Retrospectives
Why Castle Freak Works as a Dark Family Drama
Stuart Gordon’s first feature film, Re-Animator, was one of those rare movies that became an instant cult classic. It didn’t have a huge release. It was exhibited without an MPAA rating, but people at...
Idle Hands is an Essential Horror Comedy That Never Found its Audience
Horror in the 1990’s was a very different thing from the ‘80’s. Where the previous decade produced cult classic after cult classic (with the titles that didn’t make it to theaters becoming big hits on...
Hellbound: Hellraiser II – Crafting a Modern Fairy Tale
Hellraiser was a major horror hit that nobody expected; it even surprised those who had read Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and were already familiar with his work. But for once, t...
How Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 Set itself Apart from the Original And Why it Worked
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the most notorious horror movies ever made. People see whatever they want to see in it. Whether it be a commentary on Vietnam or an allegory about the meat indus...
How The House by the Cemetery Inverted the Zombie Genre
Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery is, I’ll admit, my least favorite of the director’s “Gates of Hell” trilogy. But that doesn’t mean that the film is without merits, it’s just that some of the...
Mute Moseley: The Undeniable Weirdness of Silent Night Deadly Night 3
Silent Night, Deadly Night was sure to have a sequel before it even came out. Back in the ‘80s, it didn’t take a lot for a horror movie to get at least one. However successful it may have been, Silent...
Looking Back on Campy Christmas Slasher Jack Frost
Jack Frost tells the story of a serial killer named Jack Frost (a little on the nose) on a prison convoy through Snowmonton (much too much on the nose) until one thing leads to another and the convoy ...
Ghosts of X-Mas Past: Remembering the Horror Toys of the ’90s
We’re living in the middle of a horror toy revolution. There are figures coming out every year that I could have only dreamed of as a kid—and I did spend a lot of time dreaming about them. Whenever I ...
120 Years and Counting: Why Dracula is More Modern Than It’s Given Credit For
Believe it or not, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is 120 years old. With the amount of impact it’s had on pop culture, from movies and television, books and comics and video games, to cereals, to the fact that...
