart-throbs — and you all know who’s fault that is, kids — but in terms of monsters that are almost universally respected by horror fans, zombies […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 5: Them
Against all odds, it seems as though modern-day French horror has a keen grip on what is truly frightening. It can be intense — Pascal Laugier’s eviscerating Martyrs taps into difficult notions of pain and existentialism, while Alexandre Bustillo’s equally trying Inside puts an expectant mother through the ringer to horrifying effect. David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them is a lot simpler than either of those movies, but it’s still a potent horror thriller, and it taps into something a […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 4: Night of the Demons
As I sit down to sell you on Kevin Tenney’s little-respected Night of the Demons, I find it important to reiterate once again that this series is not designed as a treatise on the best horror films of all time. There’s going to be some overlap, sure, particularly as we get closer to the holiday, but this month we’re looking to direct you towards flicks that embody the fun, eerie nature of the holiday. It’s not important that each film […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 3: The Descent
For the third day of Halloween, we take a look at crippling fear and claustrophobia in Neil Marshall’s UK nail-biter “The Descent”.
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 2: The Night of the Hunter
For the second of Popblerd’s 31 Days of Halloween, we look at Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter”, a Gothic, deep-south potboiler starring Robert Mitchum.
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 1: May
Popblerd’s countdown of 31 great Halloween movies kicks off with Lucky McKee’s twisted, bloody character study “May.”