Tag: horror
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Sleepaway Camp
I never went to camp as a kid. Growing up in Missouri, there was plenty of available open space and fresh air right where I lived, and besides that, my folks were never the type to want to ship their kids off for extended periods (also, I was a real sweety pie). After watching Sleepaway…
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15 Gruesomely Gritty Extreme Horror Films
Horror movies are renowned for being filled with acts of bloody murder, gory special effects, and disturbing stories. But even within this genre is a subgenre that goes further than the average horror film. Loosely connected under the label “extreme horror,” these films are unbelievably violent and explicit, often teetering on – if not actually…
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Tourist Trap
Bibbidi-bobbidi-BOO! It’s another horror movie recap and live review. I’m going in blind, so buckle up, chuckle nuts: It’s 1979’s Tourist Trap. Ancient-sounding music begins and it’s right to the goddamn point by rolling credits immediately. Maybe it thinks it’s a Woody Allen movie, because the credits are black and white typeface adorned by old…
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The Greasy Strangler
I enjoy weird films. If it’s cult, obscure, transgressive, shocking, or just plain bizarre, I’ll seek it out and consume it like it’s garmonbozia. But why this sort of fare? I don’t have particularly bizarre habits, behaviors, or even interests (unless you think nerdy obsessions with rhetorical theory and critical discourse as weird, which OK…
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The Ghost of Frankenstein
Here comes the the horror classic(?) The Ghost of Frankenstein. I’m not very familiar with the original Universal horror film library in general, but since Frankie’s story has been made over and over again literally hundreds of times, due to cultural osmosis its tropes, basic story outline, and visual rhetoric is well-known enough to be…
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Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later
This is a story about 1998 and an ode to the halcyon decade that year inhabited. I mean, the movie itself is about the murderous Michael Myers, his long-suffering sister, and the twentieth anniversary of his Halloween massacre that devastated her, but that’s beside the point to what might be a subtle nostalgic aspect of…
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Hellraiser
There’s something very disturbing about the monsters of Hellraiser, and it’s not just their looks (although that aspect of them is terrifying). It’s that they’re so…calm. Almost like they’re bored with the idea of having to rip your soul apart, an unwanted detour on their path to the next extreme S&M party they’re hosting. Unlike…
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
In 1974, a horror movie came out that forged a divergent path for the entire horror genre to follow and has since been so widely imitated that if you had never watched it before by now, you may wonder what the big deal is about it in the first place. This is a somewhat unavoidable…
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10 Totally 80’s Horror Flicks For Halloween
If the 1980s in America was a decade about anything, it was one of excess: a supercharged economy afforded artistic enterprises to be produced that normally would have been ignored, if not outright abandoned, were it not for the gigantic amount of capital flowing and available at the time in the arts. As such, many…
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The 10 Most Disturbing Movies of the 21st Century (So Far)
What is it about truly disturbing movies that film fans enjoy? Is it their sheer audacity and strangeness? The extreme violence and graphic sexual elements that are often on display in these films? Is it some sort of severe second-hand prurient thrill we’re seeking through fiction? Whatever the case, many dedicated cinephiles tend to seek…
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10 Great Weird Cult Films To Watch
Weird, bizarre, or just plain odd: many films have been made in history that push the boundaries of normalcy and present an utterly unique vision to audiences seeking outre cinema. But for every acclaimed Eraserhead or El Topo, there are dozens of films that slip through the cracks and fall into the often difficult-to-find realm…
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31 Days of Horror Concluded
So I spent much of October 2016 watching horror movies and writing glib little reviews about them. It was an exercise in writing that I gave myself (initially much more ambitious than what transpired, but that explanation will come later), and it has been a lot of fun writing them. To keep my chops up,…
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