I’ve written this review several times now. Our servers booted my initial review of the film’s theatrical release in September, and now it won’t let me save this particular entry into our Halloween marathon. So I greet you from my wife’s computer, hours after this review was supposed to go up. I assume that means the film is haunted, which should really just be another ringing endorsement on it’s behalf. So, in the interest of brevity — and in case […]
Posts tagged "movies"
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 17: Black Sabbath
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, […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 16: Jeepers Creepers
A few days ago, we discussed I Know What You Did Last Summer , and how my penchant for retroactively viewing my earliest scares through rose-colored glasses often causes me to exaggerate a horror film’s potency in the present. Jeepers Creepers, released four years after Last Summer, is arguably of the same era, but it’s important to note the difference: remembering I Know What You Did Last Summer is often a lot kinder to it than watching it. Having seen Jeepers Creepers during the same time frame, […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 15: Deep Red
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 […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 14: Dressed to Kill
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 […]
The 31 Days of Horror, Day 13: I Know What You Did Last Summer
Well, a fond farewell to you, horror movie fan credibility. It was nice to have you around. But before you take one look at my defense of this dead-fish Scream cash-in and decide that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I implore you to read on, and to hear me out on this. I suppose I was 10 when I was bitten by the bug. You guys know what I’m talking about — it’s the age at which I […]
The 31 Days of Halloween, Day 12: The Orphanage
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 […]
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 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 […]