October 9, 1988, as the anticipation mounted, I grabbed a blank VHS tape (for those younger readers, it’s what we had before DVD’s and DVR’s) slapped a blank label on that bad boy, then proceeded to neatly write FREDDY’S NIGHTMARES on it, yes in all caps. Just as I slid that bulky bastard of a […]
It was nearly impossible for a film not to have some kind of socio-political message in the late sixties and early seventies. Night of the Living Dead commented on racism; The Exorcist, on religion. Even B-flick gems like Frogs and Empire of the Ants made statements about what we were doing to our environment, and […]
Imagine if you took a strictly bargain-basement American slasher from the early eighties and mixed it with an equally budget-challenged Italian giallo from the early to mid-1970s; sauté this mixture lightly with some unintentionally (but stupidly) hilarious dialogue, pretty decent gore effects, and a script that a ninth grader couldn’t possibly take seriously. Serve lukewarm […]
Man lives in the sunlit world he believes to be reality, But there is unseen by most an underworld a place that is just as real but not as brightly lit….. A Darkside. There is something missing from this generation in the horror genre. Anthologies. Not the kind you read or the ones that are […]
Satire is often associated with comedic work, sometimes (quite understandably) confused with parody. On the average, when most folks think of satire, they think of shows like The Office or political skits from Saturday Night Live. By definition, however, satire ridicules the shortcomings of humanity by word or work, be it print, film, or otherwise, […]
Supernatural horror is a tough thing to get right. You’d figure it would be pretty easy; all you need is some spooky offscreen sounds for most of the picture, and toss in a “ghost” or two during the climax, either with some moderately done makeup effects or half-assed CGI (it’ll be in the dark, after […]
We seem to have a shortage of “greats” when it comes to werewolf flicks. Think about it; in over a hundred years of horror movie history, most of us could name off a pretty sizable list of “great” vampire films, monster movies, or ghost stories. In just the last fifty years or so, we could […]
Ahh, creature flicks. In this day and age we’re either bombarded by bad CGI versions of these (the SyFy Channel is my submitted evidence) or we for the most part have to revert back to the old days for our “monster movie” fix. Now, that’s not to say that the old-school movies were all that much better; […]
The movie Jaws did a lot more back in 1975 than just keep us the hell away from the water; it kicked off an entire sub-genre of horror films. Now before you all start calling for my blood, of course I’m aware that there were plenty of “when animals attack” films around before that first great […]
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 […]
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