Shocktober: The Frighteners

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 →

Shocktober: Thir13en Ghosts

Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

The 13 Ghosts remake, playfully titled Thir13en Ghosts, is a challenging movie to rate. It’s a tight 90-minutes of campy, extremely 2000s filmmaking. It’s also a horror movie that’s not scary at all, with an objectively dreadful script. So what should I do with that? I guess it’s really all in that title: a silly leetspeak rendering of a cult classic gimmick movie. At the time, I could understand critics ripping into 13 Ghosts. But now? Now it’s a nostalgic link to the days when I would have maybe rented something like this for a sleepover.

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Shocktober: Sweet Home

Sweet Home (1989)

I was playing Resident Evil Village the other night, being chased around a spooky mansion by a giant, busty vampire lady, when I started thinking about the Resident Evil franchise as a whole. Since 1996, there have been ten core games, twenty-something spin-offs, seven live-action films (with a new one due next year from Weapons director Zach Cregger), and a ravenous fanbase ready to devour it all. And to think, it all began life as a remake of Tokuro Fujiwara’s 1989 horror RPG Sweet Home.

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Shocktober: The Haunting

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 →

Shocktober: Amityville 3-D

Amityville 3-D (1983)

Last month, Amazon MGM announced a new Amityville film to be helmed by David F. Sandberg (Lights Out, Shazam, Until Dawn) and written by Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing, who wrote The Conjuring: Last Rites. The film is said to be a reimagining of the original 1979 film and I can’t help but wonder if this is a desperate attempt for Amazon to have their own Conjuring series. I say “desperate” because the Amityville name has been dragged through the muck by so many indie releases and spinoffs it’s lost all meaning to horror fans.

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Shocktober: What Lies Beneath

What Lies Beneath (2000)

If you want to know what “blank check” filmmaking is like, look no further than Robert Zemeckis in 1999. In the middle of shooting the cursed Cast Away, they decided to take a long hiatus so that Tom Hanks could lose a bunch of weight and grow his hair and beard all crazy. I don’t know how you’re supposed to spend your break away from a technically-innovative, $90 million-dollar A-list project shot on location on an island in Fiji, but Zemeckis decided to take his crew and shoot another $100 million-dollar movie with even more A-listers. What Lies Beneath is a profoundly Hitchcock-influenced thriller starring Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold, and Harrison Ford, that grumpy old. Was Zemeckis biting off more than he could chew? You know, I’m not sure.

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Shocktober: The Old Dark House

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 →