As this final Summer of Blood arrives at the slasher boom of the 1980s, it feels like a homecoming. For this is where we belong, truly: in the gutter trash world of miserably formulaic thrillers, propped up only by their most exploitative element and frequently by nothing at all. And while it’s surprisingly willing to […]
All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they’re both immensely well-made versions of something that’s already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, […]
In my head, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a beloved consensus highlight of 2000s meta-horror that is well understood to be an essential work for genre fans. And maybe that’s how it works in the real world, since every review I read about it seems to contain the sentiment “this is […]
You know how in slasher movies, sexually active teenagers are killed? Congratulations, you have all the information you need in order to have written Student Bodies, a slasher movie parody from 1981, the earliest year in which “slasher parody” is something we could even conceivably talk about (added bonus points for being released by Paramount, […]
Those of you who’ve been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the “we know we’re making a bad movie, so it’s actually funny that our movie is bad” card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly […]
1982’s The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the ’70s for […]
It has been more than three decades since Hell Night premiered in the summer of 1981, and it has only slowly developed a cult following over those years. Truth be told, I don’t know if even now it has a reputation as generally being a crap slasher film from an era when crap slasher films […]
If it had done nothing else to distinguish itself, 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre would stand out in the crowded glut of early ’80s slasher films by virtue of being written by a feminist. Not, please understand, the kind of everyday feminist that anybody could be who believes in equality between the sexes and calls […]
If there was ever a time when the notorious genre of the slasher film wasn’t in its rotten, decadent phase, that time was at any rate not 1988. By this point, all the good ideas had been used up, all the mediocre knock-off ideas had been used up, the audience was all used up, and […]
The Child’s Play franchise fascinates me: not because it is especially consistent or good (thought it has a great batting average compared to something like Friday the 13th or even A Nightmare on Elm Street), but because it has been able to reinvent itself so many times, with such success. After three increasingly ludicrous paranormal […]
Nearly two years of hype since the film’s 2011 Toronto International Film Festival has promised that You’re Next was a brilliant dark horror-comedy. I will allow the possibility that I’m dumb as fuck, but not one single moment came across to me as comic. The best case scenario is that director Adam Wingard and writer […]
This is nitpicky, but I have to get it off my chest: 1992’s Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil is not about prom (which annoys me), but it does take place on prom night, and the main characters are making a specific choice not to be at prom, so it can rightly be considered […]
