// Category Archive for: Horror

The Stanley Hotel Ghost Tour

By Julie Finley

I recently spent a few days in Colorado in and around the Rocky Mountain National Park area, specifically in a lovely area called Estes Park. It’s a small resort-like place northwest of both Denver and Boulder, and even though its considered to be at the foothills of the Rockies, the elevation is almost double to that of Denver. (And considering I live in Cleveland where there are no mountains, this was a major difference in altitude!)
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I (Think) I Want To Believe

By Jesse Roth

The concept of ghosts has always been one of those ideas I’ve wanted to buy into, but logic and practicality always seem to get in the way. Even as a child, I was usually able to explain away the strange sights and occurrences I would see or hear, usually with a mix of relief and slight disappointment.

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Slumber Party Slaughter: Don’t Go Into the Shower

By Michelle Patterson

I was not the world’s most together child. In fact, up until the age of 25, I saw morbidity in every little thing and imagined the worst-case scenarios for every event in my life.
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Les Oraliens, Or How I Found The Scariest YouTube Video Ever

By Emily Carney

Obviously, I am more than familiar with what scares me the most in my real life; in my attempts to look for “scary” videos for this issue of Popshifter, I stumbled across a lot of scenes from horror films, bad attempts at karaoke, videos of methamphetamine addicts doing their “thing,” clips of “actor”/mess Paz de la Huerta, and of course Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video (which I never watched until I was in my twenties. . . no kidding).

However, I can’t say that any of these actually frightened me; at most, they were mildly amusing. So, I became blocked on what to do for this article. . . that is, until last night, when I discovered a masterpiece of an absolutely terrifying kids’ show.
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Night Of The Living Dead: Reanimated

By Less Lee Moore

In the intro to the Night of Living Dead: Reanimated DVD, horror host Count Gore De Vol refers to the film as “quite the exquisite corpse.” It’s a wickedly good double entendre and one that is also rather accurate.

For those who have not seen the original Night of the Living Dead . . . okay, I must interrupt myself at this point to ask you, “why the hell not?” It’s one of the most influential horror films ever, not to mention one of the earliest works in the Zombie Canon. It was even remade in 1990 by special effects guru Tom Savini and has been quoted and referenced in every piece of zombie media since.
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Now There’s A Man Worth Going To Hell For: ‘The Devils’ And Ken Russell

By Less Lee Moore

As part of this year’s FanExpo, Rue Morgue presented “Confessions of a Gothic Messiah: An Evening with Ken Russell” at the Bloor Cinema, a special screening of Russell’s 1971 film, The Devils, hosted by film critic Richard Crouse and attended by the director himself.

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I Spit On Your Grave: Revenge Is Not So Sweet

By Michelle Patterson

While working on this piece, a hopeful idea flickered to life: could 23-year-old Michelle and 33-year-old Michelle be pals? Although perhaps possible, perhaps I’m too hopeful that my past self and present self should be friends in some alternate universe. Seeing as I have yet to shake the pop culture-related obsessions which began in my youth and continue to snowball into one massive contradictory mass, it’s not that much of a long shot, physics quandaries aside.

So until time travel becomes reality, here’s the imagined correspondence between two versions of myself about an important piece of film-making, the original I Spit On Your Grave.
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Friday The 13th: Not Your Mother’s Serial Killer

By Jemiah Jefferson

“Ki ki ki ki, ma ma ma!”

The frequent playground refrain from my childhood, where playing “serial killer” added extra spice to the tired old trope of Tag, came from this movie, not one of the seemingly countless similar others released around that same time.

Starting with the classic Halloween in 1978 (which I was lucky enough to see in the cinema when I was all of seven years old; it didn’t scare me a bit because I fell asleep), the next decade unleashed an onslaught of teen slasher flicks. I wasn’t a fan of gore until my college days, thus most of these movies came and went with nothing more than a dismissive sniff from me. In the interim, though, I’ve become an avid aficionado of gore, shocks, and assorted modes of on-screen death, where no panty shot goes unpunished. It was time for me to finally see Friday the 13th.
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A Lot Of Very Careful Hatred: Rituals

By Less Lee Moore

Rituals is a “lost classic,” one of those films that every horror fan (or film fan) should see, but probably hasn’t. It’s a Canadian production from 1977, starring Hal Holbrook, Larry Dane, Robin Gammell, Ken James, and Gary Reineke. Although it definitely contains elements of the slasher film genre, one of the things that sets Rituals apart from the pack (besides the fact that it came out before Halloween) is the middle-aged, all-male ensemble cast.

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Near Dark: The Night Is So Bright It’ll Blind You

By Jemiah Jefferson

Near Dark was released in 1987, the same year that The Lost Boys came out and stole all its thunder. Unfortunately for Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire film, it was the last one produced under the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, which went bankrupt almost immediately after Near Dark had finished production, and thus was robbed of a proper publicity process.

I certainly had never heard of it by the time it came on cable (Cinemax, probably) when I was 16, whereas I’d seen The Lost Boys in the theater. I avidly watched The Lost Boys, another cable staple, crushing very hard on the beauty of Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric, and seriously digging the slash-worthy homoerotic tension between their characters, and yet even then I got the sense that Near Dark was the superior film, much darker, more complex, bloodier, and Corey-free.
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