There’s something about a horror anthology that has always sucked me in. I remember distinctly my fourth-grade teacher reading aloud Alvin Schwartz’s immortal compendium of terrifying tales, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It was a mean collection to read impressionable young minds, in retrospect — my favorite story was always “Harold”, a three-page yarn about a malevolent scarecrow that began as foreboding creep-out (scarecrows are eerie things to begin with, after all) and escalated quickly in its final paragraph, […]

Regardless of what legendary giallo pioneer Dario Argento’s finest film is — I wager that most would say Suspiria, but Inferno gets a lot of love too — it’s hard to deny that his lurid, grotesque murder mystery Deep Red is among the most visually potent “slasher” movies of all time. That title, it must be said, is wildly appropriate: the red stuff flows freely and often. Arguably, Argento’s early career is a high-water mark for Italian horror cinema. He […]

One of my chief criteria for mounting this marathon was allowing myself a limited number of accepted classics. There are certain dummy-proof horror classics that populate every single list. Google it sometime; The Exorcist is the accepted #1, and the top 10 is usually a variety that includes Silence of the Lambs, Jaws, Alien, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, and often The Blair Witch Product as their token concession to the modern era. Which, yawn; sure, they’re all varying […]