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How do you adapt a no-budget, avant-garde, YouTube-based anthology series like Backrooms into a mainstream feature film? You could point to Skinamarink as an experimental horror that received a theatrical release. But it was acquired out of a festival, and never reached one thousand screens. Conversely, A24 approached Kane Parsons about adapting his own series into […]
The first movie from Eli Roth’s new production studio, The Horror Section, was Jimmy and Stiggs, a jaw dropping descent into goopy, neon madness. It was a perfect midnight movie that nonetheless played the multiplex. That was all it took to convince me that seeking out the studio’s films moving forward would be worthwhile. Roth […]
After a couple of fake trailers for amusingly dumb horror flicks, it was a genuine surprise that the opening of the film was shot from Jimmy’s (writer/director Joe Begos) perspective. We’re along for the ride in real-time as Jimmy putters and mutters about his apartment, doing coke and smoking grass and downing whiskey and watching […]
Every shark movie lives in the shadow of Jaws. While not the first, it had an immediate and lasting impact on movie culture and the industry. For one, it spawned a bunch of imitators, most of which failed to make any impression, much less a comparable one. Even once that initial wave subsided, and shark […]
I was fortunate enough to catch the New England premier of Sister Midnight at the Boston Underground Film Festival back in March, where I listed it as one of the best features of the festival. A huge benefit of catching an early screening is knowing nothing about the film beyond the title until the lights […]
As a staple of the aughts, it’s fitting that the last entry in the Final Destination horror franchise came fourteen years ago. It’s a series of mid-budget horror films with almost no recurring characters spawned from a rejected spec script for The X Files, squarely situating it in another time. While none of the original […]
There’s a certain type of low-budget sci-fi I will always show up for. They lack the money to pull off a grand epic. They feature limited action, although a clever director can disguise that with filmmaking tricks and careful planning. They never feature current stars, although rising actors and those past their prime are fair […]
Satire is a tricky thing in 2022. Many have claimed it’s impossible to satirize the current moment, as reality has become so ridiculous that everything is essentially a parody of itself. Others express frustration at the commonality of microaggressions or verbal attacks masquerading as “jokes”. It’s also, obviously, a very frustrating time to be alive, […]
Nope, Jordan Peele’s latest horror-comedy epic is intensely enigmatic. At times both profound and confounding, this is an incredibly dense movie, filled with metaphors and symbolism it oftentimes leaves up to you to decipher. While it is certainly possible to enjoy the movie’s narrative at face value, I’m sure many will walk away from it […]
Wes Craven’s original Scream was a genre-defining masterpiece. Prior to its 1996 release, mainstream horror was pretty much dead. Audiences had grown tired of the increasingly ludicrous sequels popular franchises were churning out at that point. The only move left was to make a horror movie about horror movies. Through its meta deconstruction of slasher […]