horror
About 20 minutes into A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the local drug dealer, Saeed (Dominic Rains), takes a girl (Shelia Vand) back to his flat. His place is pretty pimped out. Think a toned-down version of Alien’s crib in Spring Breakers – the mounted animal heads, the fur carpets and nice furniture, the suitcase filled with drug money and coke lined up on the glass table next to it.
Super Zero is a short by the filmmaker Mitchell L. Cohen. The story centres around Josh Hershberg, a young guy with not much to live for who discovers he has terminal cancer.
With the blockbuster success of Fifty Shades of Grey in cinemas worldwide, many pundits are claiming that this marks a new era for “sex positive” movies – and much more importantly, the basic idea of a woman being as sexually open as her male counterparts not being a source of cinematic shame, but one of pride. It has only been two decades since what I dub the “unofficial Michael Douglas misogyny trilogy” of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure hit cinemas, films that (like Fifty Shades) were successful due to their frankness of sexuality. Yet those movies were inherently misogynist in suggesting that women were mentally unstable, or just plain evil for daring to be as open about their sexuality as men.
What We Do In The Shadows is a mockumentary that expertly takes the piss out of the currently very glamorous pop culture status of the historic monster, the vampire. It initially features four vampires who live together in a flat in Wellington, New Zealand. All have arrived there for different reasons:
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
The gripping TV series American Horror Story is taking over everyone’s televisions. Its story-lines have no boundaries, and each week we are shocked by what writer and producer, Ryan Murphy has in store for us. The show is very distinct since each series is (mostly) unrelated to the last, yet they do keep many of the stars of each season and recast them.
Every year horror film enthusiasts unite to watch their favorite scary films. New movies come out around Halloween season, endlessly trying to be more graphic and push the shock factor a little further. But what is it about these films that keep us wanting more?
Every time you look for new horror movies the same ten titles show up. The Shining, Jaws, The Exorcist, The Haunting, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, Halloween, The Ring, and Night of the Living Dead. Not to say that these aren’t great films, they’re on the best lists for a reason; they’re classics!
Something about Halloween just makes you want to be scared. It’s the one time of year when it feels truly fitting. And nowhere is that more easy to accomplish than with a horror movie.
Dracula Untold tries to be a lot of different things – a PG-13 horror movie, a historical epic, a Gothic romance, a superhero origin story – and it does it all while at the same time trying to kick start an Avengers-style shared movie universe. Whether you call that ambitious or just the obvious product of too many cooks in the kitchen, it doesn’t succeed on every front. But remarkably enough, as a pure popcorn movie, it doesn’t completely fall apart, either.
What do Fleetwood Mac, surgical mutilation and a delightfully chubby Haley Joel Osment have in common? Along with a recurring erotic nightmare of mine, Kevin Smith’s new film Tusk. Based on an episode of Smith’s long-running “SModcast,” Tusk tells the story of podcaster Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) who embarks into Manitoba on a quest for new material.
I was first introduced to this short film by the director I’m working on a short film with. I showed him Francis, which reminded him of Lights Out, so he showed me. Trust me when I say I’ve already been seeing things when I turn off the lights around the house since I saw the short.
The Quiet Ones director John Pogue took a risk – inviting the viewer to follow along with Professor Joseph Coupland’s (Jared Harris) “experiment” to prove that the supernatural is simply a manifestation created in the minds of the mentally disturbed. What Professor Coupland and his team didn’t expect was a genuine haunting. The Quiet Ones was unexpected, different.
Escape From Tomorrow is a nightmare in black and white. From the opening moments to the final scene, the story unfolds in the most mind-bending ways. I grew up with very little black and white film.
Remember Mrs. Doubtfire? It’s not a spectacular movie, but I remember it fondly, having enjoyed it when I was little.