Intermittently throughout the summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a major new release. This week: the myth of Candyman has been resurrected to remind us all of the nightmarish power of storytelling. It’s not the first […]
1996’s Witchcraft VIII: Salem’s Ghost is what you might call the Halloween III: Season of the Witch of the Witchcraft series. By this I do not mean that it was initially regarded as a terrible misstep that was later rediscovered by a later generation of series fans who considered it to be something of a […]
There is very little inherently interesting about Things Heard & Seen, a movie about which the strongest emotional response I have had is frustration at the almost gravitational pull that I have towards typing out the title as Things Seen & Heard, having to bodily force myself on the right track every time. Or that […]
The Empty Man was shot in 2017 and had to wait for years to finally come out, caught in the net of 20th Century Fox being purchased by the Walt Disney Company and thus owned by a corporation that had absolutely no idea what in Hell’s name they were supposed to do with something this […]
Every film director in the history of the medium has made, or will have made, their final film. Most of them scrape out some dumb nonsense, the kind of half-assed project that a fading, aging artist can get financed. The lucky ones are able to do so at least semi-knowingly, ending their career on a […]
It is with a distinct tinge of melancholy that I welcome From Beyond the Grave to the pages of Alternate Ending. For with this 1974 release, we arrive at the seventh and final “portmanteau” film released by Amicus Productions, the little British horror studio that was, in ’74, just about to abandon the genre (the […]
By 1973, the British horror film industry was collapsing. The smallest of the three main studios focusing genre films, Tigon, released its final film in that year; the largest, Hammer Films, very famously spent the first five years of the decade desperately trying every new idea they could scrounge up, which in 1973 meant a […]
1968’s Hour of the Wolf has perhaps the single least-enviable position of any title in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography: it’s the feature film he made next after Persona. Anything would seem like a step down in ambition and visionary madness compared to that movie, though Hour of the Wolf makes a good-faith effort to stand out […]
A review requested by Brennan, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! If I were to tell you the plot of Even the Wind Is Afraid – even if I […]
I hope I will not devalue Lake Mungo if I describe it as a film that feels absolutely perfect for 2008. That suggests, I am afraid, that it has very little to offer for those of us living later than 2008, and this is not at all the case. But I think the film would […]
One is practically required by law to start any review of the 1999 version of The Haunting by negatively comparing it to the 1963 version of The Haunting, and how dare I do otherwise. The Haunting ’63 is one of horror’s all-time highest water marks, an immaculate piece of visual storytelling on top of being […]
I will begin by saying that I have seen the film we are about to dig into with three different arrangements of capital letters: Bedevil, BeDevil, and beDevil. I have decided to favor the third, partly because it’s how the title is rendered onscreen, partially because that’s how a couple of art museums refer to […]
