Monster House (2006)

Ah yes, once again we turn ourselves to the world of Robert Zemeckis-produced spooky projects. I don’t know how we ended up in this pocket of Hollywood filmmaking in the ’90s and ’00s, but I guess the guy had his finger in a lot of pies and a lot of those pies were filled with ectoplasm. Today’s entry, Monster House, doesn’t feel so far removed from one of Zemeckis’s directorial efforts, The Polar Express, which had just come out a few years prior and used some of the same animation techniques. Much like that film, its animation doesn’t entirely hold up (though for different reasons). Still, luckily, it does have a slightly more enjoyable hook and screenplay that make it enjoyable enough in 2025. Continue reading →

The Frighteners (1996)

It didn’t dawn on me until sitting down to watch this movie that I’m not all that equipped to talk about the career of director Peter Jackson. Outside of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the first Hobbit movie), I haven’t seen any of his earlier films in the horror genre nor any of his attempts at more serious filmmaking (Heavenly Creatures, The Lovely Bones). Heck, I haven’t even seen his remake of King Kong, which seemed like a really big deal in 2005. However, I have seen a lot of the work of our good friend Robert Zemeckis, whose fingerprints are all over The Frighteners, to the point where it feels like the kind of madcap film he could have made in the Death Becomes Her vein if he hadn’t taken a turn toward slight respectability after helming Forrest Gump. Continue reading →

The Haunting (1963)

Ever since the creations of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley were brought to the screen, it’s been hard to keep Hollywood from adapting a great novel about things that go bump in the night. While Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House isn’t the most over-adapted example of these by any means, it does seem to get an adaptation once every few decades, most recently with a 2018 Netflix series, which followed a 1999 movie adaptation as well as the one I’ll be reviewing today that are both called simply The Haunting, a title suggested by Jackson herself. Her novel doesn’t necessarily lend itself innately to film, just because it’s fairly subtle in spooky atmosphere, but somehow this first adaptation manages to embody the source material while infusing it with enough thrills and chills to keep you on the edge of your seat. Continue reading →

The Old Dark House (1932)

I begin my Shock-BOO-ber this year in a place that’s always a fun place to start when exploring the history of the horror genre. I’m of course talking about the Universal monster movies cooked up by studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. in the 1930s that gave us some of film’s most iconic horror villains. One of those, of course, was Frankenstein, brought to life in 1931 by director James Whale, who would later bring to the screen other iconic characters in this loose “universe” with 1933’s The Invisible Man and 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein. However, the horror movie he would follow up Frankenstein with didn’t really have any iconic characters in it and was fairly forgotten for many years. And yet, I would put The Old Dark House right up there with any of the great Universal horror movies and a great example of Whale’s knack for dark intrigue with a dash of camp. Continue reading →