October movie #9 – The Visit

There's not a more disappointing career than M. Night Shyamalan. Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense were great, Signs and The Village were just okay, and everything after that was bad to awful. The Visit looked promising, and with a lower budget I thought that it could be a return to form in telling a good …

October movie #8 – Crimson Peak

Remember all those nice things I said about Penny Dreadful? How it took Gothic themes and made them seem real and grounded? Basically reverse all that and you get Crimson Peak. It looks fantastic, and the creature effects are phenomenal. Guillermo del Toro knows how to make a film look good, but I really wish …

October movie #7 – The Prophecy

The thing that kills me about horror movies that are based around Christian doctrine (and there are a lot of them, oddly), is just how serious everyone in those movies takes religion. In every single one of these movies, they pull out some odd passage or book that a writer remembers from Catechism and everyone - …

October movie #10 – The Exorcist

You likely have some questions after reading the headline. The first might be “isn’t this out of order?” and the second might be “isn’t this list for horror movies you haven’t seen yet?” The answer to both of those is: yes. First, the other three posts aren’t started finished yet. Second, no I had not …

October movie #BONUS – Penny Dreadful, Sharknado 2, The Neon Demon

I've been busier this year than I have been last year, so I haven't had as much time to dedicate to horror movies. But I have been trying to keep things going as best as I can and one of the ways I've been doing this is watching Penny Dreadful on Netflix. It's a recently-wrapped …

October Movie #6 – Ginger Snaps

Remember everything I said was wrong about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? This movie does those things right. It's a similar set-up - high-school drama and horror trope - but this one makes you care about both elements. The movie focuses on two sisters that are weird goth kids obsessed with death and shitty fashion choices …

October Movie #5 – The Conjuring 2

If you had any doubts before, this movie proves that James Wan is one of the best horror directors ever. He's definitely the best currently active one. "Saw" had a distinctive look and feel to it that he continued to perfect in his other movies: Dead Silence, Insidious (as well as the sequel), and The Conjuring. …

October Movie #4 – Phantasm: Ravager

I’m a big fan of the Phantasm series. I found them in college when I started tracking down movies I saw in video stores as a kid but was too scared to rent. The first Phantasm movie came out in 1979 and impressed me with a creative story that mixed sci-fi, horror, and fantasy and …

October Movie #3 – Tourist Trap

Any time you see "Chuck Conners in" and it is not immediately followed by "The Rifleman" you know you're in for a treat. He made a string of B-level horror movies where he always played a similar character- an "aw-shucks", slightly simple country type with ambiguous motivations. You could never tell if he was going …

October Movie #2 – Buffy the Vampire Slayer

  Full disclosure: I have never seen a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don't know much of anything about it. And judging by the movie, I still don't know how this concept could work. Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out in 1992 and was written by Joss Whedon but directed by someone …