There's been a recent flurry of discourse about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Specifically the direction of its next iteration, with musings on how you can modernize the slaughterhouse. There will always be discourse about it, which speaks to the inherent power of Tobe Hooper's Southern-fried nightmare.
Every craft has its language, from medicine to magic. Knowledge gives that language context, which infuses it with power. In INFERNO, our protagonists live outside that knowledge. They enter blind into a world of black sorcery, unprepared for the violence of its adepts. That's the true the secret
She stares into the empty sockets, and watches as out of the twin voids something begins to coalesce. Flames licking upwards, infernal and endless where once were the gateways to the soul. There's a history to be told beyond those scorching fingers and she sees it resurrected, tinged
In Mandy, our doomed lovers share a pre-tragedy dinner of microwavable meals while taking in a very special piece of cinema. Mandy and Red sit rapt as a snaggle toothed, jumpsuit-clad creature tears open abdomens and uses a laser pistol to blow away anyone crossing its path. I share their
In 1973 a movie was released about a demon living within the body of a young girl. Its arrival was a nuclear explosion in the world of cinema, creating urban legends, upending genre expectations and solidifying its place as the last word on possession horror. Cathy's Curse is
"The World is dead. It raped itself...But I'll purify it with blood!" -George Eastman with Manic Panic highlights, wearing homoerotic Stormtrooper armor. When a youthful Dr. Graves first discovered Max-sploitation existed, I had what amounted to a mini-stroke. A whole slew of movies featuring modified
FACES OF DEATH transcended its physical form. It grew like a starving void, spreading like an eldritch cancer. It bulged against the film reels within the VHS and bloomed violently out of the plastic housing. The metastasis could not be stopped by the barrier of its slipcase with the drawing
If your movie has Ol' Scratch in the title, I better see him make an appearance. Satan's Storybook has an Aldi-brand Lou Cypher with shag carpet legs. The Devil's Rain has Borgnine's titanic eyebrows perfectly channeling the man downstairs. Asylum Of Satan is
It's surreal watching a seventies movie in high definition. I'm sure this has been talked about before, and using far more pretentious language, but it's an unmooring experience. During the wedding scene in The Bride (Or Last House on Massacre Street if yer'
Frank Zito is 1980 New York made flesh. He is the blinding lights of the porno theaters, beaming photons that promise lust across slush-slick sidewalks. He is the steam from a manhole cover obscuring a figure that watches you, as you fumble for your keys in the doorway. He is
Bruno Mattei would have remade all of his movies. I'm paraphrasing, but he said as much in an interview on the Blue Underground DVD for, I think, Hell Of The Living Dead. I respect his honesty. I also respect his callous disregard for the notion of creative licensing.
Dear friends, Hellmaster (AKA Them if yer' nasty) is bad. I want to be up front about that. If you want me to judge the film on its ability to have an understandable plot structure, create meaningful character arcs and give something for David Emge to do, then I
There's a world where your daydreams become nightmares that involve a Kali-coded devil woman and the metal band D.C. Lacroix. This is a place where your girlfriend has a Pentagram badly tattooed on her butt, and a fully stocked bar in her living room. In this world
Ugliness can be a powerful cinematic tool. That should go without saying when it comes to the horror genre, but we are in a world far removed from the phrase "Go without saying." Michael Rooker in a crumbling apartment, stammering slowly through a dark confession in Henry: Portrait
"It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our
Long Deprived of Light -Part 2- As we walk, the ground slopes downward and the already dampened sounds of the surface world become a memory. The packed soil of the tunnel darkens, settling on the color of pitch. Illumination from the mag light makes for a weak amber portal, one
Long Deprived Of Light "See! Right-fuckin'-here!" He emphasizes the words by jumping up and down on kissing layers of autumns past. Hollow thudding accompanies the collision of his combat boots. For once in his life Roger-fuckin'-Kormick is right. Which means the tunnels are real.
I believe that the trailer-watching experience in the year of our lord 2025 is a horror show. Coming attractions are either tonally baffling or vomit out the entire plot before you have a chance to choke down your Snow Caps. It isn't an enigma as to why this
Your senses become attuned in the desert. I used to think it was a blessing, but I'm not so sure now. There are things I'm proud of. I can show you where the coyotes fight and where scorpions have their promenade à deux. I can hear
My relationship with punk and hardcore music was one I didn't wade into carefully. I did not dip my toe in to check the temperature or throw a stone into the deep end to see if predators lay in wait. I leapt into into those murky fathoms, monsters
There's no greater poverty than loneliness. It can drive people to pitch black places. Alan Volk is the blackest place you'll ever go. Moving in your senior year was hard enough, the threads of your life slashed to fraying ends by your father's work
"I have been a customer here for a long time and no one has ever spoken to me this way!" A cloud of perfume your grandma would wear drifts off the lady and you think of mustard gas flooding a trench with vaporized death. You respond by pulling
It's an endless winter where I live. The howling wind creeps beneath my parka as I drag the body between walls of naked pines. Their branches reach up like nerve cells, desperate for sensation but cursed to only experience this cutting cold. It's perpetual dusk where
The party is in full swing by the time you arrive. You sink into the brown couch whose floral pattern is all but a memory buried by stains. Facing the TV a tattooed hand passes you a lukewarm Coors. The sound it makes as you crack the can open is