// Category Archive for: Movies

Nose Putty In My Hair: Time With Tom Savini

By Less Lee Moore

Tom Savini putting finishing touches on
Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th)
Photo from Wikipedia

Horror movie fans know the answer to the question: “Who is Tom Savini?” For the rest of you, here’s a quick summation: he’s one of the most well-known and highly respected special effects make-up artists in the movie industry. His filmography of effects work is impressive, including the original Dawn of the Dead, Maniac, Friday the 13th, Creepshow, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Trauma, and many others.

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We Were Having A Party And Harry Warden Started Killing Everybody: 30 Years Of My Bloody Valentine

By Less Lee Moore

If you’ve haven’t seen the original version of My Bloody Valentine from 1981, you’re missing out. If you haven’t seen the uncut version, you’re definitely missing out. The 2009 reissue contains almost five minutes of footage that wasn’t in the original, theatrical release. Five minutes doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but after an hour spent with members of the cast and crew of the film, I now understand why they meant so much.

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He Is the Night, He Is Vengeance, He Is Batman: The Animated Series

By Paul Casey

Batman: The Animated Series was the cause of my love of Batman, superheroes, and later, comic books. I had seen Tim Burton’s wonderful 1989 adaptation early on and went to the cinema to see the underrated and childishly maligned (though rather too scary for my youth) sequel, Batman Returns. I was also aware of the 1960s Adam West TV show.

Even though I enjoyed these, it was the Noir shadows of The Animated Series which got to me. The vision of Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, Alan Burnett, and Paul Dini would stay with me. The opening is perhaps the most evocative and perfect definition of who Batman is as a character. Danny Elfman’s score is Batman.

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Crypts And Blood: A Creepy Crawl Through The History Of Horror Hosts

By Cait Brennan

“There’s nothing on,” you say. A strangely common complaint in an era with hundreds, if not thousands, of 24-hour-a-day channels. Once upon a time, there was literally nothing on, because the two or three local stations your town was lucky to have would shut their transmitters off at 11 p.m. Stations invented every possible kind of stunt (up to and including running the weatherman’s home movies) to fill airtime, but eventually the exhausted staff would finish the late local news, have a priest give a drunken invocation, run the national anthem, and pull the damn plug.

But as the signals died, there through the flickering static, in the dark dead of night, one station would keep its dim light on, transmitting faded images of 1930s ghouls into your darkened living room. Then, out of the black, when it all started getting just a little too real, some character covered in blood cut their way into the movie and cracked wise. You’ve just met your horror host, and whether your movie was terrifying or just terrifyingly awful, spooky late nights never had a better friend.
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Jesus Take The (Lunar) Wheel: Apollo 18

By Emily Carney

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle landed on Earth’s Moon, beginning three years of unsurpassed, spectacular lunar voyages.

On December 14, 1972, Apollo 17’s lunar module Challenger departed the Moon’s surface, leaving a massive void in manned lunar exploration which continues to exist until the present time.

In the beginning of the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy sent out a resounding, powerful call to have a man walk on the Moon by the end of that decade, and NASA was wholly successful in their goal to meet such a momentous deadline.

It took Hollywood well over 50 years from that point to make Apollo 18. To paraphrase JFK, at the beginning of this decade, we made the worst space horror film, ever.
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Theatre Of Blood: The Stage Is Set . . . For Murder!

By Aila Slisco

There is a space between comedy and horror which some people call black humor. If a movie can inhabit that space, it will likely be a favorite of mine. While this has certainly been used in movies up to the present day, the golden age of this kind of horror comedy film arguably happened in the UK several decades ago. Theatre of Blood is not only a great example of the horror comedy, but my favorite film of the subgenre.
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Horror Films Of The 1970s, By John Kenneth Muir

By Less Lee Moore

As a film fan, I’m an unabashed lover of the 1970s. In the introduction to Horror Films of the 1970s, film and television critic John Kenneth Muir describes why in two words: “savage cinema.” There truly was something different about films of that decade, and horror films of the ’70s are no exception. In fact, sometimes lines between horror and non-horror were blurred so successfully that it’s difficult to define the exact genres of films like Deliverance or Straw Dogs, both of which are discussed in Muir’s book.

Part of what makes the “savage cinema” so unique and thrilling, claims Muir, is that it presented viewers with a universe in which there were no answers. Yet, he quotes documentary filmmaker Adam Simon, who says that horror can be “open to the traumas of the world” in a way which will “naturally convey truths.” This nexus between no answers and universal truths is precisely why horror films of the 1970s are so unique and so thrilling.

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Everything Undead Is New Again: Are Vampires Still Vicious?

By Kai Shuart

So, I’m just going to get down to the nitty-gritty: I love me some vampires. They’re violent, they’re sexy, and they’re transgressors of any religious, sexual, or social mores a mortal can think up. And they have the power to give that power to anyone they see fit.

But I am a vampire snob. Don’t come across my way with any of that Stephenie Meyer weak sauce; give me Eli from Let The Right One In, Anne Rice’s Lestat, Cassidy from The Preacher comics, Buffy’s Dru or Spike, or even Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows (a callous hedonist turned vicious killer vampire turned tortured hero . . . yeeeah, with all due respect to Joss Whedon, the archetype didn’t start with a certain billowy-coated King of Pain). To me, a vampire is first and foremost a killer, and a gleeful one at that. Well, we should all take pride in our work . . .

Twilight vs. 30 Days Of Night

I couldn’t help but wonder, though: why does each successive interpretation of what a vampire is and what a vampire does seem so tame compared to the early pop culture incarnations set forth by people like Bram Stoker and F.W. Murnau? This is a monster whose father was Vlad the Impaler, one of the bloodiest, most sadistic dictators who ever walked the face of the Earth; and whose mother was Elizabeth Bathory, a woman who threw orgies and bathed in virgin’s blood because she believed it kept her youthful. Now they sparkle? All snark aside, I had to ask how this shift took place.

Upon consideration, I think part of this comes from a very human need to make friends with what scares us. The thinking goes that if we somehow forge a connection with the monsters (both literal and figurative) that keep us awake at night, the monsters will eventually overcome their natures and spare our lives. This is exactly how the romances play out in modern vampire lore: Twilight’s Edward can smell Bella’s blood a mile away, but doesn’t do the deed because he loves her so much. (This is me. Retching.) In True Blood, there’s something in Sookie Stackhouse’s blood that drives vampires crazy, but Bill Compton protects her from some of his more primal cohorts. To be fair, there’s a lot of this dynamic between Oskar and Eli in the book Let Me In, but at least there’s a question of whether protecting Oskar wasn’t just a by-product of Eli procuring a meal.

The fact that vampires have grown significantly less vicious and amoral as time has gone on could also be because it plays into the rather marketable notion that a good woman can reform a bad boy. Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer has many, many positive points, even that great show is guilty of this. In the third season, Angel is somehow brought back from the hell dimension to which Buffy sent him after his reversion to his evil Angelus form. In this form, he psychologically tortured Buffy through attacking—and in the case of Jenny Calendar, killing—Buffy’s allies.

After Angel’s return, Buffy finds him in an extremely feral state. But what does our heroine do? Instead of thinking that maybe she was a bit justified in killing her former lover and sending him to hell, she is convinced that the Angel she loved is still in there somewhere. Because of this, she makes it her mission to tame him through regular visits during which she feeds him, reads to him, and does Tai Chi with him.

A final reason for these shifting interpretations of vampires could be the political climate. The massively popular Twilight series was first published during the Bush administration, a period in which everything seemed oriented towards conventional sexual mores. Sure enough, Bella and Edward don’t have sex at all until they’re lawfully wed.

By contrast, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was released in 1976, within a much more liberal environment that was likely influenced by the attitudes of the previous decade. This could account in some small part for the fact that a story that features Lestat, a sybaritic, gleeful killer vampire who makes no bones about how much he enjoys being a vampire, sold so well. Also, Rice was much less squeamish about the homoerotic elements of her story. For example, as melancholy as he is, Louis finds a “companion” in fellow vampire Armand. It’s not explicitly stated that the two are lovers, but there is certainly ample room for that interpretation.

Regardless of whether these shifts have come about due to political climate, human nature, or the marketing of gendered relationship roles, one thing is for certain: I will keep taking my vampires straight up. Fortunately for me and other like-minded individuals, a much more animalistic interpretation of the vampire has recently been coming into prominence, quite possibly in response to the vampire’s role as the dark, sexy, forbidding romantic figure.

Vampires in the film and comic 30 Days of Night, with their ghostly faces and mouths full of razor-sharp teeth, have a purely animal instinct to kill rather than seduce their prey, and they certainly don’t worry about how killing people affects the state of their immortal soul. Proving that everything comes full circle, this seems to be reverting to the much earlier pop culture incarnations of vampires, borrowing the gnarled claws and batlike visage from Murnau’s Nosferatu.

Will this interpretation eventually overtake its sparkly, more tween-friendly counterpart? Time will tell, but I for one really hope so . . .

Livide, A Film by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

By Less Lee Moore

It’s young Lucie’s first day as a trainee in-house caregiver. She visits Mrs Jessel, an old woman who lies in cerebral coma, by herself, in her large desolate house. Learning by accident that Mrs. Jessel, a former dance teacher of repute, supposedly possesses a treasure somewhere in the house, Lucie and friends William and Ben decide to search the house in the hope of finding it. At night, they get into the house, which reveals itself to be increasingly peculiar. Their hunt for Mrs. Jessel’s treasure leads them into a horrifying supernatural series of events that will change Lucy forever . . .

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Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark

By Less Lee Moore

Horror fans of a certain age surely remember the 1973 TV movie Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark. To me, it was always known as “the movie about the things in the fireplace,” which was enough to keep a scaredy-cat kid away for many years. Although I didn’t see it until more recently, I quickly became a big fan; the movie still provides plenty of genuinely creepy moments which make me glad I never saw it as an impressionable youth.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who produced the terrific remake that’s out today in theaters, has called the original “the most terrifying on earth.” But the new Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark isn’t a movie full of jump scares like the also-terrific Insidious, which came out earlier this year. It’s more of an old-fashioned haunted house movie, where the unease and dread build slowly and inexorably towards a horrible climax.

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