I always try to go at any film respecting the time that it was made; granted, that’s not always easy, but otherwise, it would be near-impossible to enjoy classics like Nosferatu, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or even later films like Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Thing from Another World, […]
Fairytales are the stuff born of nightmares; I think it’s pretty safe to say that such cautionary morality stories were one of the primary forerunners of the modern horror film. Spirits, “little people”, goblins and long-leggedy beasties…I can’t come up with a single fright film out of the many that I’ve seen that doesn’t have […]
“She lives…Don’t Move…Don’t Breathe…There’s Nowhere To Run…She Will Find You…” So ran the commercial tagline for Prophecy, John Frankenheimer’s 1979 enviro-horror flick. I gotta tell you, this (at the time) eight-year-old mouse often had the shit scared out of him when this low, somber narration would come outta the TV, coupled with the horrific single-frame […]
We’ve talked before about how horror flicks come at you in different ways. Some seek to creep you out; they wanna make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, your skin crawl, and for you to be jumpy in your own living room at the sounds of your house settling. Others go […]
The idea of our children going bad is an old fear; the prodigals returning to usurp the parents is a tale that’s been told since at least ancient Greece, and likely for much longer. Horror films, as with all of the other primal shared fears we have, picked up on this almost from the start. […]
The eighties was the heyday of the slasher flick; I mean, c’mon; on the heels of Carpenter’s Halloween at the close of the ’70s, you had a virtual gold mine of hack ‘n’ slashes that followed. Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, Terror Train, Prom Night, Bloody Birthday; the list could go on for pages. […]
Besides a quick flashback sequence and a shot of The Tall Man walking slowly through the haunted halls of a mausoleum, Phantasm 4 starts off right where three left off. Mike has told Reggie to leave him be and takes off on his own, Reggie decides to give up the fight against the Tall Man […]
Fifteen years after it all began, a full six of those years being since we had been given Phantasm II, we were again invited to delve into the mysteries of the Tall Man and his ilk. Dan Coscarelli and company cast off the yoke of a big studio and returned to the smaller-budget, fan-oriented roots […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: this started out being a review, but as the writing progressed it became more of a retrospective. Regardless, I hope the main points come through that I originally sat down to write. Almost 9 years after the original Phantasm, Don Coscarelli gifted us with the follow up film, Phantasm II. This film is […]
After Michael but before Jason, horror cinema had another psychotic pop up on the radar; he was more akin to Norman Bates of old than either of these two chronologically closer contemporaries (at least in terms of motivation), but his methodology and what we were to witness was such that he could hold his own […]
It all started 35 years ago with Don Coscarelli and his stable of young filmmaking friends and actors, a childhood nightmare, and a desire to make a horror movie. Taking a small budget but big ideas, together they took these elements and made the film into a reality; a reality that has stood the test […]
A couple of years before he faced down whatever the hell was dwelling in Amityville, James Brolin went mano y mano with another possibly demonic force, only this time, it was quite literally hell on wheels. 1977′s The Car is a little gem that went largely unnoticed during its time in theaters (there was another […]
The term Classic is thrown around kinda liberally when talking about film, but I think it’s justified in a lot of cases; as I’ve alluded to many times, one person’s trash is another’s treasure, and this is fundamentally true to us horror folks. We have some indisputable classics; the German silent films, Universal’s monsters, many of Hammer’s movies, […]
While other kids eagerly waited for Saturday morning cartoons to begin, I scoured the TV guide hoping and praying that some scary flick would be playing. The 80’s would inevitably always be the Mecca for B-rated horror films. They were the type of films that at times you hated to love, but were always eager […]
I love horror films in all their guises; I can get into a ghost story, a zombie flick, cannibal films; hell, I even get a kick out of a lot of the modern crop of bad-CGI SyFy flicks, for chrissakes. I kinda figured you Fellow Fans already knew that, elsewise you wouldn’t be sitting there […]
The 1980s, with its explosion of scary flicks and the rise of the slasher genre, saw an inordinate amount of films that borrowed from one another, taking a successful idea and turning it over into something else. I loved ninety-eight percent of them (and still do), but there was one particular stand-out to me that […]
Today’s recipe: Take one shot of Halloween, one shot of The Exorcist; pour into a shaker with ½ pint of Bad Acting and ½ pint of Low Budget; add just a splash of The Amityville Horror. Shake well. Serve over a weak script, and garnish with a couple of fairly decent gore scenes and a late-70s patina. […]
“We all go a little mad sometimes.” When Anthony Perkins uttered those lines in that impeccable aw shucks inflection back in the 1960 classic Psycho, he opened the door to a topic that had up till then been largely untapped in horror films; hidden, controlled, yet pure batshit insanity. That twisting, venomous worm whispering in […]
